Modern Mind

by Watson, Peter

• ISBN13: 9780060084387
• ISBN10: 0060084383
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-07-03
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

From Freud to Babbitt, from Animal Farm to Sartre to the Great Society, from the Theory of Relativity to counterculture to Kosovo, The Modern Mind is encyclopedic, covering the major writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers who produced the ideas by which we live. Peter Watson has produced a fluent and engaging narrative of the intellectual tradition of the twentieth century, and the men and women who created it.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Introduction: an Evolution in the Rules of Thought	1	(10)
PART ONE FREUD TO WITTGENSTEIN The Sense of a Beginning
Disturbing the Peace	11	(15)
The Unconscious Unveiled
Europe's Mother Civilisation
the gene rediscovered
Max Planck's Quantum
Picasso in Paris
Half-way House	26	(13)
German pre-eminence in thought
Vienna's cafes a market for ideas
Schnitzler and von Hofmannsthal
Brentano and Husserl
Krafft - Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis
Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos
Weininger and Klimt
Ernst Mach
Darwin's Heart of Darkness	39	(13)
Nietzsche
Veblen
Spencer
Haeckel
Lapouge's `racial disaster'
Ratzel's `Lebensraum'
Houston Chamberlain
Nordau's `egeneration'
Galton's eugenics
Herzl's Zionism
Weber's Protestant Ethic
Conrad's Africa
Les Demoiselles de Modernisme	52	(21)
Strauss's Salome and Elektra
Schoenberg's Ewartung
Picasso's whores
Kandinsky's abstractions
Bergson's elan vital
Pascendi Dominici Gregis
the new learning in China
The Pragmatic Mind of America	73	(17)
University life
Charles Eliot
Peirce, James and the Pragmatic school of philosophy
John Dewey
Harvard Business School
Taylor's Scientific Management
Hofstadter and the practical culture of America
Sullivan and the skyscraper
Kill Devil Hill
the Ashcan School
The Great Train Robbery
D. W. Griffith
Mary Pickford
E = mc2, /≡/v+C7H38O43	90	(18)
Rutherford's atom
Einstein's relativity
Baekeland's awkward resin
Russell and Whitehead
adrenaline
Ehrlich's magic bullet
Ladders of Blood	108	(18)
W. E. B. Du Bois and Souls of Black Folk
the NAACP
The Louisiana Purchase Exhibition
T. H. Morgan and the fruitfly
Franz Boas and The Mind of Primitive Man
Hiram Bingham and Machu Picchu
Wegener's continental drift
Volcano	126	(18)
The Armory Show
the Sonderbund
Apollinaire's Alcools and `Zone'
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring
Diaghilev and Nijinsky
Einstein's special theory
Niels Bohr's orbits
Death in Venice
Sons and Lovers
Proust
Jung's break with Freud
Robert Frost
Counter - Attack	144	(27)
The intellectual consequences of war
plastic surgery
blood grouping and transfusion
the concept of the IQ
the Americanisation of the IQ
psychoanalysis achieves respectability
the war poets
the `versus' habit
spiritualism
Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico - Philosophicus
Dada in Zurich
artists of the Russian Revolution
PART TWO SPENGLER TO ANIMAL FARM Civilisations and Their Discontents
Eclipse	171	(15)
Spengler's Decline of the West
Versailles
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
May 4 in China
George Lukacs's Sunday Circle
Bartok's Bluebeard
Eddington at Principe
The Acquisitive Wasteland	186	(20)
Tawney's bitter vision
Eliot's Waste Land
Pirandello's bleak stage
Karl Kraus's Last Days
Joyce's Bloom
Yeats
Gatsby's many wastelands
Proust, again
Gide's moral wasteland
Jacob's Room
Breton's unconscious murmur
Ernst and Dali's biological wasteland
Magritte
Babbitt's Middletown	206	(15)
IQ and race
the Scopes's trial
Babbitt
the concept of the `middlebrow'
Middletown
the Harlem renaissance
The New Yorker
birth of the BBC
Heroes' Twilight	221	(24)
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
the Warburg Institute
the Bauhaus
the Frankfurt School
`secret' Germany
Rilke
The Magic Mountain
serialism
Brecht
Heidegger
History and Class Consciousness
the Vienna Circle
Robert Musil
Kafka
Hitler and the intellectual origins of the Third Reich
The Evolution of Evolution	245	(11)
The idea of progress
the Tomb of Tutankhamen
Ur
Leonard Woolley and Sumer
the Flood and the First Library
Ras Shamra and the evolution of EI
tree - ring dating
Whig history
