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No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920
T. J. Jackson Lears draws on a wealth of primary sources â sermons, diaries, letters â as well as novels, poems, and essays to explore the origins of turn-of-the-century American antimodernism. He examines the retreat to the exotic, the pursuit of intense physical or spiritual experiences, and the search for cultural self-sufficiency through the Arts and Crafts movement. Lears argues that their antimodern impulse, more pervasive than historians have supposed, was not "simple escapism," but reveals some enduring and recurring tensions in American culture.
"It's an understatement to call No Place of Grace a brilliant book. . . . It's the first clear sign I've seen that my generation, after marching through the '60s and jogging through the '70s might be pausing to examine what we've learned, and to teach it."â Walter Kendrick, Village Voice
"One can justly make the claim that No Place of Grace restores and reinterprets a crucial part of American history. Lears's method is impeccable."â Ann Douglas, The Nation
"It's an understatement to call No Place of Grace a brilliant book. . . . It's the first clear sign I've seen that my generation, after marching through the '60s and jogging through the '70s might be pausing to examine what we've learned, and to teach it."â Walter Kendrick, Village Voice
"One can justly make the claim that No Place of Grace restores and reinterprets a crucial part of American history. Lears's method is impeccable."â Ann Douglas, The Nation
375 pages, Paperback
First published September 12, 1981
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May 11, 2010
This is a book about an irony of modern life. Thanks to its very openness, modernity (defined by relentless official rationality on the one hand, a universal belief in the value of free thought on the other, and boundless materialism between them) seems to be inescapable, and even efforts to escape modernity actually reinforce it. It may not be obvious to all readers, however, that this is Jackson Lears's message -- thanks in large part to the fact that the author himself is caught in the bind he describes.
Jackson Lears strongly feels the "antimodern impulse" himself: "In our time," he writes, "the most profound radicalism is often the most profound conservatism" (xviii). According to him, the dominant American culture since the late nineteenth century has been a therapeutic culture that liberates the individual only to accommodate him to industrial bureaucracy, insatiate consumption, and spiritual aimlessness. It is therefore not the impulse of individual liberation, Lears thinks, but the impulse to conserve and govern that offers escape from this comfortable prison. Yet Lears also shows that the antimodern impulse (felt most strongly at the turn of the century by old Protestant families in the East) failed to liberate. Antimodernism became, for most affluent and educated Americans at the turn of the century, yet another form of accommodation to the modern order. It merely allowed old elite families to "revitalize" their values for a new capitalist century, which they would continue to dominate. Seemingly, Jackson Lears has -- beautifully -- written himself into a corner.
Beyond this philosophical aim, however, Lears has two broad historiographic aims. First, he aims to show that antimodernism was not the "death rattle of old-stock Northern elites" (xvi) but rather the elites' way of marking their transition to the secular industrial age. The antimodern impulse gave old money a dominant cultural role in the new economy, establishing the first families of Boston and New York as natural artistic guardians of a sordid commercial society. Second, he aims to show that the hedonistic consumer culture of the twentieth century was not invented after the First World War, but instead originated in the nineteenth century as Protestantism declined and secular cultural values replaced it as the hegemonic ideology of the middle-class United States. In pursuing these aims Lears enjoys considerable success, if we accept his assumption that the values of the articulate middle class were "hegemonic" -- i.e., that they indirectly defined the values even of Americans who did not strictly share in their cultural basis. Because of other studies in a variety of fields, I think they generally were, especially by the end of Lears's period.
In the late nineteenth century, Lears writes, middle-class Americans shared in a transatlantic ideology that located freedom and beauty in "progress," technology, rationalization of all areas of life, lowered tolerance for discomfort, and an ideology of self-control. This was the age of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who applied science to the factory line to achieve maximum discipline and productivity, and his psychic counterpart John Harvey Kellogg, who wrote advice books for growing boys, enjoining them to master every fleeting sexual thought. The "focal point" of this Victorian morality was the domestic ideal, which promoted the middle-class home (and wife) as a haven within (and essential disciplinary support to) the competitive world of working men. The central philosophy was that of Herbert Spencer, who promoted not cutthroat "social Darwinism," as has often been claimed, but rather a vision of benign evolutionary progress that would end cruel competition -- a positivist vision that liberal Protestant religious leaders enthusiastically embraced. These ministers, Lears writes, "sought to exorcise the last vestiges of shadow and magic from their creeds, to create a clean, well-lighted place where religion and rationalist optimism could coexist in harmony." In the process, though, they undermined their faith as "an independent source of moral authority and [it:] became a handmaiden of the positivist world view" (23).
