It is rare for a thinker of Charles Péguy’s considerable stature and influence to be so neglected in Anglophone scholarship. The neglect may be in part because so much about Péguy is contestable and paradoxical. He strongly opposed the modern historicist drive to reduce writers to their times, yet he was very much a product of philosophical currents swirling through French intellectual life at the turn of the twentieth century. He was a passionate Dreyfusard who converted to Catholicism but was a consistent anticlerical. He was a socialist and an anti-Marxist, and at once a poet, journalist, and philosopher.
Péguy (1873-1914) rose from a modest childhood in provincial France to a position of remarkable prominence in European intellectual life. Before his death in battle in World War I, he founded his own journal in order to publish what he thought most honestly, and urgently, needed to be said about politics, history, philosophy, literature, art, and religion. His writing and life were animated by such questions as: Is it possible to affirm universal human rights and individual freedom and find meaning in a national identity? How should different philosophies and religions relate to one another? What does it mean to be modern?
A voice like Péguy’s, according to Matthew Maguire, reveals the power of the individual to work creatively with the diverse possibilities of a given historical moment. Carnal Spirit expertly delineates the historical origins of Péguy’s thinking, its unique trajectory, and its unusual position in his own time, and shows the ways in which Péguy anticipated the divisions that continue to trouble us.
Cuprins
Introduction
Chapter 1. Modernity, Antimodernity, and Beyond
Chapter 2. His Youth
Chapter 3. An Answer to the Question: What Is Modernity?
Chapter 4. The Revolution of Critique
Chapter 5. Revolutions of the Body and Work
Chapter 6. Continuity and Revolution: War and Honor
Chapter 7. Universal Particulars, Particular Universalities
Chapter 8. Mysticism and Politics
Chapter 9. The Style of Infinite Reality
Chapter 10. The Christian Revolution
Chapter 11. Despair and Exaltation
Conclusion
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Despre autor
Matthew Maguire is Associate Professor of History and Catholic Studies at De Paul University and author of The Conversion of Imagination: From Pascal Through Rousseau to Tocqueville.
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