The Golden Age of Physics	256	(17)
Rutherford `splits' the atom
Bohr links physics and chemistry
Pauli's exclusion principle
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
Schrodinger's waves
Chadwick and the neutron
Hubble's expanding universe
Pauling's chemical bond
Whittle and Von Ohain's jet
Godel's theorem
Civilisations and Their Discontents	273	(27)
Freud and the health of the West
Jung's modern man
Horney's `neurotic personality'
A Room of One's Own
Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict's anthropology
Chicago sociology
The Negro in American Civilisation
Faulkner's South
Orwell's Paris, London and Wigan
Mumford's cities
Dean Inge v. Bertrand Russesll
The Revolt of the Masses
the Webbs in Russia
Rosenberg's `Myth'
Huxley's `new' world
Inquisition	300	(26)
Blacklist of artists in Germany
paintings seized
Einstein's persecution
campaigns against von Frisch, the Bauhaus, the Warburg Institute, the Frankfurt School
Vienna Circle exiled
attacks on Freud and Hannah Arendt
Karl Lorenz's work for the Nazis
Himmler's `science'
the exhibition of Degenerate Art
the philosophy, courage and death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
nationalisation of arts and sciences in Soviet Russia
the role of Maxim Gorky
Red professors
the persecution of Nikolai Vavilov
Lysenko
the purge of scientists
the KGB literary archive
the death of Osip Mandelstam
Cold Comfort	326	(24)
Talking pictures
Goebbels and Riefenstahl
`The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction'
CIAM
Auden and his generation
writers in the Spanish Civil War
Picasso's Guernica
Penguin Books
Fiction and the Reading Public
Keynes's theory of employment and money
Cole Porter
cellophane and nylon
Eugene O'Neill
On Native Grounds
Citizen Kane
Hitler's Gift	350	(11)
Artists exiled in America
German academics in Turkey
mathematicians, musicians and psychologists flee to the U.S
Varian Fry and the ERC
the University in Exile
Mondrian's New York paintings
Schoenberg (and others) in Los Angeles
Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine
Colossus	361	(15)
Alan Turing, Enigma and ENIAC
radar
penicillin
the caves at Lascaux
the evolutionary synthesis
Schrodinger's `What is Life?'
No Way Back	376	(16)
Karl Mannheim
Joseph Schumpeter
Friedrich von Hayek
Karl Popper
`Christianity and the Social Order'
the Beveridge Report
Animal Farm
Keynes and the war
Bretton Woods and the peace
An American Dilemma
Light in August	392	(15)
A nuclear chain reaction becomes possible
Enrico Fermi
nuclear fission
the Manhattan Project
the meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr
German, Russian and Japanese plans for a bomb
Hiroshima
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
PART THREE SARTRE TO THE SEA OF TRANQUILITY The New Human Condition and The Great Society
Paris in the Year Zero	407	(14)
Sartre
Ritzkrieg
Merleau - Ponty
Aragon
the Left Bank
Kravchenko
Messaren
the Paris School of painters
Camus
Genet
Beckett
Ionesco
Daughters and Lovers	421	(11)
Simone de Beauvoir
the Kinsey Report
Masters and Johnson
Gregory Pincus and the contraceptive pill
Nabokov's Lolita
Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique
The New Human Condition	432	(18)
The Lonely Crowd
The Authoritarian Personality
Hannah Arendt
Erich Fromm's Sane Society
Organisation Man
C. Wright Mills
Galbraith's Affluent Society
W. W. Rostow
Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders
Daniel Bell's End of Ideology
The Rise of the Meritocracy
Cracks in the Canon	450	(21)
Eliot's Definition of Culture
F. R. Leavis
Lionel Trilling
The American Mind
Ginsberg's Howl
Kerouac's On the Road
the new pop
James Baldwin
Things Fall Apart
Levi - Strauss
John Osborne
The Movement and Philip Larkin
The Uses of Literacy
Raymond Williams
Snow's Two Cultures
Forces of Nature	471	(19)
Michael Polanyi
1984
Lysenko, again
Shockley and the transistor
Waston, Crick and DNA
Korolev and Sputnik
Louis and Mary Leakey and Zinjanthropus
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Mind minus Metaphysics	490	(14)
Psycho
The Divided Self
Gilbert Ryle
Wittgenstein
The failures of psychoanalysis
Skinner v. Chomsky
Maternal deprivation
Piaget
tranquilisers
Herbert Marcuse
Manhattan Transfer	504	(12)
Eichmann in Jerusalem
refugee analysts in America
Bruno Bettelheim
Erik Erikson
