The Ordeal of Humility

In 1974, John Murray Cuddihy published The Ordeal of Civility. It was nominated for a National Book Award, and became not only a succès d’estime but also a succès de scandale. Most reviewers handled itasifit were radioactive, and, in a sense, they were right.

Ordeal dealt with the familiar tradition-modernity (Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft) collision, but it did so in a new way. It took as its specific example the Jewish collision with Western modernity, bringing to bear on Freud, Marx, and others the insights not only of the sociology of knowledge but of a wide range of other modes and perspectives, including the close-reading techniques of the New Criticism. The result was intellectually breathtaking. No other book I know of describes the Jewish situation so clearly, and this was one thing that made Ordeal such a sensitive item. Freud and Marx—in Cuddihy’s perspective anti-modern thinkers, indeed at war with modernity—can never look the same to us again. Ordeal is one of the major works of original thought in our period.

In 1974, John Murray Cuddihy published The Ordeal of Civility. It was nominated for a National Book Award, and became not only a succès d’estime but also a succès de scandale. Most reviewers handled itasifit were radioactive, and, in a sense, they were right.

Ordeal dealt with the familiar tradition-modernity (Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft) collision, but it did so in a new way. It took as its specific example the Jewish collision with Western modernity, bringing to bear on Freud, Marx, and others the insights not only of the sociology of knowledge but of a wide range of other modes and perspectives, including the close-reading techniques of the New Criticism. The result was intellectually breathtaking. No other book I know of describes the Jewish situation so clearly, and this was one thing that made Ordeal such a sensitive item. Freud and Marx—in Cuddihy’s perspective anti-modern thinkers, indeed at war with modernity—can never look the same to us again. Ordeal is one of the major works of original thought in our period.