Journalist Brooks, returning from several years abroad, noticed that the old bipolar categories of bourgeois capitalism vs. bohemian counterculture just didn't seem to fit anymore. The former had been the 'square, practical ones. They defended tradition and middle-class morality. They worked for corporations, lived in suburbs and went to church. Meanwhile, the bohemians were the free spirits who flouted convention...artists and intellectuals, hippies and Beats. In the old schema the bohemians championed the values of the radical 1960s and the bourgeois were the enterprising yuppies of the 1980s' (10). The information age was making the 'bohemian' realm of ideas and knowledge just as important as 'establishment' natural resources and financial capital. Brooks suggests that a new elite (all societies have them) based on education and intellect is replacing older ones based on blood, wealth or military valor. 'We're not so bad,' he says, admitting he's a member of this elite, as are most readers of this book.
Although Brooks admits to membership in this new elite and claims they've managed to find a way to meld idealism and realism, he spends alot of time on a contradictory theme; mocking their failure to adhere to their idealism in practice and satirizing the often silly results of their attempts to do so. He seems ambivalent as to whether BOBOs have made a positive cultural contribution.
One of the reasons I really enjoyed reading this book is that I could feel strong internal resonances from the descriptions he gave for both bourgeois and bohemian mindsets. They both rang true for me. I was raised with bourgeois values and sympathies and continue to primarily identify with that camp, although especially during my formative teen years, I could feel a strong pull toward the bohemian side, and even this continues to some extent to this day. He really seems onto something in seeing a cultural fault line here, somewhat moderated due to the bobo synthesis experiment, but undoubtedly still fueling America's culture war.
The book begins with a history of the rise of this new class (chapter 1: The Rise of the Educated Class) and then describes them in detail from superficial to profound aspects (consumption, business, intellectual, social, spiritual). The last chapter looks to possible future political developments. Brooks considers the 1950s to be the last decade of the industrial age and the period 1955-65 as having produced the books most insightful about the new emerging class, including The Organization Man, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Affluent Society, The Status Seekers and The Protestant Establishment. He describes his method of analysis as 'comic sociology' and not theoretical or systematic.
- The Fifties (18)
Brooks observes that the New York Times wedding page (aka the M&A page) provides a window onto the ruling class and what's important for membership there. Whereas the pages used to emphasize noble birth and breeding, now they feature genius and geniality. Bloodlines have yielded to academic degrees and career paths. 'These are the kids who spent the crucial years between ages 16 and 24 winning the approval of their elders,' vs. rebelling, feeling alienated or exploring their baser natures (15). These high achievers tend to fall into two categories; predators or nurturers. The former are 'lawyers, traders, marketers - the folk who deal with money or who spend their professional lives negotiating or competing or otherwise being tough and screwing others. Nurturers tend to be liberal arts majors. They become academics, foundation officials, journalists, activists and artists - people who deal with ideas or who spend their time cooperating with others or facilitating something' (15). These BOBO kids are inevitably described in terms of paradoxes: 'grounded but berserk, daring yet traditional, high-flying yet down to earth, disheveled yet elegant, sensible yet spontaneous' (16). While older elites don't need to prove their membership, newer ones based on brainpower do. 'Self actualization is what educated existence is all about.' For this class, 'life is one long graduate school.' They feel they'll be rewarded based on how many fields of self expression they've mastered (18).
The east coast 'Protestant Establishment' of the 1950s was dominated by WASPy Episcopalians and featured 'a strong sense of inherited European culture' (20). Edmund Burke was one of their heroes. Brooks cites two books that beautifully and elegantly lament the decline of the WASPs: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard and Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited covering Sicilian and British aristocracies, respectively. Despite the racism, anti-Semitism and rigidity that did them in, we can still admire their sense of duty, service and honor and their willingness to sacrifice for these ideals.
The Protestant Establishment was wrecked, claims Brooks, by college admissions committees deciding to base admission on SAT scores instead of prep school background and alumni parents. The average SAT score for incoming students across the Ivy League was 500 (good) in 1952, 678 (stratospheric) by 1960. The first chapter of The Bell Curve tells the Harvard tale. Nicholas Lemann, in his book The Big Test, tells the story of how the WASP elite willingly and knowingly destroyed itself, with the highest of motives, by transforming the older establishment into a meritocracy. The prime movers were James Bryant Conant (president of Harvard after WWII, and so sitting 'at the pinnacle of the Protestant Establishment') and Henry Chauncey, standardized testing enthusiast and believer in the 'glorious promise of social science' (26). This was a time when 'sociologists, psychologists and macro-economists thought they had discovered the tools to solve personal and social problems' (27). They believed these tools could allow experts to 'manage society on a more just and rational basis' (27). Others who 'rose up to assert intellectual values against those of the WASP Establishment' were C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite, 1956), Jacques Barzun (The House of Intellect, 1959), Richard Hofstadter (Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 1963) and Digby Baltzell (The Protestant Establishment, 1964).
