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Walker Percy is one of America's great novelists, and he ought to be known as a political thinker as well. In Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer, Brian A. Smith makes the case that we should understand Percy's novels and essays together as a guide to living in a complex world.
Percy cultivated a philosophical and literary approach that revealed the fault lines in the modern mind. He portrayed man as a wayfarer: peristantly unsatisfied and wandering in search of a perfectly complete solution to life's dilemmas. His writing captures the restlessness of the human heart and allows us to comprehend our temptation to escape our sense of alienation and longing. Drawing ideas from philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and literature, Percy's multidimensional account of American political life shows the ways that today's approaches to life often fall short and leave us more unsatisfied with ourselves and others than ever.
Percy hoped we would evade the temptations to escape the life of the wayfarer and accept our misplaced longings, alienation, depression, and anxiety as part of the human condition. Failing to do this might lead us to accept ever more extreme political and social ideas as the basis for life. The promise of embracing Percy's political teaching is that we might then be able to accept ourselves as we really are in order to join with others in authentic community.
List of contents
Chapter 1: The Mishmash Theory of Man
Chapter 2: On the Cult of the Expert and the Dangers of Scientism
Chapter 3: Individualism, Community, and the Longing for Place
Chapter 4: Stoicism and the Honor-Bound South
Chapter 5: Dreaming of the End Times
Chapter 6: Toward a New Social Science
Chapter 7: Percy's Vision of Family, Community, and Faith
About the author
Dr. Brian A. Smith, a chiropractic physician, internist, historian, and avocational genealogist has been researching his ancestors since 1985 and has self-published several books including biographies of his father in World War II and grandfather in the Great War. Other works include "A Select History of New Jersey," "Il Regno" (a history of Southern Italy), "A History of Central Eastern Europe," "A Critical Analysis of the Myth of the Crusades," and "Magna Carta and Isabel Dutton." He has made several works published in French and Spanish available to English readers for the first time through his translations. Professionally, he has authored many works appearing in peer-reviewed journals including two papers awarded "Research Paper of the Year" by the Association for the History of Chiropractic and one of the first papers on HIV infection published in the chiropractic literature: "Chiropractic and the HIV+ Patient" that appeared in the December 1997 issue of "The Internist."
Summary
Walker Percy and the Politics of the Wayfarer is the first sustained treatment of Percy as a political thinker. The book argues that Percy provides a distinctive approach to politics, one that might allow us to give up the dangerous longing for limitless progress and perfection in our lives.
