No Place of GRACE by T.J.Jackson Lears

No Place of GRACE
Antimodernism and The Transformation of American Culture, 1880--1920, The University of Chicago Press,1981.

Preface to the Paperback Edition.

1,I also suggested that an antimodern outlook might help us to define liberation in larger than individual terms by preserving structures of meaning outside the self.But my primary purpose was that of most historians: I wanted to reconstruct and understand the experience of people under particular historical circumstances--in this case, the experience of educated Americans grappling with the spiritual and psychological turmoil around the turn of the century.

2,Late Victorian period. Textbooks told of an optimistic, energetic society about to reach the full vigor of industrial maturity; to me that tale failed to account for the myriads of thoughtful Americans who ,by the 1880s, had begun to question the very basis of industrial capitalist society: not merely the unjust distribution of wealth and power but the modern ethic of instrumental rationality that desanctified the outer world of nature and the inner world of the self,reducing both to manipulable objects.

3,Antimodern dissenters recoiled from this ethic and groped for alternatives in medieval, Oriental, and other "primitive" cultures.