《现代性及其不满》读后感精选( 三 ) modernity|modern|debate|book|M

既然现在中译本已经翻译出版，还是放出来供有需要的人参考。
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Steven Smith’s recent book, Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow, examines one central topic in contemporary political philosophy, modernity. For Steven Smith, the core question in this book is: how did the idea of the bourgeois, once considered virtually synonymous with the free and responsible individual, become associated with a kind of low-minded materialism, moral cowardice, and philistinism？
The content of the book is organized into four parts clearly: the first part is a brief introduction examining the development and the dialectic of the modernity, its origin, development, and the rising of its opponents; the second part consists of classic authors of early modernity and the analysis of their texts, including Machiavelli new manner of individualism, secularization of society raised by Hobbes and Spinoza, the creation of the modern idea of the self by Descartes and Benjamin Franklin, the international humanism of Kant, and the morality of the civil society by Hegel; the third part, examines the great critics of the modern project, from Rousseau’s critique of the culture of the refinement and the arts, Tocqueville’s account of two kinds of new despotism, Flaubert’s diatribe against the modern bourgeois, Nietzsche’s undermining of the idea of progress and his influence on Georges Sorel, Gy?rgy Lukács, Martin Heidegger and Karl Schmitt, Isaiah Berlin and Leo Strauss on the reconsideration of the track of the modernity, and at last two literary images of modernity provided by Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Saul Bellow’s Mr.Sammler’s Planet. And fourth the conclusion part.
1.The Outline
How modernity comes to rise and how the modernity develops its opponents, are the central questions of this book. The etymological analysis of the term “modernity” shows that it first gained its appearance in the “quarrel between the ancients and moderns” over the proper ways of artistic production which quickly becomes a debate involving the issues ranging from philosophy, politics to economics. For the author, the modernity is more associated with a particular type of human being, the bourgeois. The typical bourgeois, not refers to a particular kind of production in Marxism context but means a certain way of life and set of moral characteristics, can be characterized as an individual with the quality of generosity, courage, nobility, love of fame, and self-assertion[1]. America is founded on the basis of modern philosophy and acceptance of the bourgeois morality. While the question is, as the history of political thought shows, how the rhetoric of modernity develops in the development of the modernity？ How the once virtuous bourgeois is considered with materialism, moral cowardice, and philistinism？
The book begins with the examination of the concept of modernity. The term “modernity” itself indicates a distinction to the previous ancients, while the beginning of the modernity remains a question. If we regard modernity as mentality, when does it exactly begins？ It depends on the standard. Some traced it back to the age of exploration and the discovery of the New World, others to the scientific revolution by Harvey, Galileo, and Newton, or to the philosophical innovations of Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza. Some identified it with the social and political revolutions in England, France, and the United States. Even others identify it artistic and aesthetic developments to certain writers like Proust, Joyce, and James.