Vitality Rages Against the Machine

“All history is the history of longing,” Jackson Lears has written. In four major works, ranging across subjects as varied as advertising, gambling and the search for grace, his gaze has turned to one form of longing in particular: our desire to escape the iron cage. That metaphor, as used by Max Weber, illustrates our modern predicament. Progress has left us mired in bureaucracy, disenchanted by science and severed from the nonhuman world.