Abstract

Emerging from a "lost generation" following the First World War was the humanist and man of letters, Joseph Wood Krutch. During the Twenties and most of the Thirties, Krutch's early literary career was intricately tied to The Nation magazine. Yet, his most remembered work is The Modern Temper, published in 1929. It was not only "the once ultimate bible... of the period," as Lewis Mumford proclaimed, but, as I attempt to demonstrate, a new testament of "a liberal despair." Krutch's subsequent writings, seeking to discover a means for reuniting human beings with enduring values, were an effort to pass beyond the debilitating skepticism in his own liberal values. ;This study of Krutch's contribution to contemporary liberal thought focuses on his ideas to find, first, what it is about the modern world, and, in particular, Marxism, Social Darwinism, and Skinnerian Behaviorism that caused him to despair. Secondly, taking his diagnosis at face value, how successful was Krutch in reconciling the tensions between an unyielding defense of individual free will and a natural law belief in higher normative standards? At issue here, lastly, is whether or not he ever bridged the chasm between eternal norms and the chaotic laws of nature as revealed by science. ;Although Krutch's "journey beyond despair" never completely came to an end, he did find some modest reconciliation between humanistic values and nature's facts. The Tucson desert became his refuge in the fifties and sixties, providing Krutch with a new basis for believing in the individual's autonomy. But while he admired nature's works, Krutch remained a social critic. However dismal life and thought in modern times had become, Krutch never allowed himself to abandon for a moment the value of critical reflection on the practices of his society. The cult of transcendentalism, or the mysticism of Romantic nature was not his. Krutch's strengths as a contemporary liberal thinker, in sum, lie less in his answers for curing modern alienation than in the questions an embrace of natural law enabled him to raise