But by the 1880s, upper- and middle-class Americans were entertaining doubts about the rationalist vision. Some of them noticed that "the rationalization of urban culture and the decline of religion into sentimental religiosity" threatened a coherent sense of self; many now longed for the sort of intense, spiritual experience that seemed to be missing in their comfortable lives. Editorialists inveighed against a lack of heroism or robust sense of sin in American society. "Neurasthenia" -- depression -- seemed to be epidemic among young men in American cities. (George Miller Beard named the malady in American Nervousness in 1880, and it rapidly gained currency.) Meanwhile, labor unrest was unsettling bourgeois complacency about industry and cultural assimilation. From this sense of doubt about the advance of civilization, the antimodern impulse in America was born.
One manifestation of antimodernism came in the form of the Arts and Crafts movement. The idealists of this movement (including early figure Charles Eliot Norton, Horace Traubel, Edward Pearson Pressey, Elbert Hubbard, Gustav Stickley, and Oscar Lovell Triggs) protested modern industry's production values (or lack thereof) and the alienation of the worker from his product. Yet they had nothing, Lears writes, to offer the actual working classes. Their artisanism was exclusively a bourgeois leisure pursuit; it made well-educated hobbyists the masters of a craft industry that did not exist.
Meanwhile, many bourgeois antimodernists cultivated a darker ideal. Romantic militarists such as Charles Majors, author of the Tudor novel When Knighthood Was in Flower; the "Rough Rider" and ersatz western rancher Theodore Roosevelt; youth organizations like the Princely Knights of Character Castle; poets Richard Hovey and Louise Imogen Guiney; Frank Norris, who wrote about the American West and the Middle Ages alike; and Brooks Adams, a pessimistic imperialist, sought in medieval violence and pain a refuge from industrial decadence, lassitude, and femininity. But their martial ideal, Lears points out, promoted American imperialism in the Caribbean and Latin America -- not a force of feudalism but a powerful engine of modern machinery and trade.
Another medieval fantasy arrived in the form of "vitalism," an impulse to celebrate medieval or otherwise exotic spirituality without embracing its doctrinal content. Many vitalists looked to the Middle Ages as the "childhood of the race" (in the terms of psychologist G. Stanley Hall) -- an ambivalent image of both sincerity and simplemindedness. They participated in artistic enthusiasms such as a cult of Dante (devotees included Lowell, Longfellow, and Charles Eliot Norton) that celebrated the Italian poet's religious sincerity but did not enter into its substance. Popular literature, likewise, included wildly popular work on medieval themes by Howard Pyle and Mark Twain; the former managed to assimilate his premodern fantasies of Sherwood Forest to an optimistic view of the modern West, but Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court contrasted the premodern with the modern and revealed its author to be unable to choose between them without bitter regret. Many late Victorians also mined medieval magic and myth for archetypes that might inform modern life; examples include Sir James Frazer (The Golden Bough, 1890), the folklorist John Fiske, William Butler Yeats and Richard Wagner, and the orientalists Lafcadio Hearn and Sir Edwin Arnold. Most of these antimodern vitalists, Lears charges, were sentimentalists who elevanted "weightless" aesthetic experience over tangible outcomes or analytic systems. They tried to satisfy religious longings with disconnected, irrational sensations; thus, Lears believes, they promoted a secular therapeutic ethic of self-expression that did nothing to challenge the values of industrialism. At their best, however, some of them did at least celebrate feelings of "dread and awe -- emotions altogether alien to the enlightened optimism of the emerging twentieth century" (143).
Some antimodernists, though, did tack toward more traditional and systematic expressions of religion. The end of the nineteenth century was a period of great fascination with Catholicism among young members of old families, who sought in high tradition the meaning they could not find in sentimental liberal Protestantism (or atheism). It was, in other words, the age of Anglo-Protestantism among not only Episcopalians but also members of other churches. Some, like the great church architect Ralph Adams Cram, had religious epiphanies in European cathedrals and returned to the United States to spread the beauty of Catholic tradition among rootless, mechanical-minded Americans. Cram, however, was "entangled in bourgeois institutions"; he built new cathedrals in which the Episcopalian titans of business could flaunt their civic power and taste. Cram protested "centrifugal liberalism" authentically enough, but his conservatism was a conservatism of the capitalists (209). Lears contrasts his approach with that of Vida Dutton Scudder, a self-identified Christian socialist who, like Cram, found in Catholic sacramentalism a refuge from doubt and anomie, but who became a champion the poor. On the whole, Lears thinks, the church movement toward art and ritual was the most two-sided of all the antimodern movements; it pointed to a uniquely viable alternative to therapeutic consumer culture, yet it also encouraged a consumer ethic within churches themselves as they built more impressive structures and filled them with costly furnishings.
