Marshall Berman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marshall Berman (born 1940) is an American Marxist Humanist writer and philosopher. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The City College of New York and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, teaching Political Philosophy and Urbanism.

Berman completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1968. He is on the editorial board of Dissent and a regular contributor to The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Bennington Review, New Left Review, New Politics and the Village Voice Literary Supplement.

His main works are The Politics of Authenticity, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, One Hundred Years of Spectacle and Adventures in Marxism. In Adventures in Marxism, Berman tells of how while a student at Columbia University in 1959, the chance discovery of Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 proved a revelation and inspiration, and became the foundation for all his future work. This personal tone pervades his work, linking historical trends with individual observations and inflections from the situation.

[edit] Modernity and modernism

During the mid- to late-20th century philosophical discourse focused on issues of modernity and cultural attitudes and philosophies towards the modern condition. Berman put forward his own definition of modernism to counter post-modern philosophies.

Others believe that the really distinctive forms of contemporary art and thought have made a quantum leap beyond all the diverse sensibilities of modernism, and earned the right to call themselves “post-modern”. I want to respond to these antithetical but complementary claims by reviewing the vision of modernity with which this book began. To be modern, I said, is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows.(All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, The Experience of Modernity, verso ninth edition Pages 345-346)

This view of modernism is at odds with post-modernism. Michel Foucault simply defined Modernism as the will to “heroize” the present[1]. Berman views postmodernism as a soulless and hopeless chamber in which a whole generation of Foucault's "followers" have chosen to suffocate and choke.

The Cardinal, singer/guitarist of the English punk rock band The Blood, has described Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air as offering hope to those who might be exterminated as a result of religious fundamentalism. Marshall Berman's modernity is forged in an "atmosphere of agitation" where feelings of "psychic dizziness and drunkenness" see a "destruction of moral boundaries and personal bonds"; in this "whirlwind" the "modern sensibility is born": The Cardinal argues that it is in this stealth tempest that young modern people will strive to "open frontiers" and build "new nations" where they will seek a neo plateau where they have a freedom to think: they will "melt" fundamentalism in a "turbulent" reality of uncertainty. The Cardinal concludes; 'as Nietzsche wrote it was not uncertainty that made Hamlet mad but his solid certainty: his fundamentalism. Salmon Rushdie said that his Satanic Verses were a love song to our mongrel selves; All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a love song that brings our energies and imaginations to life'.