The Perils of Uglytown

With characteristic wit, Harry Berger, Jr., brings his flair for close reading to texts and images across two millennia that illustrate what he calls structural misanthropology. Beginning with a novel reading of Plato, Berger emphasizes Socratess self-acknowledged failures. The dialogues, he shows, offer up, only to dispute, a misanthropic polis. The Athenian city-state, they worry, is founded on a social order motivated by apprehensionboth the desire to take and the fear of being taken. In addition to suggesting new political and philosophical dimensions to Platonic thought, Bergers attention to rhetorical practice offers novel ways of parsing the dialogic method itself. In the books second half, Berger revisits and revises his earlier accounts of Italian humanism, Elizabethan drama, and Dutch painting. Berger shows how structural misanthropology helps us to read the competitive practices that characterize Renaissance writing and art, whether in Machiavellis constitutional prostheses, Shakespeares pageants of humiliation, or the elbow jabs of Dutch portraiture.