Lears ends his book with biographical studies of seven elite men who came of age or came to prominence during this period. Six of them -- William Sturgis Bigelow, George Cabot Lodge, Percival Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, G. Stanley Hall, and Van Wyck Brooks -- are presented as specimens of ambivalent affluence seeking meaning in their comfortable lives. (The ambivalent young educated man is this author's leitmotif.) Lears believes that all of them failed to resolve their misgivings about the modern world. Their attempts to find refuge in premodernist fads ended in failure, inasmuch as these men ended up where they had started -- as cultural leaders of modern America who saw no escape from its obligations. The seventh, on the other hand, is closer to Lears's heart: Henry Adams, the cranky patrician responsible for still-legendary indictments of modern pretensions. It seems that Henry Adams is, for Lears, the only respectable sort of dissident from modernity -- an incorruptible outsider. And a pessimist.
Jackson Lears strongly feels the "antimodern impulse" himself: "In our time," he writes, "the most profound radicalism is often the most profound conservatism" (xviii). According to him, the dominant American culture since the late nineteenth century has been a therapeutic culture that liberates the individual only to accommodate him to industrial bureaucracy, insatiate consumption, and spiritual aimlessness. It is therefore not the impulse of individual liberation, Lears thinks, but the impulse to conserve and govern that offers escape from this comfortable prison. Yet Lears also shows that the antimodern impulse (felt most strongly at the turn of the century by old Protestant families in the East) failed to liberate. Antimodernism became, for most affluent and educated Americans at the turn of the century, yet another form of accommodation to the modern order. It merely allowed old elite families to "revitalize" their values for a new capitalist century, which they would continue to dominate. Seemingly, Jackson Lears has -- beautifully -- written himself into a corner.
Beyond this philosophical aim, however, Lears has two broad historiographic aims. First, he aims to show that antimodernism was not the "death rattle of old-stock Northern elites" (xvi) but rather the elites' way of marking their transition to the secular industrial age. The antimodern impulse gave old money a dominant cultural role in the new economy, establishing the first families of Boston and New York as natural artistic guardians of a sordid commercial society. Second, he aims to show that the hedonistic consumer culture of the twentieth century was not invented after the First World War, but instead originated in the nineteenth century as Protestantism declined and secular cultural values replaced it as the hegemonic ideology of the middle-class United States. In pursuing these aims Lears enjoys considerable success, if we accept his assumption that the values of the articulate middle class were "hegemonic" -- i.e., that they indirectly defined the values even of Americans who did not strictly share in their cultural basis. Because of other studies in a variety of fields, I think they generally were, especially by the end of Lears's period.
In the late nineteenth century, Lears writes, middle-class Americans shared in a transatlantic ideology that located freedom and beauty in "progress," technology, rationalization of all areas of life, lowered tolerance for discomfort, and an ideology of self-control. This was the age of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who applied science to the factory line to achieve maximum discipline and productivity, and his psychic counterpart John Harvey Kellogg, who wrote advice books for growing boys, enjoining them to master every fleeting sexual thought. The "focal point" of this Victorian morality was the domestic ideal, which promoted the middle-class home (and wife) as a haven within (and essential disciplinary support to) the competitive world of working men. The central philosophy was that of Herbert Spencer, who promoted not cutthroat "social Darwinism," as has often been claimed, but rather a vision of benign evolutionary progress that would end cruel competition -- a positivist vision that liberal Protestant religious leaders enthusiastically embraced. These ministers, Lears writes, "sought to exorcise the last vestiges of shadow and magic from their creeds, to create a clean, well-lighted place where religion and rationalist optimism could coexist in harmony." In the process, though, they undermined their faith as "an independent source of moral authority and [it:] became a handmaiden of the positivist world view" (23).
