The Superfluous Men

Plot

The roots of modern conservatism as an intellectual and political movement have been explored extensively by a variety of writers, but almost all attention has been focused on ideas and events following the Second World War. Editor Robert M. Crunden seeks to go deeper, in this anthology of prewar material. He brings together a group of authors bound by what one of them calls a concern over "the spiritual disorder of modern life--its destruction of human integrity and its lack of purpose." Contributors include academics, polemicists, and journalists: Irving Babbit, Walter Lippmann, H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, John Crowe Ransom, George Santayana, Allen Tate, and others. These "superfluous men" (the odd term is derived from Nock's influential book Memoirs of a Superfluous Man) did not consider themselves part of an inchoate conservatism, although a number of them were allied in the New Humanist and Southern agrarian movements. And although they write from decades long past, their voices rarely seem distant. Here is Donald Davidson with an antimaterialist critique of industrial progress (as personified by Henry Ford) that could apply to the roaring economy at the turn of the 21st century: [The masses] must spend and spend unceasingly, in order to consume the never-ending stream of new products that industry hurls upon them. They will be encouraged to make a necessity of every luxury that the clever industrialists may devise. For the industry of the Ford type has not regard for actual or fundamental needs! It seeks to create two or even twenty demands where none at all existed before. Serious students of conservatism will surely want to have a copy of The Superfluous Men on their shelves, near Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind and George M. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America. --John J. Miller