Customer Reviews (1)

"There is no gene for the human spirit"
The quote is from the ads for the film "Gattaca," but is appropriate to Krutch's mind-bending reappraisal of 19th and 20th-century thought. "The Measure of Man" won the 1955 National Book Award for nonfiction.

Briefly: he notes that Freud, Darwin, and Marx, as received in popular and general-scholarly literature, taught that humans aren't responsible for what they are, what they do, or what is going to happen--and he methodically demolishes each of these assumptions. Along the way he takes special pains to assess and obliterate the rationale for Skinner's "Walden 2," a world in which the presumed authority of the social sciences entitles a social scientist--himself the product of random "conditioning" in Skinner's terms--to impose a feel-good "Brave New World"-type tyranny on the rest of humanity. Skinner never recovered from the critique, and was bitterly attacking it into the 1980s (and he responded to few critics, not even Chomsky).

Beyond the social sciences, Krutch reviewed what modern physics had revealed about the nature of "reality," and that far from materialistic determinism, it makes possible a world in which the reality of "mind" and consciousness--and freedom, and dignity--has not been abolished. As the Columbia University website says, "In Krutch's The Measure of Man, he articulates the minimal requirements with which nature has endowed the human species: the capacity to be at least sometimes a thinking animal, the ability sometimes to exercise some sort of will and choice, and the power of making individual value judgments."

Though the book's scientific basis has aged in the half-century and more since it first saw print, "The Measure of Man" is a carefully considered, inexorably reasoned overview of the human condition in our times. Those who want to seek flaws in its logic or conclusions may want to pack a lunch. ... Read more