But by the 1880s, upper- and middle-class Americans were entertaining doubts about the rationalist vision. Some of them noticed that "the rationalization of urban culture and the decline of religion into sentimental religiosity" threatened a coherent sense of self; many now longed for the sort of intense, spiritual experience that seemed to be missing in their comfortable lives. Editorialists inveighed against a lack of heroism or robust sense of sin in American society. "Neurasthenia" -- depression -- seemed to be epidemic among young men in American cities. (George Miller Beard named the malady in American Nervousness in 1880, and it rapidly gained currency.) Meanwhile, labor unrest was unsettling bourgeois complacency about industry and cultural assimilation. From this sense of doubt about the advance of civilization, the antimodern impulse in America was born.
One manifestation of antimodernism came in the form of the Arts and Crafts movement. The idealists of this movement (including early figure Charles Eliot Norton, Horace Traubel, Edward Pearson Pressey, Elbert Hubbard, Gustav Stickley, and Oscar Lovell Triggs) protested modern industry's production values (or lack thereof) and the alienation of the worker from his product. Yet they had nothing, Lears writes, to offer the actual working classes. Their artisanism was exclusively a bourgeois leisure pursuit; it made well-educated hobbyists the masters of a craft industry that did not exist.
Meanwhile, many bourgeois antimodernists cultivated a darker ideal. Romantic militarists such as Charles Majors, author of the Tudor novel When Knighthood Was in Flower; the "Rough Rider" and ersatz western rancher Theodore Roosevelt; youth organizations like the Princely Knights of Character Castle; poets Richard Hovey and Louise Imogen Guiney; Frank Norris, who wrote about the American West and the Middle Ages alike; and Brooks Adams, a pessimistic imperialist, sought in medieval violence and pain a refuge from industrial decadence, lassitude, and femininity. But their martial ideal, Lears points out, promoted American imperialism in the Caribbean and Latin America -- not a force of feudalism but a powerful engine of modern machinery and trade.
Another medieval fantasy arrived in the form of "vitalism," an impulse to celebrate medieval or otherwise exotic spirituality without embracing its doctrinal content. Many vitalists looked to the Middle Ages as the "childhood of the race" (in the terms of psychologist G. Stanley Hall) -- an ambivalent image of both sincerity and simplemindedness. They participated in artistic enthusiasms such as a cult of Dante (devotees included Lowell, Longfellow, and Charles Eliot Norton) that celebrated the Italian poet's religious sincerity but did not enter into its substance. Popular literature, likewise, included wildly popular work on medieval themes by Howard Pyle and Mark Twain; the former managed to assimilate his premodern fantasies of Sherwood Forest to an optimistic view of the modern West, but Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court contrasted the premodern with the modern and revealed its author to be unable to choose between them without bitter regret. Many late Victorians also mined medieval magic and myth for archetypes that might inform modern life; examples include Sir James Frazer (The Golden Bough, 1890), the folklorist John Fiske, William Butler Yeats and Richard Wagner, and the orientalists Lafcadio Hearn and Sir Edwin Arnold. Most of these antimodern vitalists, Lears charges, were sentimentalists who elevanted "weightless" aesthetic experience over tangible outcomes or analytic systems. They tried to satisfy religious longings with disconnected, irrational sensations; thus, Lears believes, they promoted a secular therapeutic ethic of self-expression that did nothing to challenge the values of industrialism. At their best, however, some of them did at least celebrate feelings of "dread and awe -- emotions altogether alien to the enlightened optimism of the emerging twentieth century" (143).
Some antimodernists, though, did tack toward more traditional and systematic expressions of religion. The end of the nineteenth century was a period of great fascination with Catholicism among young members of old families, who sought in high tradition the meaning they could not find in sentimental liberal Protestantism (or atheism). It was, in other words, the age of Anglo-Protestantism among not only Episcopalians but also members of other churches. Some, like the great church architect Ralph Adams Cram, had religious epiphanies in European cathedrals and returned to the United States to spread the beauty of Catholic tradition among rootless, mechanical-minded Americans. Cram, however, was "entangled in bourgeois institutions"; he built new cathedrals in which the Episcopalian titans of business could flaunt their civic power and taste. Cram protested "centrifugal liberalism" authentically enough, but his conservatism was a conservatism of the capitalists (209). Lears contrasts his approach with that of Vida Dutton Scudder, a self-identified Christian socialist who, like Cram, found in Catholic sacramentalism a refuge from doubt and anomie, but who became a champion the poor. On the whole, Lears thinks, the church movement toward art and ritual was the most two-sided of all the antimodern movements; it pointed to a uniquely viable alternative to therapeutic consumer culture, yet it also encouraged a consumer ethic within churches themselves as they built more impressive structures and filled them with costly furnishings.
