Book: The Modern Temper

Overview
Joseph Wood Krutch's The Modern Temper offers a reflective diagnosis of Western intellectual and moral life in the aftermath of World War I. The book reads the pervasive anxieties, doubts, and sense of loss that came to define the period as more than a political or economic reaction; it treats them as a shift in sentiment, a collective mood that reorients how people think about authority, truth, and purpose. Krutch positions this temper as the product of a collision between older certainties and new, disquieting realities brought into focus by mechanized warfare, rapid social change, and the spread of scientific and historical consciousness.
Krutch traces how traditional sources of meaning, religion, inherited morality, and the confidence of Victorian progress, have been eroded, leaving a cultural climate marked by skepticism and an acute awareness of contingency. Rather than offering a systematic philosophical treatise, the book proceeds through critical readings, reflections on literature and philosophy, and an engaged, often elegiac commentary on the human consequences of modern intellectual habits.

Central Themes
A principal theme is the loss of moral and metaphysical assurance. Krutch describes a widespread retreat from claims of absolute truth and certainty, and a corresponding rise in relativism, irony, and a defensive temperament that values adaptability over conviction. He links this shift to historical developments, scientific advances that dispelled naive teleologies, the brutal demonstration of modern technology's destructiveness, and the intellectual turning inward that elevated subjectivity and doubt.
Another recurrent theme is the cultural role of art and literature as means of confronting modern malaise. Krutch reads modern writers and artists as both symptoms and potential healers of the modern temper: their works reflect disillusionment, fragmentation, and estrangement, but they also preserve a capacity for moral and aesthetic seriousness that resists nihilism. The book is as much a case for attentive criticism as it is an analysis of despair.

Arguments and Analysis
Krutch argues that the modern temper is not simply a passing pessimism but a condition that reshapes judgments about progress, duty, and the human place in the world. He examines how a scientific worldview, divorced from ethical and spiritual anchors, can lead to an impoverished sense of value. Yet he is not a straightforward Luddite: his critique targets the hubris of claiming that science and technology alone can supply meaning, rather than condemning inquiry itself.
Throughout the analysis, Krutch blends cultural history with moral philosophy. He reads intellectual trends, skepticism, utilitarianism, radical individualism, against the human costs of reduced communal frameworks and attenuated transcendence. His method is synthetic: drawing on literary examples, philosophical debates, and social observation to show how ideas translate into lived attitudes.

Style and Tone
The prose is lucid, elegiac, and occasionally polemical, mixing clear-minded critique with a sympathetic sense of the era's wounds. Krutch's voice combines a critic's attention to nuance with an essayist's personal moral concern; he writes as someone who mourns losses but seeks constructive pathways. His judgments are both cultural and humanistic, aiming to persuade readers not only intellectually but morally.
Though engaged with abstract themes, the tone remains accessible and concrete through frequent allusion to contemporary writers, public figures, and recognizable social developments. The rhetorical aim is less to demolish modernity than to call it to account and to recover resources, imaginative, ethical, communal, that might temper its harsher tendencies.

Legacy and Relevance
The Modern Temper remains valuable as a period diagnosis and as a model of humane criticism. It captures the ambivalence of an age that simultaneously prized reason and suffered from the consequences of rationalized violence and dislocation. Krutch's insistence that intellectual honesty must be married to moral reflection anticipates later debates about modernity, secularization, and the cultural costs of technological advancement.
Readers today will find the book resonant when confronting contemporary anxieties about authority, meaning, and the role of expert knowledge in public life. The Modern Temper offers both a historical portrait of post–World War I disillusionment and a sustained plea for forms of thought and feeling that can sustain human dignity amid the fractures of modern life.