The Anti-Modernists
My favorite newspaper has a piece in today’s literary supplement that talks about the difference between modernists and anti-modernists. Anti-modernists are not reactionaries: they accept the inevitability of modernity but don’t celebrate it. Their main value is liberty, not order; and indeed, the article suggests, the difference between modernists and anti-modernists is a better signpost for political tendencies than the traditional left/right divide. (Of course one could just continue the list: modernists believe in grand social and political projects while anti-modernists don’t — though artistic grand projects are another thing, just think of À la recherche du temps perdu or the Mémoires d’outre-tombe, by two quintessential anti-modernists).
The piece is a review of Antoine Compagnon, Les antimodernes. De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes, Gallimard, 2005. Sounds like it should join my growing list of books I want to read but am pretty sure I won’t — not any time soon, that is.
