Rob Riemen

Under omprövning rymmer ett stort antal bidrag som förenas av att de utifrån ett kritiskt perspektiv diskuterar vår tids mest karakteristiska estetiska hållningar och konstnärliga tendenser. Antologin försöker se framåt, förbi de modernistiska och postmodernistiska strategier som kännetecknat 1900-talets utveckling inom konstarter som litteratur, musik, bildkonst och arkitektur. Detta innebär också en omvärdering av kulturhistorien, där en rad förbisedda författarskap och konstnärskap lyfts fram. Och där kulturhistorien utvärderas med avseende på vad som kan te sig fruktbart och ofruktbart för framtiden.

Thomas Mann and Albert Camus understood something many political scientists still find difficult to fathom. Deprived of any coherent theory, fascism is characterised by its politics of resentment, stirring up of anger and fear, xenophobia, need for scapegoats, and by its hatred of the life of the mind. Combining history and philosophy, Rob Riemen eloquently explores the global return of fascism, disguised in the false promises of freedom and greatness. Riemen’s response to the spiritual crisis of our age is a moving story about the universal meaning of European humanism, with its values of truth, justice, beauty and love for life as the origin of a democratic civilisation. To Fight Against This Age is for those who want to understand and change the world in which they live.

An impassioned call to restore the conditions of freedom and human dignity, ideals our civilization seems to have lost In the pages of this slim, powerful book Rob Riemen argues with passion that “nobility of spirit” is the quintessence of a civilized world. It is, as Thomas Mann believed, the sole corrective for human history. Without nobility of spirit, culture vanishes. Yet in the early twenty-first century, a time when human dignity and freedom are imperiled, the concept of nobility of spirit is scarcely considered. Riemen insists that if we hope to move beyond the war on terror and create a life-affirming culture, we must address timeless but neglected questions: What is a good society? Why art? Why culture? What is the responsibility of intellectuals? Why anti-Americanism? Why nihilism? Why the cult of death of fundamentalists? In a series of three essays, the author identifies nobility of spirit in the life and work of Baruch Spinoza and of Thomas Mann; explores the quest for the good society in our own time; and addresses the pursuit of truth and freedom that engaged figures as disparate as Socrates and Leone Ginzburg, a Jewish Italian intellectual murdered by Nazis.“The forces now aligned against humanistic values are manifold,” observes George Steiner in the foreword to the book. In this imaginative and compelling volume, Riemen addresses these forces and speaks to every reader who believes in the power of classical ideas to restore Western civilization’s highest values.