All That Is Solid Melts into Air The Experience of Modernity [Paperback]

A bubbling caldron of ideas . . . Enlightening and valuable. —Mervyn Jones,New Statesman.

The political and social revolutions of the nineteenth century, the pivotal writings of Goethe, Marx, Dostoevsky, and others, and the creation of new environments to replace the old—all have thrust us into a modern world of contradictions and ambiguities. In this fascinating book, Marshall Berman examines the clash of classes, histories, and cultures, and ponders our prospects for coming to terms with the relationship between a liberating social and philosophical idealism and a complex, bureaucratic materialism.

From a reinterpretation of Karl Marx to an incisive consideration of the impact of Robert Moses on modern urban living, Berman charts the progress of the twentieth-century experience. He concludes that adaptation to continual fluxispossible and that therein lies our hope for achieving a truly modern society.

All That Is Solid Melts into AirPreface to the Penguin Edition: The Broad and Open Way
Preface
Introduction: Modernity - Yesterday, Today and TomorrowI. Goethe'sFaust: The Tragedy of Development
First Metamorphosis: The Dreamer
Second Metamorphosis: The Lover
Third Metamorphosis: The Developer
Epilogue: The Faustian and Pseudo-Faustian Age

II. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: Marx, Modernism and Modernization
1. The Melting Vision and Its Dialectic
2. Innovative Self-Destruction
3. Nakedness: The Unaccommodated Man
4. The Metamorphosis of Values
5. The Loss of a Halo
Conclusion: Culture and the Contradictions of Capitalism

III. Baudelaire: Modernism in the Streets
1. Pastoral and Counter-Pastoral Modernism
2. The Heroism of Modern Life
3. The Family of Eyes
4. The Mire of the Macadam
5. The Twentieth Century: The Halo and the Highway

IV. Petersbur: The Modernism of Underdevelopment
1. The Real and Unreal City
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