The Measure of Man

In 1929 Joseph Wood Krutch published The Modern Temper, a famous and bleak argument that science had dissolved every ground for human dignity, leaving love, morals, and free will exposed as illusions. The Measure of Man is his answer to his younger self, written a quarter century later, and the argument between the two books gives this one its drama. Krutch surveys what the confident sciences of his day, behaviorist psychology, sociology, and the new art of statistical prediction, claim about human beings: that conduct is conditioned, that choice is an illusion, that people are products to be managed. Then he pushes back, carefully and without mysticism, on behalf of what he calls the minimal man, the creature who really does deliberate, really does choose, and really can be held responsible. If human beings accept a description of themselves as machines, he argues, they will be governed as machines, and the totalitarian states of the century show where that road ends. Reading Krutch is like listening to the best kind of teacher, one who takes the strongest version of the opposing case and answers it in plain English. The book won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1955, a striking choice, since it is a work of philosophy by a drama critic, and it marks the pivot of Krutch's own life. By then he had already left New York and his Columbia professorship for the Arizona desert, where in 1952 he settled in Tucson, and the author who had once found nature meaningless had published The Desert Year in 1951 and went on to become one of America's finest nature writers, living proof of his own argument that a man can change his mind and his life.