Lears ends his book with biographical studies of seven elite men who came of age or came to prominence during this period. Six of them -- William Sturgis Bigelow, George Cabot Lodge, Percival Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, G. Stanley Hall, and Van Wyck Brooks -- are presented as specimens of ambivalent affluence seeking meaning in their comfortable lives. (The ambivalent young educated man is this author's leitmotif.) Lears believes that all of them failed to resolve their misgivings about the modern world. Their attempts to find refuge in premodernist fads ended in failure, inasmuch as these men ended up where they had started -- as cultural leaders of modern America who saw no escape from its obligations. The seventh, on the other hand, is closer to Lears's heart: Henry Adams, the cranky patrician responsible for still-legendary indictments of modern pretensions. It seems that Henry Adams is, for Lears, the only respectable sort of dissident from modernity -- an incorruptible outsider. And a pessimist.
July 26, 2023
Brilliant but frustratingly dense, almost unreadable.
This is the most frustrating book that I’ve come across in years. It is highly original, bold in its claims, well-researched, but so dense that I failed to finish more than perhaps a third. After reading straight through the opening chapters I dipped into some later chapters to see whether it becomes more accessible later—but it doesn’t. Five stars for originality; two for readability.
Lears discusses what he calls “antimodernism” in the United States between 1880 and 1920. This was a period in which the protestant church had become more flexible in its demands on its members while business life was becoming more impersonal: small family businesses were being replaced by large corporations where white-collar work was fragmented and the value of each individual’s contribution to business success difficult to discern. While the “meaning” of religion and work had both become more vague, there were strong social pressures, particularly on professional men, to pursue an productive business life as bread-winner for the family.
The social tensions that arose during the period led to nervous exhaustion or “neurasthenia”, with professionals taking time away from work (if they had the wealth to do so), revitalizing themselves through rest cures or a return to nature. They also looked for something that would replace the protestant religion as a meaning to their lives. They favored the arts and crafts movement, under which meaning and identity came from the pursuit of artisanal skills, and revived interest in medieval themes, seeking a return to a time when social and religious roles were clear and well-defined. Similarly, many turned to Eastern religions and Catholicism seeking a more stable center to their lives.
These movements were not necessarily widespread across the US population. Lears makes the case that the rebellion against modernist trends (weaker church, more powerful corporate business, atomized individual life) was most prominent within the educated bourgeoisie in the American northeast. Thus, having described what he saw as the general tensions of the time, he looks at how they played out in the lives of about 50 prominent Americans.
This is fascinating stuff, and I would love to say that No Place of Grace provided me with a clear exposition of Lears’s thinking. Unfortunately, the book is best suited for the academic community or, at a minimum, those well-versed in the social and political movements of the late-19th century. To take just one example, in the opening page, Lears refers to “a long tradition of Puritan and republican moralism.” I know something of the Puritans, but nothing about the tradition of “republican moralism”. Checking with Wikipedia, I find that “American republicanism was centered on limiting corruption and greed. Virtue was of the utmost importance for citizens and representatives. Revolutionaries took a lesson from ancient Rome; they knew it was necessary to avoid the luxury that had destroyed the empire.” Ideally, Lears could have recapped these ideas to prepare the reader for his own contributions.
Even where I had the basic elements to follow Lears’s thinking, his writing was so dense that I lost track halfway through sentences. The constant need to reread and pick apart the strands of his thinking was ultimately exhausting and I gave up. Just a few examples of his prose:
“A sentimental, optimistic religiosity conformed to the common pattern of evasion pervading the dominant culture. In the inspirational literature of liberal Protestantism, all conflicts were resolved, all tensions relaxed—even the tension between life and death.” (p. 23)
“Liberal Protestantism, like other official doctrines of nineteenth century America, came to terms with modernity by denying its darker side. The specter of class conflict, the pain of passions thwarted, the spiritual sterility of the positivite world view—all were overlooked on the highroad of progress.” (p. 25)
“The merger of medieval and modern character was eased by the whiggish historiography of the craft leaders.” (p. 76)
If these extracts are smooth sailing for you, then I whole-heartedly recommend you check out No Place of Grace. In my case, I’ll set it aside to have another go in a few years’ time. Perhaps with a second reading it will be more accessible. I fear not, however.
This is the most frustrating book that I’ve come across in years. It is highly original, bold in its claims, well-researched, but so dense that I failed to finish more than perhaps a third. After reading straight through the opening chapters I dipped into some later chapters to see whether it becomes more accessible later—but it doesn’t. Five stars for originality; two for readability.
