ABSTRACT
In some ways, The End of Economic Man anticipated by more than a decade the existentialism that came to dominate the European political mood in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Two key chapters of the book are respectively entitled, "The Despair of the Masses", and "The Return of the Demons", terms that, though quite familiar today, were rudely foreign to the political rhetoric of the thirties or indeed of any earlier period since the French Revolution. The End of Economic Man was perhaps least fashionable for its time in its respect for religion and in the attention it paid to the Christian churches. The End of Economic Man was meant to be a concrete social and political analysis of a profound crisis. It was not conceived as "history", and is not written as such. But it also does not "report" events.
