Like many posthumous books from distinguished thinkers, this isn’t one. A book, I mean. Not really. The problem is that nobody seems to buy cobbled-together collections of previously published essays, talks and book reviews. The thing to do if you’re a publisher, therefore, is to give it a title that makes it sound like a book, shoehorn the content into vague, grand-sounding sections (‘Part I: The Predicament of “High Culture” Today’; ‘Part II: The Culture of the Bourgeois World’; ‘Part III: Uncertainties, Science, Religion.’; ‘Part IV: From Art to Myth’) and put it between hard covers for 25 quid.
That said, the situation’s not quite as bald as all that. Eric Hobsbawm, if his preface is to be believed, worked on turning this into a book before his death; and the preoccupations front and centre or under-lying most of these essays are the same — the relationship between culture and society as it shifted with the eclipse of the 19th-century bourgeoisie, and its current state and direction.
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