The Wreck of Western Culture: humanism revisited

Those who sought to contain humanism’s pride within a frame of higher truth — Luther, Calvin, Poussin, Kierkegaard — could barely interrupt its torrential progress. Those who sought to reform humanism’s tenets — Marx, Darwin, and Nietzsche — were tested by the success of their own prophecies.

So runs the approved view; it is not shared by John Carroll. Rather he articulates a disruptive and compelling alternative version of Western civilisation since the Renaissance and the Reformation contrived to unleash Reason, Will, and a superhuman Man on the world. Here, Carroll significantly reworks his bracing study of humanism’s rise to pre-eminence and its headlong tumble into contradiction. This revised look at the failure of the West’s 500-year experiment with humanism, and its dire cultural consequences, concludes with 11 September, 2001.