ABSTRACT
In nineteenth century Europe, there was a tradition of showing respect to the unusual or extraordinary book by writing essays en hommage to it. Quantity has come to displace quality, and worse, to define quality. The concept of book as commodity has seen to that. But there is a third reason why great books are not written often. Culture Against Man is really two books imperfectly blended to define a unitary picture of how the cultural apparatus of American society has been mobilized in the service of depersonalizing the person, and dehumanizing the human. It is at once an ethnographic report and a theoretical explanation. For what is vividly described are not simply cultural forces against human forces, but social forces against human forces. But the concept of society is not clear enough. The price of the contractual society, the achieving society, the capitalist society is exacting and high.
