The intellectual versus the city: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright

The intellectual versus the city: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright

anti-urbanism, anti-urbanisme, philosophie, intellectual, intellectuel, Franklin Benjamin, St. John de Crèvecoeur J. Hector, Jefferson Thomas, Emerson Ralph Waldo, Melville Herman, Hawthorne Nathaniel, Poe Edgar Allan, Adams Henry, James Henry, Howells William Dean, Norris Frank, Dreiser Theodore, James William, Addams Jane, Park Robert E., Dewey John, Royce Josiah, Santayana George, Wright Frank Lloyd, White Morton, White Lucia

Extract from the 'Opening Theme': ...[E]nthusiasm for the American city has not been typical or predominant in our intellectual history. Fear has been the more common reaction. For a variety of reasons our most celebrated thinkers have expressed different degrees of ambivalence and animosity toward the city, attitudes which may be partly responsible for a feeling on the part of today's city planner that he has no mythology or mystique on which he can rest or depend while he launches his campaigns in behalf of urban improvement... [T]he negative attitude of the intellectual toward the American city is of interest in its own right, especially because it is voiced in unison by figures who represent major tendencies in American thought: by Jefferson, the child of the Enlightenment; by Emerson and Thoreau, the Transcendentalists; by Hawthorne, Poe and Melville, who represent what Harry Levin calls "the power of blackness"; by Henry Adams and Henry James in reaction to the Gilded Age; by Howells, Dreiser, and Norris, spokesmen of literary realism and naturalism; by John Dewey and Jane Addams in what Richard Hofstadter calls "The Age of Reform"; by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, America's best-known architects; by Robert Park, its most influential urban sociologist. Because these figures dominate or sum up certain phases of American intellectual development, they form a body of intellectual lore and tradition which continues to affect thought and action about the city today. There is a contemporaneity about some of their views which is not obscured by the fact that they speak from the past; they continue to be read by those who are interested in the general history of the United States and also by those who are curious about our literary and philosophical tradition. They virtually constitute our intellectual tradition as it is known today. They make up the core of our intellectual history and one must go to them if one wishes to know what the articulate American conception of urban life has been. Contents: I. The opening theme II. The Irenic Age: Franklin, Crèvecoeur, and Jefferson III. Metaphysics against the city: The age of Emerson IV. Bad dreams of the city: Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe V. The displaced patrician: Henry Adams VI. The visiting mind: Henry James VII. The ambivalent urbanite: William Dean Howells VIII. Disappointment in New York: Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser IX. Pragmatism and social work: William James and Jane Addams X. The plea for community: Robert Park and John Dewey XI. Provincialism and alienation: An aside on Josiah Royce and George Santayana XII. Architecture against the city: Frank Lloyd Wright XIII. The legacy of fear XIV. The outlines of a tradition XV: Romanticism is not enough XVI. Ideology, prejudice, and reasonable criticism

Morton White Lucia White

Harvard University Press MIT Press

1962

270

Ouvrage

hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015039838985