physicists in America: Gamow, Gell-Mann and quarks
Andy Warhol
The Last Avant - Garde
Sontag's `Against Interpretation'
Equality, Freedom, and Justice in the Great Society	516	(37)
The Condition of Liberty (Hayck)
Milton Friedman
The Other America
Jane Jacobs
Martin Luther King
the Civil Rights campaign
Frantz Fanon
Eldridge Cleaver
Maya Angelou
Germaine Greer
Juliet Mitchell
Kate Millett
Shere Hite
the Coleman Report
Arthur Jensen
Christopher Jencks
Deschooling Society
One - Dimensional Man
Norman Mailer
China's Cultural Revolution
madness in Russia
Solzhenitsyn
Isaiah Berlin on liberty
Marshall McLuhan
Guy Debord
Rawls's Theory of Justice
Robert Nozick on anarchy
Skinner on Freedom and Dignity
La Longue Duree	553	(13)
Seafloor spreading and tectonic plates
the Beringia conference
Basil Davidson's Old Africa
Ferdinand Braudel and the Annales school
the British Marxist historians
Renfrew's radiocarbon revolution
Heaven and Earth	566	(23)
The moon landing
pulsars and background radiation
The First Three Minutes
quasars
The Bible and Archaeology
Paul Tillich
Rudolf Bultmann
Teilhard de Chardin
Reinhald Niebuhr
Vatican II
Rachel Carson
The Limits to Growth
The Greening of America
Small is Beautiful
PART FOUR THE COUNTER - CULTURE TO KOSOVO The View From Nowhere, The View From Everywhere
A New Sensibility	589	(17)
The Oil Crisis
The New Industrial State
Post - Industrial Society and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
Roszak's Counter - culture
Zen and Motorcycles
Tom Wolfe's Acid Test
The Me Decade
the Narcissism of Professor Lasch
Religion and the Decline of Magic
The World Turned Upside Down
Genetic Safari	606	(15)
Ethology
African Genesis
three women in Africa
The Serengeti Lion
snow leopards and elephants
`Lucy' and Laetoli
Fred Sanger's two Nobel prizes
Genentech
Jacques Monod
Sociobiology
Dawkins's mathematics of the jungle
The French Collection	621	(23)
Galerie Beaubourg
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers
IRCAM and Pierre Boulez
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Jacques Lacan
Michel Foucault
Piaget's Structuralism
Jacques Derrida
Louis Althusser
Jurgen Habermas
Roland Barthes
Robert Bresson
Jacques Tati
Francois Truffaut
Jean - Lac Godard
Peter Brook's CIRT
Doing Well, and Doing Good	644	(13)
Taking Rights Seriously
Free to Choose
the Solow Residual
New Growth Theory
the famines of Amartya Sen
The Culture of Contentment
Losing Ground
America's enduring race problem
The Wages of Repression	657	(10)
AIDS
beta - blockers
immunosuppressants
heart transplants
oncogenes
Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor
AIDS and the arts
the attack on psychoanalysis
the attack on Margaret Mead
Local Knowledge	667	(15)
Lyotard's Postmodern Condition
the philosophy of Richard Rorty
Thomas Nagel's Mortal Questions
Clifford Geertz
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Quine
Relative Rationality
David Harvey's ephemeral truths
`The Best Idea, Ever'	682	(22)
Genetic fingerprints
the origins of life
Lynn Margulis's eukaryotes
the K/T boundary
the death of the dinosaurs
Turkana Boy
mitochondrial DNA
the `mother tongue'
the neo - Darwinists and their family quarrels
The Bell Curve
the Human Genome Project
Consciousness studies
The Empire Writes Back	704	(17)
Non-fiction v. fiction
U. S. English v. U. K. English
English as a Global Language
Toni Morrison
Alice Walker
Vargas Llosa
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
R. K. Narayan
Anita Desai
Salman Rushdie
V. S. Naipaul
Satyajit Ray
Wole Soyinka
Edward Said's Orientalism
Gayatri Spivak's Subaltern Studies
The Political Unconscious
Political Shakespeare
David Mamet
John Updike
Saul Bellow
Approaches to American Indian Texts
Culture Wars	721	(16)
The Closing of the American Mind
The Western Canon
the counter - attack
Black Athena
the counter - attack
Enola Gay and the counter - attack
cultural politics on campus
Cultivating Humanity
Great Books today
Gertrude Himmelfarb's warning
Deep Order	737	(14)
The Internet
its history
the singularity of Stephen Hawking
black holes
The Birth of the Universe
wormholes
the anthropic universe
string theory
chaoplexity
artificial life
the deep order of mathematics, even in biology
morphomatics
Conclusion: The Positive Hour	751	(22)
Notes and References	773	(56)
Index of Names	829	(14)
Index of Ideas	843