Lears discusses what he calls “antimodernism” in the United States between 1880 and 1920. This was a period in which the protestant church had become more flexible in its demands on its members while business life was becoming more impersonal: small family businesses were being replaced by large corporations where white-collar work was fragmented and the value of each individual’s contribution to business success difficult to discern. While the “meaning” of religion and work had both become more vague, there were strong social pressures, particularly on professional men, to pursue an productive business life as bread-winner for the family.
The social tensions that arose during the period led to nervous exhaustion or “neurasthenia”, with professionals taking time away from work (if they had the wealth to do so), revitalizing themselves through rest cures or a return to nature. They also looked for something that would replace the protestant religion as a meaning to their lives. They favored the arts and crafts movement, under which meaning and identity came from the pursuit of artisanal skills, and revived interest in medieval themes, seeking a return to a time when social and religious roles were clear and well-defined. Similarly, many turned to Eastern religions and Catholicism seeking a more stable center to their lives.
These movements were not necessarily widespread across the US population. Lears makes the case that the rebellion against modernist trends (weaker church, more powerful corporate business, atomized individual life) was most prominent within the educated bourgeoisie in the American northeast. Thus, having described what he saw as the general tensions of the time, he looks at how they played out in the lives of about 50 prominent Americans.
This is fascinating stuff, and I would love to say that No Place of Grace provided me with a clear exposition of Lears’s thinking. Unfortunately, the book is best suited for the academic community or, at a minimum, those well-versed in the social and political movements of the late-19th century. To take just one example, in the opening page, Lears refers to “a long tradition of Puritan and republican moralism.” I know something of the Puritans, but nothing about the tradition of “republican moralism”. Checking with Wikipedia, I find that “American republicanism was centered on limiting corruption and greed. Virtue was of the utmost importance for citizens and representatives. Revolutionaries took a lesson from ancient Rome; they knew it was necessary to avoid the luxury that had destroyed the empire.” Ideally, Lears could have recapped these ideas to prepare the reader for his own contributions.
Even where I had the basic elements to follow Lears’s thinking, his writing was so dense that I lost track halfway through sentences. The constant need to reread and pick apart the strands of his thinking was ultimately exhausting and I gave up. Just a few examples of his prose:
“A sentimental, optimistic religiosity conformed to the common pattern of evasion pervading the dominant culture. In the inspirational literature of liberal Protestantism, all conflicts were resolved, all tensions relaxed—even the tension between life and death.” (p. 23)
“Liberal Protestantism, like other official doctrines of nineteenth century America, came to terms with modernity by denying its darker side. The specter of class conflict, the pain of passions thwarted, the spiritual sterility of the positivite world view—all were overlooked on the highroad of progress.” (p. 25)
“The merger of medieval and modern character was eased by the whiggish historiography of the craft leaders.” (p. 76)
If these extracts are smooth sailing for you, then I whole-heartedly recommend you check out No Place of Grace. In my case, I’ll set it aside to have another go in a few years’ time. Perhaps with a second reading it will be more accessible. I fear not, however.
May 8, 2007
This book profoundly altered the way I think about America at the turn of the 20th century, and also how I go about writing history myself. Weaving insights from psychoanalysis, sociology, literary theory, and cultural history, Lears creates a topical history that resists telling history with a simple narrative arc, even as it utilizes the narratives of the lives of exemplary figures. Half history, half theory, No Place of Grace is a deeply moral work that makes a case for spirituality and the quest for meaning.
Read
July 5, 2021first threeish chapters are good, conclusion is good, latter chapters are a bit weaker. overall excellent!
July 1, 2022
Genuinely interesting source material about the turn to anti-modernity (medievalism, militarism, Catholicism) taken by dissenting (and depressed) members of the American elite. However, Lears' insistent claim that the bourgeoisie at large transitioned from a "liberal Protestant" to a "therapeutic" world-view, under the disintegrating pressures of secular modernity, and that this is an adequate explanation for 20th century materialism and individualism, is not adequately justified. You can't simply shout "Gramsci" and call it a day! While Lears interpretation of modernity is less conspiracy-brained than claims that "the CIA invented modern art" which proliferate among anti-intellectual Marxists, it still hews too closely to conservative religious tropes for my comfort.
The chapter on the Arts and Crafts movement is the best, convincingly showing how the anti-modern socialism of William Morris degenerated into aestheticism and came to terms with industrial capitalism.
