Melancholy and Society

Rare is the person who has never known the feelings of apathy, sorrow, and uselessness that characterize the affliction known as melancholy.

In this book, one of Europe's leading intellectuals shows that melancholy is not only a psychological condition that affects individuals but also a social and cultural phenomenon that can be of considerable help in understanding the modern middle class.

His larger topic is, in fact, modernity in general. Wolf Lepenies focuses not on what melancholy is but on what it means when people claim to be melancholy.

His aim is to examine the origin and spread of the phenomenon with relation to particular social milieux, and thus he looks at a variety of historical manifestations: the fictional utopian societies of the Renaissance, the ennui of the French aristocracy in the 17th century, the cult of inwardness and escapism among the middle class in 18th century Germany.

In each case he shows that the human condition is shaped by historical and societal forces - that apathy, boredom, utopian idealism, melancholy, inaction, and excessive reflection are the correlates of class-wide powerlessness and the failure of purposeful efforts. Lepenies makes use of a range of sociological, philosophical and literary sources, from Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" to the ideas of contemporary theorists such as Robert K.

Merton and Arnold Gehlen. His study also examines writers whose works express the melancholy of entire social classes - writers such as La Rochefoucauld, Goethe, and Proust.

In his analysis of these diverse ideas and texts, he illuminates the plight of people who have been cast aside by historical change and shows us the ways in which they have coped with their distress.

It is aimed at historians, sociologists, psychologists, students of modern literature, indeed anyone interested in the problems of modernity.