Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau » (New Edition)

Paranoia and Modernity is a dazzling and exhilarating genealogy of modern Western suspicion. With shrewd discernment and understated wit, John Farrell shows how misanthropic distrust, once an object of general satire, became the received wisdom of intellectuals. His book is itself a satire, though a very learned and scrupulous one, on the folly of religious and philosophical systems that pay no heed to our common humanity.-Frederick Crews

"The effect of John Farrell's intellectual historical overview is both bracing and convincing. I particularly enjoy (and endorse) his notion that the idealism and moral perfectionism exhibited not only by Luther's anxieties about the state of his immortal soul but also by Don Quixote's fantasies of chivalric excellence lie at the root of the anti-idealist sense of alienated human degradation that characterizes our post-Rousseauvian modernity. This book supplies a way out of the nihilist impasse in which so much contemporary cultural criticism seems trapped."-Christopher Braider, University of Colorado at Boulder

"In Paranoia and Modernity, paranoia represents the compulsive need to hold others responsible for one's failure to match identity to reality, and John Farrell's provocative readings of some heady and often-read texts establish paranoia as one way to explain the discrepancy between lofty cultural or personal ideals and the reality that brings them too often to earth."-Thomas DiPiero, University of Rochester