John Carroll (author)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Carroll is the current (as of November 2007) Reader in Sociology at La Trobe University, and author of Puritan, Paranoid, Remissive, Guilt, Ego and Soul, Humanism: The Rebirth and Wreck of Western Culture, and Intruders In The Bush: The Australian Quest For Identity.

Humanism is Carroll's most ambitious work to date. Predicated on the view that Western culture is in a declining mode, Humanism traces this decline to an epistemological tyranny of reason and its subjection of other forms of knowing and understanding being. Carroll's often bleak diagnosis is primarily based on unique readings of canonic theological, philosophical and artistic texts including those by Sophocles, Calvin, Holbein, Donatello, Shakespeare, Rembrant, Poussin, Henry James and John Ford. This methodology appears to be inspired by the American cultural critic Philip Rieff (to whom Carroll dedicates his text), with the heart of the book's analysis being highly indebted to Nietzsche's critique of "Socratic" culture in the The Birth of Tragedy.

Although Humanism appears at first glance to have diagnostic affinities with works inspired by American neoconservativism, for example Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Carroll's work also illustrates tendancies that do not easily fit with conservativism as it is traditionally defined. In the prescriptive works, The Western Dreaming and The Existential Jesus for example, Carroll rereads Gospel narratives and the ontology of Christ through a Heideggerian and non-theistic lens.