Although the WASPs had fended off earlier challenges, they chose to relinquish their hegemony in this case. Why? David Frum has theorized that, after 50 years and 3 generations since the last great fortune-making era, there just wasn't much vigor left. Another guess is that the Holocaust 'altered the landscape by discrediting the sort of racial restrictions that the Protestant Establishment was built on' (29). Baltzell saw the colleges as promoting the new 'opportunarian' values in place of those of the students' parents, offering success to the lower ranks of society just as had the church in medieval times and business enterprise in the 19th century . The incoming non-WASP meritocrats were naturally interested in 'finishing off' the old regime, producing a 'classic revolution of rising expectations. Tocqueville's principle of revolutions proved true: as social success seems more possible for a rising group, the remaining hindrances seem more and more intolerable. The social revolution of the late sixties was not a miracle or a natural disaster, the way it is sometimes treated by writers on the left and right. It was a logical response to the trends of the crucial ['hinge'] years between 1955 and 1965' (31).
- The Hinge Years (25)
Brooks turns next to The Sixties, citing the 1968 movie The Graduate as prototypical. Ben Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman) returns home to California from an ivy-league school, having excelled there, to realize in horror 'the immense cultural gap between his parents and himself' (31). As Baltzell had predicted, campus values had displaced parental values. Ben's sensitive character 'perfectly represented all the new ethnic strivers who were suddenly pouring through the colleges, facing life in the affluent suburbs, and finding it arid and stifling' (32).
- The Sixties (31)
'The educated-class rebellion we call 'the sixties' was about many things, some of them important and related to the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam, some of them entirely silly, and others, like the sexual revolution, overblown (actual sexual behavior was affected far more by the world wars than by the Woodstock era)' (32). It was a political and cultural effort by the rising new elites to replace the old WASP lifestyle and moral code (e.g. including keeping up with the Joneses, social respectability, measuring success by income, manners, possessions) with new ones that would 'celebrate spiritual and intellectual ideals.' The new elite 'favored bohemian self-expression and despised the earlier elite for its arid self-control' (33). Their prime directive? 'Thou shalt construct thine own identity' (34). At the end of the movie, Elaine (Katherine Ross) deserts a WASPish groom at the alter to run off with Ben, signifying their emancipation from old constraints, but by the closing scene, the mood is a more sober 'now what do we do?'
- And Then Comes Money (35)
Worth noting, too, is that this shift did not occur without social cost. 'Old authorities and restraints were delegitimized. There was a real, and to millions of people catastrophic, breakdown in social order, which can be measured in the stunning rise in divorce, crime, drug use, and illegitimacy rates' (34). By now, however, as the new establishment has begun to assert control (mostly through private cultural rather than political means), these measures of social unrest have begun to fall. The new elite lacks a strong sense of public service and hasn't established clear lines of authority (both due to its distrust of authority), although there are definite informally enforced boundaries (46).
- The Anxieties of Abundance (40)
A key inner conflict of the new wave was that, while they valued relationships and social equality, their core value was still achievement (just like their forebears). 'Most of them were never going to drop out or sit around in communes smelling flowers, raising pigs and contemplating poetry' (36). 'Many of the members of the educated elite didn't go out hungry for money. But money found them. And subtly, against their will, it began to work its way into their mentality' (38). They now find they must 'navigate the shoals between their affluence and their self-respect' (40). 'Though they admire art and intellect, they find themselves living amidst commerce...[they have] more yards of built-in bookshelf space than any group in history. And yet ... their shelves ... [include] deluxe leather-bound editions of all those books arguing that success and affluence is a sham: Babbitt, The Great Gatsby, The Power Elite, The Theory of the Leisure Class' (41). But their biggest tension is between worldly success and inner virtue. But being the achieving problem solvers they are, they've [seemingly at least] found a way to have both.
