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Marx's Failure as Theorist

was already "modernist, that is, impatient with traditional constraints, attuned to elemental realities and desires, responsive to abstract forms, and entranced by technological innovation." Suggestive as far as it goes, this reading slights modernism's moral and metaphysical impulses. Ignoring in effect the content of modernism, Allen misses the chance to assess the distortions and confusions, and also the genuine cultural gains, occasioned by the Chicago-Aspen reformers. Jackson Lears's No Place of Grace (1981) provides a useful gloss on Allen's text. Examining an earlier phase of antimodern reaction, Lears argues that such cultural reforms as the arts and crafts movement and late Victorian medievalism actually strengthened the development of modernism. Because the success of these movements turned only on the feelings they inspired in the individual, they encouraged the self-absorbed consumption of pleasure they sought to resist. Had Allen admitted of such a possibility with the Chicago-Aspen reformers, he might have achieved more strenuous and useful judgments. For example, Allen explains that to survive in Chicago the Bauhausler had to recast their broader social goals in increasingly practical commercial terms. But he does not question what it then meant for Bauhaus design to become popular without the cultural vision that motivated it. Similarly, Hutchins and Adler attempted to strengthen the hold of the morals and metaphys ics of the Great Books by setting them apart from and above their modernist critique. It is possible that by doing so they actually helped to loosen the connection between those books and vital contemporary culture. That Allen does not ask such questions is unfortunate, for the impulses underlying the Chicago humanism are still very much alive. Particularly among advocates of school reform, there has been much discussion of late about cultural literacy and the restoration of a humanistic curriculum similar (if less ambitious) to that espoused by Hutchins and Adler in the 1940's and 1950's. Indeed, with the publication of The Paideia Proposal (1982), Mortimer Adler has renewed his Great Books campaign, this time at the precollegiate level, and adaptations of his proposal are being attempted in cities as diverse as Atlanta and Chicago. If this renewed effort to strengthen our connection with the Western humanistic heritage is to have a positive effect, those involved will have to take seriously the challenges of modernism in all its modes. There is perhaps no better way to begin this process than by reviewing the limitations of earlier reforms as they emerge from The Romance of Commerce and Culture.