Abstract

Though the two books being reviewed are written from widely divergent positions, one from a Catholic-liberationist-Habermasian and the other from an American Old Rightist perspective, they do share one characteristic. Both seem curiously out of touch with current social and political realities.

Slogging through the works of Irving Kristol, Peter L. Berger, Daniel Bell, R. J. Neuhaus, Norman Podhoretz, and Michael Novak, Mardones both praises and blames the neoconservatives for producing a neo-Weberian defense and critique of capitalist society. He credits them with rediscovering the cultural contradictions of bourgeois society, particularly the tension between an impersonal economic system (and a crassly utilitarian culture) and the human quest for spiritual and esthetic satisfaction.