- The Reconcilers (42)
- The New Establishment (43)
Unlike the old establishment, which never made much headway in the media (noted in 1962 by Richard Rovere), the new establishment exercises its power subtly but pervasively over ideas and concepts across the entire culture. 'People gain entry...by performing a series of delicate cultural tasks: they are prosperous without seeming greedy; they have pleased their elders without seeming conformist; they have risen toward the top without too obviously looking down on those below; they have achieved success without committing certain socially sanctioned affronts to the ideal of social equality; they have constructed a prosperous lifestyle while avoiding the old cliches of conspicuous consumption (its OK to hew to the new cliches)' (45).
- The New Pecking Order (48)
Brooks has a formula for determining social status in the new system: 'net worth ... multipl[ied] by ... antimaterialistic attitudes' (50). So you not only have to show some results, but also how little your worldly success means to you. You must 'devote your conversational time to mocking your own success in a manner that simultaneously displays your accomplishments and your ironic distance from them' (50). The anxiety of this elite comes not from outside threats but from inner tension between success and ideals (and it doesn't help that we don't award status sinecures). Ironically, this insecurity makes it stronger, demanding constant striving and performance. Marx warned that 'the more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent members of the dominated classes, the more stable and dangerous its rule' (53). By this criterion, the new establishment looks quite permanent.
- Class Rank (51)
In chapter 2 (Consumption), Brooks discusses changes to the old Main Line 'establishment' communities (e.g. plain vanilla Wayne, PA, more cosmopolitan Bryn Mawr and Haverford), where women went by catchy nicknames like Skimmy and Binky. These places have now been invaded by 'Upscale Suburban Hippiedom,' complete with artsy gourmet coffee houses ('there probably still aren't a lot of artists and intellectuals ... but suddenly there are a lot of people who want to drink coffee like one' 55), fancy bread shops, independent bookstores and toy stores pretending to be educational institutions. This new cultural wave 'has taken ethos of California in the 1960s and selectively updated it' (58). Instead of imitating European aristocrats (as the old elite did), the new wave takes its cues from the European peasantry (59). Brooks argues that one upshot of the new era is that Marx had it exactly backward; classes are defined, not by their means of production, but by their patterns of consumption (61).
- The New Elite in the Old Ones' Beds (60)
- The Historical Roots of Bobo Culture (61)
The author next treats us to a fascinating study of the historical roots of Bobo culture (although it probably belongs in chapter 1). The bourgeois ethos was born in America in the early 1700s along with the first glimmerings of the industrial revolution. It was during this time that many Americans, after decades of pioneer struggle, began to discover gentility. The rough-hewn, practical styles of the pioneers gave way to more refined, polished and comfortable styles. Parlors were newly introduced, not for any 'practical' reason, but for genteel activities such as entertaining, reading, needlepoint or music appreciation. The best in furniture and decoration was placed there. 'The idea was to create an elevated environment where people could cultivate delicate sensibilities and higher interests' (62), to excel the vulgar masses in their inner beings and, of course, to demonstrate their higher manners and status. While most of America remained rugged and plain, this rising new elite was building a social hierarchy. While guided by European styles, the American elite were merchants, not lords. This new social ethic found its quintessential expression in Benjamin Franklin.
'Franklin celebrated wholesome ambition. The central goal of life, he seemed to imply, is to improve yourself and thereby improve your station in life. Franklin celebrated a characteristically bourgeois set of virtues: frugality, honesty, order, moderation, prudence, industry, perseverance, temperance, chastity, cleanliness, tranquility, punctuality and humility' (63-4). These values are not particluarly heroic (like aristocratic love of honor) or spiritual, but practical and democratic. Anyone can adopt them and find happiness, virtue and even greatness. One should be smart but not overly intellectual, not too introspective or contemplative (only to improve language), apply one's religion in a practical way, focus on concrete and immediate interests vs. abstract or utopian visions. The new middle class wanted to be more refined than the working masses, but also to avoid the decadent extremes of the European elites.
