Hurling the little streets against the great: Marshall Berman's perennial modernism

Marshall Berman's great work, All That Is Solid Melts into Air , is a compelling, indeed visionary, response to capitalism's assaults on humanism and to the failure of traditional left-wing models of revolution. Via literary and social analysis stretching over two centuries, he undermined capitalism's claim to have arrived at a just order-indeed, any order at all. Modernity, in his thinking, was harnessed to the history of capitalism, infused with disorder and bursting with both creative and destructive elements. Modernity was a perpetual crisis and modernism was both a diagnosis and a perpetual call to overcome it. In his evocation as the street as the centre of modern life, he aimed to reconcile two poles in his thinking: modernity as a collective product and individuality as a modern achievement. He struggled, not always successfully, to find in the culture of modern cities-in particular, New York-a reservoir of creative responses to the unending crisis.