The chapter on the Arts and Crafts movement is the best, convincingly showing how the anti-modern socialism of William Morris degenerated into aestheticism and came to terms with industrial capitalism.
December 23, 2008
Theoretically intriguing but ultimately a fabulist version of history. Lears hearts Gramsci, Freud, Weber, Nietzsche and all the other cool kids, but his platform, basically the Arts and Crafts Movement and neo-medievalism circa 1900, is too thin to support his grand designs. Just write philosophy, man. The Freudian reading of Henry Adams is worth a read for Henry Adams aficionados, and you know who you are.
December 28, 2022
Repetitive, disorganized. Feels like a Weber book, and in the same sense is absolutely worth a chapter or two, particularly chapter 1 and the epilogue. Read alongside Charles Taylor and Christopher Lasch.
October 8, 2012
Brilliant, intermittently frustrating in its blanket assumptions, profound, sort of crabbed in style, v necessary adjustment to how you think about the 19th century America.
Read
September 29, 2015Cultural history of modernism and the reaction against it. Classic.
July 8, 2018
Brilliant study of antimodern impulses during the growth of industry and the consumer economy. Jacskon Lears shows how Americans entertained serious critiques of modernity — for instance, returning to an artisanal economy of "Arts and Crafts," reviving medieval imagery and heroic sagas for the imperial era, using militarism to reinvigorate white masculinity, or preferring Catholicism or mysticism to secularism. Lear's great insight is that antimodernism could wind up reinforcing the economic and cultural power of the bourgeoisie. Theodore Roosevelt detested physical weakness and thought a bit of war was good for every white patrician man, but he married these antimodern attitudes to a strong defense of capitalism. He went to war in Latin America to create foreign markets, as clear an example of toxic "acquisitive individualism" as any. Writer Brooks Adams viewed medieval society as according men more freedom than Northeastern filiopiety or capitalism. Adams was also a virulent anti-Semite who claimed Jews were using the economy to hurt the people. Even the Arts and Crafts reformers, building utopian and artists' communes, wound up reinforcing capitalism, since by withdrawing from mainstream society they abdicated control of it. Lears believes that his critique of libertarian utopianism and therapeutics in the Progressive Era also applies to twentieth-century socialists, expatriates, and Beatniks (and, I'd add, New Agers). Focusing on the self is not the way to transform society.
The book's theoretical language is dense. Lears assumes the reader knows about Freud, Gramsci, and Marx. As in Lears's "Something for Nothing," Lears tends toward descriptive reductionism. He lumps too many disparate trends under the category of "antimodern." Still, this book is essential for understanding opposition to consumer capitalism and the ways that Northeastern elites appropriated that opposition to strengthen the capitalist system.
The book's theoretical language is dense. Lears assumes the reader knows about Freud, Gramsci, and Marx. As in Lears's "Something for Nothing," Lears tends toward descriptive reductionism. He lumps too many disparate trends under the category of "antimodern." Still, this book is essential for understanding opposition to consumer capitalism and the ways that Northeastern elites appropriated that opposition to strengthen the capitalist system.
March 3, 2019
Lears writes with verve and insight about the coming of modern times. He shows us what this meant to the culture – in the arts, in consciousness, religion, and how Americans defined themselves. It’s an impressive book that makes sense of an era crowded with big personalities and technological change.
January 30, 2021
This is how you do history + cultural criticism.
May 23, 2022
This book will influence how I view the world for a long time.
July 15, 2014
Lears explains the cultural and intellectual transformation of the period 1880-1920 as a flight from modernity and its attendant weightlessness and rationalization toward antimodern sentiment. While this sort of antimodernism has routinely (especially in the case of Henry Adams) been seen as the last gasp of a dying world, Lears writes against this interpretation, considering turn-of-the-century anti-modernism as something new. Methodologically Lears draws on a combination of Gramsci and Freud - suggesting that while the American ruling class did create a dominant culture, they did so in part through unconscious or subconscious desires - a deep ambivalence about autonomy vs dependency. This ambivalence led the "point-men" of the United States toward eastern mysticism, a fetishization of innocence (in the form of children and of the Middle Ages) and a desire for lived experience over the effete intellectual life of late 19th century positivism (often through militarism). Lears desires in part to rescue antimodernism, 'the best of Conservatism' from contemporary right-wing defenders of corporate capitalism. While he takes pains at least, to insist that he is not overgeneralizing by extrapolating from the experience of the hegemonic elite, I am not totally convinced that his analysis extends as far as he wants it to.