- The Bohemian Revolt (65)
Within 50 years of Franklin's death in 1790 came the Bohemian revolt against bourgois values. The rebels congregated in Paris, Franklin's former conquest. "In a world dominated by the merchant classes, these artists no longer had aristocratic sponsors to flatter, which was emancipating, but they had to fend for themselves in the marketplace, which brought its own traumas" 65). As they began to resent their dependence upon an impersonal, middle-class audience which "never seemed to pay sufficient homage to genius," they increasingly detached themselves from the rest of society and cultivated "heroic images of their own importance" (65). Cesar Grana's Bohemian versus Bourgeois (1964) wonderfully captures this artistic revolt, which included Flaubert, Stendahl, de Musset and Zola. What they most resented was middle-class materialism, the focus on money and productivity, vs. the artists' admiration of creativity, imagination, spirit. Bohemian epitaphs against bourgeois included dull, joyless, unimaginiative, conformist, unheroic, clueless about the transcendent, prosaic, mediocre, merely useful, punctual, bean-counting, daily grind, machine-like, philistine, plodding, avaricious. Most maddening of all was their tremendous worldly success! (we're used to it now, but it was new and shocking in the 1830s). The dullness lead to the power.
"The intellectual set ... [rejected] that, and they established their own alternative universe ... The French intellectuals set up ways of living that are by now familiar to us all. The sensitive souls flocked to run-down urban neighborhoods and created artistic communities and movements. In these places the poet and painter had higher status than the banker or president. And unable to ward off the growing strength of the bourgeoisie, the artists could at least shock [annoy, unnerve, anger] them ... and so was born one of the war cries that was a hallmark of the bourgeois-bohemian feud: Epater les bourgeois!" (i.e. amaze/impress the bourgeois, 67). "The bohemian men grew their hair long and wore beards. They adopted flamboyant modes of dress by which they could be easily identified ... They celebrated youth culture ... developed a mordant fascination with the mystical and the macabre. They often wrote about suicide and sometimes performed it. They embraced novelty and sometimes applauded experimentation merely to demonstrate their contempt for the conservative middle classes ... identified with others they saw as victims of the bourgois order: the poor, the criminals, the ethnic and racial outcasts. They admired exotic cultures that were seemingly untouched by bourgeois mores ... idealized noble savages, putting strange African artifacts in their [homes] ... considered every aspect of life an art form ... the Parisian bohemians thought of everything. For the next 150 years [until 1990] ... rebels, intellectuals, and hippies could do little more than repeat their original rebellions" (68). While the conflict was never as polarized as advertised (i.e. the bourgeois were more cultivated, the bohemians more materialistic), "the mental categories entailed in this culture war did dominate people's thinking" (69).
- The Transcendentalists (70)
This "Parisian-style conflict between the Right and Left Banks" [of the Seine] eventually made its way to America (the heyday of Greenwich Village bohemia was 60 years away, in the 1890s). American critics of industrialism "lacked the pranksterish humor and rebellious amoralism" (70) of the Europeans. Rather than urban rebellion, they [mostly New England 'transcendentalist' thinkers like Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller] sought respite in nature and the simple life. "Their aesthetic was more naturalist than artistic" (70). "Richard Hofstadter called transcendentalism 'the evangelicalism of the highbrows'" (70). Rather than reject material things, they initially considered them to be a stepping stone to greater (more inward, spiritual, sensing, feeling, noble) things. But later they came to believe (European influence?) that material progress itself would "threaten nature and man's spiritual connection to nature" (71). They felt the middle-class was "too concerned with standard of living [how] and not enough with reason for living [why]" (72). "Thanks in part to [the transcendentals], bohemia in America has usually been more naturalist, more devoted to the simple life, less nihilistic than its European counterpart" (72).
- The Culture War (73)
"The culture war between the bohemians [artistic, antirationalist, spiritual, admired authentic furnishings, adventurous styles, naturalistic manners, enjoyment oriented, John Muir, Gustav Stickley's Mission style furniture, influenced by Arts and Crafts movement led in Britain by John Ruskin and William Morris, celebrating simple virtues embodied in the preindustrial handicraft guild communities, Sinclair Lewis, Thorstein Veblen, John O'Hara, John Dos Passos, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Paris/Moscow, radical politics] and the bourgeoisie [materialist, rationalist, technological, aspired to refined tastes and genteel manners, achievement oriented, McGuffey Readers, Ben Franklin diligence, Andrew Carnegie essays, presidents Harding, Coolidge, Hoover] raged throughout the industrial age" (73). Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return summarized bohemianism as the ideas of original innocence, self-expression, paganism, living for the moment, liberty, female equality, psychological adjustment, changing place. The 1950s was the high point of the bourgeois era, but it was already being undermined by "squads of rebel bohemians" like the Beats. Paul Goodman's 1960 Growing Up Absurd "saw in the Beat styles the first glimmerings of a social revolution" (76). He brilliantly anticipated bobo mindset in noting that bohemia was natural and a lifestyle most people would choose if they got wise to themselves" (77). In the 1960s, bohemia went mainstream. For a time, "the romantic counterculture actually overshadowed the bourgeois mainstream culture" (78). Then came the "bourgeois counterattack."
