Volume 29, Number 3 · March 4, 1982
Jogging to the Abyss
By Robert M. Adams
All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
by Marshall Berman
Simon and Schuster, 383 pp., $17.50
Marshall Berman's new book, with its apocalyptic title, is a contribution to the large and growing literature of modernism, modernity, and the modern. Nominally, the book takes the 'modern' experience to be close to five hundred years old, dating it perhaps from the Reformation or something like that, but to the first three hundred of those years it pays little attention. Many traditional accounts of modernism (for it's a topos with a curiously long history) lay great emphasis on the seventeenth-century querelle des anciens et modernes, which began with Boileau, Perrault, and Fontenelle in France, but widened as it crossed the Channel to involve Richard Bentley, William Wotton, Sir William Temple, Charles Boyle, and of course Jonathan Swift—widened also to include, beyond matters of literary taste, a fresh assessment of the new science and its achievements. None of this concerns Berman, who for the purposes of the book seems to take modernism as beginning approximately with the Industrial Revolution or the later stages of it, when the substitution of steam for water power led to the formation, in the western midlands, of the first large-scale industrial towns.
Review, 2454 words
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