An examination of authenticity as a revolutionary concept. In this acclaimed exploration of the search for “authentic” individual identity, Marshall Berman explores the historical experiences and needs out of which this new radicalism arose. Focussing on eighteenth-century Paris, a time and place in which a distinctively modern form of society was just coming into its own, Berman shows how the ideal of authenticity—of a self that could organize the individual’s energy and direct it toward his own happiness—articulated eighteenth-century man’s deepest responses to this brave new world, and his most ardent hope for a new life in it. Exploring in particular the ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau, Berman shows how the ideal of authenticity was radically opposed to the bourgeois, capitalistic idea of “self-interest.” ....

The glittering spectacle of Times Square has been the object of the world’s fascination since the turn of the century. Now available in a handsome new paperback edition, noted critic Marshall Berman’s On the Town captures the incandescence of the “crossroads of the world.” By interweaving a century of songs, film, and literature, Berman conjures the vibrant personalities that shaped, and were shaped by, Times Square—from Busby Berkeley and Martin Scorsese, to George Gershwin and Bob Dylan. Berman also reveals little-known characters on the fringes of history—hustlers, artists, and eccentrics—who helped to make the iconic site what it is today.
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