- The Bourgeois Counterattack (78)
Before the 1970s, bohemian criticism had been but a minor annoyance to the dominant bourgeois mainstream, who normally concluded that "living well is the best revenge" (78). They hadn't taken the effort to formulate a "comprehensive critique of bohemianism" (79). But now that the counterculture had become so pervasive, they had to respond. The neoconservatives were some of the first to respond. Initially (in the 1970s) they didn't question the New Deal and Great Society orthodoxy, but in the face of intense "enemy fire," they deepened their search and "produced something rare in the history of this dispute, an articulate defense of the bourgeoisie and a telling critique of bohemia" (79). They conceded that "the bourgeois lifestyle is not heroic or inspiring ... [it] produce[s] happy civilizations but not grand and immortal ones ... 'amiable philistinism' is inherent ... free, but not always just ... often the narrow-minded brute ends up with money and success while the truly wise languish unrewarded" (79-80). On the other hand, it has "provided an effective moral context for capitalism" (80) and produced unprecedented freedom from poverty and ignorance, restrained harmful passions, respected traditional values. Furthermore, despite the grandiose claims of the bohemians, their ways have actually led to self-destructive behavior, immorality, lack of restraint, egotism, vulgarization of popular culture, victim mindset (unwillingness to accept responsibility for oneself), and dramatic increases in social ills like divorce, illegitimacy, crime, drug abuse, etc. They therefore concluded their task was to restore bourgeois values to their former influence.
- The Dream of Reconciliation (81)
While many intellectuals longed for some type of reconciliation between these 2 camps (e.g. Van Wyck Brooks' 1915 America's Coming-of-Age), the author contends that bobo culture has finally largely achieved it (by "mov[ing] into bourgeois haunts and infus[ing] them with bohemian sensibilities, [and] at the same watering down bohemian attitudes so they don't subvert bourgeois institutions" 83). Now, the old bohemian (e.g. Berkeley, Greenwich Village) and bourgeois (e.g. Wayne, PA; Winnetka, IL) centers look the same after having both been conquered by the (educated, affluent) bobos. "Now the Babbitt lion can mingle with the beatnik lamb at a Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Starbucks, or any of the other zeitgeist-heavy institutions that cater to the educated affluents. Today the culture war is over, at least in the realm of the affluent. The centuries-old conflict has been reconciled" (84). The author has distilled 7 rules of the bobo culture. He mockingly notes the bobo "must show, in the way he spends his money, that he is conscientious and not crass ... [the rules] help them convert their wealth into spiritually and intellectually uplifting experiences. A person who follows these precepts can dispose up to $4 or $5 million annually in a manner that demonstrates how little he or she cares about material things." His sardonic tone is on full display here, making the bobos look downright silly in their artificial distinctions and paradoxes (e.g. "frantically shopping for the accoutrements of calm" ; "[using technology and progress to] celebrate extinct cultures [even including the former Protestant Establishment] destroyed by the march of technology and progress" 96-7 ; bobos respond to carefully developed marketing strategies designed "for people who disdain marketing" (100) ; "Shopping has become a means of self-exploration and self-expression. 'Happiness,' as Wallace Stevens wrote, 'is an acquisition'" (101):
- The Code of Financial Correctness (84)
"Marx once wrote that the bourgeois takes all that is sacred and makes it profane. [The Bobos do the reverse] ... turning the grubby and materialistic into the elevated. We take the quintessential bourgeois activity, shopping, and turn it into quintessential bohemian activities: art, philosophy, social action. Bobos possess the Midas touch in reverse. Everything we handle turns to soul" (102).
