Marshall Berman

Marshall Berman (born 1940, The Bronx, New York City) is an American philosopher and Marxist Humanist writer. 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.

Biography

An alumnus of Columbia University, 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 major work is All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience Of Modernity. His most recent publication is the anthology, New York Calling: From Blackout To Bloomberg, for which he was co-editor, with Brian Berger, and also wrote the introductory essay. In Adventures in Marxism, Berman tells of how while a Columbia University student 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.

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. Paraphrasing Charles Baudelaire, Michel Foucault simply defined Modernism as the will to “heroize” the present[1]. Berman views postmodernism as a soulless and hopeless chamber.

Bibliography

• The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society (1970) Reissued 2010 by Verso Press
• All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982)
• Adventures in Marxism (1999)
• On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (2006)
• New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg (2007), edited by Marshall Berman and Brian Berger.
• "Introduction" to "The CommunistManifesto" by Karl Marx, Penguin Books 2010

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers
• Karl Marx
• Modernism
• Post-Modernism
• Anti-modernism
• Marxist Humanism
• The Praxis Group
• Faustian

External links

• Eminent Domain: The American Dream on Sale with Marshall Berman at LIVE from the New York Public Library
• Tradition . . . Transgression! Singer in the Shtetl and on the Street by Marshall Berman
• "Interview with Marshall Berman and Brian Berger" of New York Calling: From Blackout To Bloomberg
• New York Times review of New York Calling: From Blackout To Bloomberg"
• "Time Out New York review of New York Calling: From Blackout To Bloomberg
• Freedom and Fetishism Source: Adventures in Marxism, publ. Verso, 1999. Just one of 13
• An Interview with Marshall Berman Interviewed by Tony Monchinski
• "The New York Review of Books" Contributions by Marshall Berman
• "Standing in the Doorway," Marshall Berman on Dissent in Dissent (magazine)
• Marshall Berman on a trip to Israel in Dissent (magazine)
• Marshall Berman on Times Square in Dissent (magazine)
• link Online Audio recordings of Berman's lectures
• Angel in the City by Marshall Berman
• Marshall Berman's Love Affair With Marx by Christopher Hitchens
• On the Corner Review from The Nation, by David Margolick