All That Is Solid Melts into Air

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“A bubbling caldron of ideas . . . Enlightening and valuable.” —Mervyn Jones, New Statesman.

The political and social revolutions of the nineteenth century, the pivotal writings of Goethe, Marx, Dostoevsky, and others, and the creation of new environments to replace the old—all have thrust us into a modern world of contradictions and ambiguities. In this fascinating book, Marshall Berman examines the clash of classes, histories, and cultures, and ponders our prospects for coming to terms with the relationship between a liberating social and philosophical idealism and a complex, bureaucratic materialism.

From a reinterpretation of Karl Marx to an incisive consideration of the impact of Robert Moses on modern urban living, Berman charts the progress of the twentieth-century experience. He concludes that adaptation to continual flux is possible and that therein lies our hope for achieving a truly modern society.

All That Is Solid Melts into AirPreface to the Penguin Edition: The Broad and Open Way
Preface
Introduction: Modernity – Yesterday, Today and TomorrowI. Goethe’s Faust: The Tragedy of Development
First Metamorphosis: The Dreamer
Second Metamorphosis: The Lover
Third Metamorphosis: The Developer
Epilogue: The Faustian and Pseudo-Faustian Age

II. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: Marx, Modernism and Modernization
1. The Melting Vision and Its Dialectic
2. Innovative Self-Destruction
3. Nakedness: The Unaccommodated Man
4. The Metamorphosis of Values
5. The Loss of a Halo
Conclusion: Culture and the Contradictions of Capitalism

III. Baudelaire: Modernism in the Streets
1. Pastoral and Counter-Pastoral Modernism
2. The Heroism of Modern Life
3. The Family of Eyes
4. The Mire of the Macadam
5. The Twentieth Century: The Halo and the Highway

IV. Petersbur: The Modernism of Underdevelopment
1. The Real and Unreal City
“Geometry Has Appeared”: The City in the Swamps
Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman”: The Clerk and the Tsar
Petersburg Under Nicholas I: Palace vs. Prospect
Gogol: The Real and Surreal Street
Words and Shoes: The Young Dostoevsky
2. The 1860s: The New Man in the Street
Chernyshevsky: The Street as Frontier
The Underground Man in the Street
Petersburg vs. Paris: Two Modes of Modernism in the Streets
The Political Prospect
Afterword: The Crystal Palce, Fact, and Symbol
3. The Twentieth Century: The City Rises, the City Fades
1905: More Light, More Shadows
Biely’s Petersburg: The Shadow Passport
Mandelstam: The Blessed Word with No Meaning
Conclusion: The Petersburg Prospect

V. In the Forest of Symbols: Some Notes on Modernism in New York
1. Robert Moses: The Expressway World
2. The 1960s: A Shout in the Street
3. The 1970s: Bringing It All Back Home

Notes
Index

Marshall Berman was an American philosopher and Marxist humanist writer. He was a distinguished professor of political science at City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was the author of All That Is Solid Melts into Air and wrote the introduction to Penguin Books’ edition of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. He died in 2013.US

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