In chapter 3 (Business Life), Brooks describes "Latte Towns [as] upscale liberal communities, often in magnificent natural settings, often university based, that have become crucial gestation centers for America's new upscale culture" (104). These include Boulder, CO; Madison, WI; Northampton, MA; Missoula, Montana; Wilmington, NC; "and half of the towns in northern CA, OR, and WA" (104). "For most of this century, literary types have portrayed small towns as stifling enclaves of Babbittry and reaction, but today these micro-cities are seen as refreshing oases from mass society" (105). These Latte Towns have discovered that "business is not about making money; it's about doing something you love. Life should be an extended hobby. Moreover, business, which was once thought to be soul destroying, can actually be quite enriching if you turn your profession into a craft" (108). "It used to be thought that the pursuit of profit inevitably crushes values. But now many companies have determined that good values lead to greater profits - as long as there is a large educated populace willing to pay a little extra for the sake of social progress" (109). "Indeed, one of the ironies of the age is that the one realm of American life where the language of 1960s radicalism remains strong is the business world [and the higher up the ladder you go, the more radical] ... the people who talk most relentlessly about smashing the status quo and crushing the establishment are management gurus and corporate executives" (110).
In 1949, Leo Lowenthal noticed that magazine profiles were shifting from "heroes of production ... people who built bridges, dams, companies" to "heroes of consumption ... movie stars, sports celebrities, superstars of the leisure world" (113). Today the celebrated are "youthful, daring, and avant-garde, to personify change" (113). "Today's business leaders want to show they are playful free spirits [v.] members of the older business elite [which] wanted ... to show how much they embodied Ben Franklin's virtues: industriousness, thrift, reliability" (114). Intellectualism used to be derided as "vaguely feminine and airy-fairy" (Brooks cites Hofstadter's AIAL), but now this image is highly valued. "Once businessmen spoke with gravitas to project and image of calm and caution. Now they speak like sociological visionaries" (115). He quotes one: "We are at the very point in time when a 400-year-old age is dying and another is struggling to be born" (116, sounds like McLaren's ANKoC; trendy, lefty).
Brooks sees William H. Whyte's 1956 The Organization Man as "a brilliant broadside at the prevailing management theories of the time" (119). Whyte called for more emphasis on individual v. corporate needs, for recognizing quirky and creative genius v. conformity. Theodore Roszak's 1969 The Making of a Counter Culture picks up this theme and takes it further toward radicalism. White was a Fortune reporter; Roszak a countercultural radical. Roszak bought into the bohemian critique of the business ethic as "anti-intellectual, antispiritual, conformist, philistine" (118) and saw corporate structure as symptomatic "of a deeper cultural disease. For [him] the real problem was the whole rationalistic mentality, which he called the objective consciousness" (121), the cult of the machine. After describing Roszak's flowery vision of pure subjectivity, Brooks hilariously says "well, that was never going to work [i.e.] creat[ing] a cosmic consciousness that would embarrass rationalistic thinking into submission. Roszak was being too grandiose ... not wrong [in] criticiz[ing] technocracies or the conformist and artificial social ethic they engendered ... but it would take a more down-to-earth writer to provide a more practical way of rethinking organizations and social structures" (123, i.e. Jane Jacobs).
Brooks calls Jacobs a "proto-Bobo" (123). Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities ("remains the most influential book on how Bobos view organizations and social structures" 123), while "mostly about city planning ... creates ... a description of the good life ... that has attracted devoted followings on both the bohemian left and the bourgeois right" (124). At first, she seems pure bohemian, but if you look closely, her heroes are actually shopkeepers. "Napoleon thought he had come up with the ultimate antibourgeois put-down when he called England a nation of shopkeepers" (124). She breaks with bohemianism and admires the shopkeepers bourgeois values. Her tone is not "overcharged and histrionic" like Kerouac and Roszak, nor "pompous and directive" like most leftist 50s writers. "Jacobs utterly rejects the utopianism and extremism that were an integral part of romanticism. She rejects the notion of the intellectual who is removed from the everyday world and lives instead in a world of ideas ... The bourgeois epistemology often appealed to reason ... the bohemian ... to imagination. Jacobs asks us to appreciate a mode of perception that requires both sense and sensibility ... requir[ing both] the practical knowledge of the shopkeeper [and] the sensitive awareness to surroundings that we might expect from a painter or novelist. Most important, Jacobs reconciles the bourgeois love of order with the bohemian love of emancipation" (125-6). Jacobs saw the city in organic, rather than mechanical, terms, reconciling "freedom and safety, order and change, life and art. The good life, she implies, is composed of flux, diversity, and complexity, but underneath it all is an inner harmony" (126).
Pick up at The Pastoral Organization, p. 127.
In chapter 4 (Intellectual Life), ...
In chapter 5 (Pleasure), ...
In chapter 6 (Spiritual Life), ...
In chapter 7 (Politics and Beyond), ...
...to be continued
