Be Not Afraid: A Denunciation of Despair

by Emmanuel Mounier, Leslie Paul (Foreword)

Romano Guardini, in the wake of World War II, “The signs of the times have indicated…with all the spontaneity of a genuine symptom, that the human personality is in danger.” Diagnosing and treating the cause of this symptom was, for Emmanuel Mounier, a mission of the utmost urgency. His philosophy of personalism represented “a total effort to comprehend and outgrow the whole crisis of the twentieth-century man.” Be Not Afraid is a précis of Mounier’s his critiques of materialism and scientism; his Péguy-inspired dialectic of revolution; his distrust of the structures of liberalism and dismay at the uninhibited sprawl of capitalism; and the conflict between his sympathies toward Marxism and his acceptance of the Christian gospel that “in hope we are saved.” An impassioned appraisal of past and present, Be Not A Denunciation of Despair sheds fulsome, at times uncomfortable, light on the life of the Western mind at the midpoint of the twentieth century.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion

242 pages, Paperback

Published June 18, 2021

About the author

Emmanuel Mounier (1 April 1905 – 22 March 1950) was a French Catholic philosopher and intellectual who founded the personalist movement, emphasizing the inherent dignity and communal vocation of the human person as a spiritual being engaged in the world, and established the journal Esprit as its primary organ.