Only a Voice: Essays

This bracing compendium by essayist Scialabba (How to Be Depressed) brings together meditations on novelist Wendell Berry, Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich, Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, and other major figures of the “antimodernist left,” an intellectual tradition the author suggests is defined by a skepticism of the ability of “science and progress” to bring about a “humane, democratic” society. In “A Whole World of Heroes,” Scialabba argues that historian Christopher Lasch viewed modernity as the commodification and bureaucratization of “activities once left to individuals and their families,” the solution for which was to be found in localizing power and decentralizing “control in workplaces, communities, and families.” Meanwhile, literary critic Lionel Trilling insisted on pointing out what he saw as unavoidable trade-offs in progressive policy, believing that the egalitarianism of “radical democracy” stymies “the superbness and arbitrariness which often mark great spirits.” Other essays consider how T.S. Eliot’s poetry contains the “revolutionary as well as the conservative,” Isaiah Berlin’s focus on “the blindness of enlightenment and the cruelties of emancipation,” and Ellen Willis’s support for building a society in which individuals can pursue their own development unfettered by material deprivation. The erudite sketches of iconoclastic thinkers highlight the heterogeneity of leftist thought, and Scialabba has a knack for teasing out the provocative implications of his subjects’ ideas. This stimulates. (Aug.)