February 20, 2013
Lears argues that at the turn of the 20th century antimodernist impulse was not merely cultural escapism, but a critique of the secularization and increasing bureaucracy of American life. Antimodernists yearned for greater individualization and authenticity, as well a renewed spirituality. Turning toward an exotic and spiritualized medieval and orientalist aesthetic, American antimodernists nurtured a therapeutic world view that was ambivalently compatible with the material progress and imperialism of modern American culture. Turning toward an exotic and spiritualized medieval and orientalist aesthetic, as well as return to the tradition of handcraft, Antimodernist Americans linked morality and taste with art and ritual. Yet, it was a taste that promoted conspicuous consumption. Large collections of original art were established during this period, with wealthy Americans salvaging and preserving European art. This is the second time I've read this book, and I like it better this time than the first. However, I did not enjoy it as much as Lears' more recent book "Rebirth of a Nation," which I read first and think was more fully developed. I still am somewhat troubled by Lears' use of the term "Antimodern-Modernist"...
September 21, 2013
In No Place of Grace, T.J. Jackson Lears explores the origins and effects of the antimodernist movement in the United States around the turn of the 20th century. He argues that due to the spiritual and psychological turmoil created by modernity, many intellectuals began yearning for a more authentic physical and emotional experience by embracing ���old ways.��� He claims that this movement is more intellectually and socially important than previously suspected, because it not only encouraged escapist nostalgia and protests against liberalism, it also created a subtle and long lasting transformation of the psychological foundation of America, making way for a streamlined liberal culture of consumer capitalism.
Lears demonstrates the complexity of the Antimodernist movement as well as the important transformations that arose out of it. He also points out that it is still evident in avant-garde art and literature. It is evident that he conducted extensive research on the individuals involved in this movement, and used various personal writings to explore the inner sentiments of these people.
Lears demonstrates the complexity of the Antimodernist movement as well as the important transformations that arose out of it. He also points out that it is still evident in avant-garde art and literature. It is evident that he conducted extensive research on the individuals involved in this movement, and used various personal writings to explore the inner sentiments of these people.
October 11, 2013
Upon a theoretical foundation that combines Gramsci’s cultural hegemony with Freud’s psychoanalytic focus, Lears proposes a more gradual and nuanced telling of the progression from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, depicting the Victorian bourgeoisie’s antimodernim as constructive ambivalence, which shaped both American culture and her landscape.
While the academic trend of the moment was to focus on the experiences of ordinary people, Lears chronicles how the intellectual elite experienced “weightlessness” in private and public, rooted in a “crisis of cultural authority,” caused by a combination of urbanization, post-industrialization, and increasingly secular views. Beset by “cultural strain, moral confusion, and anomie,” this privileged group sought real, authentic, sweeping experiences through preindustrial craftsmanship, a pastoral and simple life, martial violence, exotic encounters, and mysticism. These actions were never fully nostalgic, backward actions, however, as Lears argues, antimodernism was “a complex blend of accommodation and protest” that transitioned the elite and common man alike into a new age of consumer capitalism.
While the academic trend of the moment was to focus on the experiences of ordinary people, Lears chronicles how the intellectual elite experienced “weightlessness” in private and public, rooted in a “crisis of cultural authority,” caused by a combination of urbanization, post-industrialization, and increasingly secular views. Beset by “cultural strain, moral confusion, and anomie,” this privileged group sought real, authentic, sweeping experiences through preindustrial craftsmanship, a pastoral and simple life, martial violence, exotic encounters, and mysticism. These actions were never fully nostalgic, backward actions, however, as Lears argues, antimodernism was “a complex blend of accommodation and protest” that transitioned the elite and common man alike into a new age of consumer capitalism.
June 15, 2015
Lears writes an intellectual and psychological history of a portion of the educated American elite around the turn of the last century. There he finds deep spiritual turmoil and a strain of anti-modernism reaching towards and appropriating medieval, Asian, and primitive cultures. The writing is thick - not difficult to read, but not quick as Lears opens up ideas and individuals, as they sought therapuetic self-fulfillment in experience. And so while the anti-modernists sought to avoid the advances of modernism, their therapuetic turn did not question the developing corporate society sufficiently and their questing was easily assimilated into that society's individualism and consumerism.
January 29, 2008
ohh what a snoozer
Want to read
June 18, 2010Recommend to Jen
March 11, 2014
At the risk of hyperbole, this is the greatest book on American history ever written.
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