When my daughters are ready for college, I’ll tell them a story they’ll scarcely believe: that when their father was first a graduate student, he attended a university where the most electric presence on campus was a philosopher. This will sound the same note of disbelief in them as sounded in me when my parents informed me diseases were once treated with leeches. When Richard Rorty, the great American pragmatist who died a year ago, would drift by on the University of Virginia’s great lawn, a copy of Being and Time tucked under one arm and bearing a distant resemblance to Bumble the Abominable Snow Monster, all conversation would stop.

Was John a great king for acceding to the Magna Carta? Could Rorty be a great philosopher for being the Last Philosopher? A young person’s head should ache with big questions; and in a time when the liberal arts feel like a Committee to Decide What a Committee Determining the Fate of the Humanities Might Look Like (Possibly), the mere fact of Rorty gives everyone a big headache.

In writing the obituary for his own profession, and by way of that obituary, granting permission to us quasi-humanists in the English department to pull our aching heads away from non-problems and to think and write guided only by clarity and affinity, Rorty was returning to his greatest influence: his parents. James and Winifred Rorty, loose affiliates of the New York intellectuals of the 1930's, were untheoretical, engagé and urbane. Their son became a university-credentialed philosopher, which is to say a master of a small sub-specialty—in Rorty’s case, the relationship between mental events and brain states. He also became, perforce, part of the mostly non-urban diaspora of American intellectuals, the threadbare jet set of conferences and symposia that developed along with the postwar research university.

Richard Rorty spent his life trying to shed the university’s cliquish habits of insularity and small-mindedness, and to become, like his parents, untheoretical, engagé, urbane. (And as he became more prominent outside the academy, his tongue loosened, calling out his Princeton department as "ghastly," his colleagues in analytic philosophy as "time-serving bores.")

As a sociologist influenced by Pierre Bourdieu and Charles Camic, Mr. Gross can’t bring himself to assign credit to Rorty as the "creative genius" (Mr. Gross’ phrase) who revivified pragmatism. But even as a reviewer who loathes Bourdieu, I can’t assign blame to Mr. Gross for de-vivifying Rorty. Few university presses and fewer tenure committees would be impressed by a general-interest biography like the one that makes up this book’s middle. Skip the beginning, skip the end, and Mr. Gross has written a thoughtful biography of a great American thinker. But he has trapped this narrative within a vise of social scientism, the better, apparently, to kill it.

By way of example: "First, from Anglo-American social psychology, which is much indebted to William James and George Herbert Mead, I borrow the assumption that among the components of selfhood is self-concept, which Morris Rosenberg defines as ‘the totality of the individual’s thoughts and feelings having reference to himself as an object.’" This is everything Rorty aspired to escape: the language of overspecialization, of course, but even more, the evident shame that humanists feel for purveying "soft" knowledge, a shame that forces them to walk through a thicket of name-drops and if-you-wills before uttering the simplest commonplace. Mr. Gross has made Rorty into everything he didn’t want to be: theoretical, disengaged, un-urbane.

Richard Rorty had a big project: convincing the world that someone as classically educated and gracefully oracular as Richard Rorty had nothing to tell them. Well, nothing to tell them as a philosopher, per se. He believed that philosophy as we conceive it, as a distinct discipline aimed at establishing the precise relationship between our inner representations and an external reality, is a purely modern phenomenon. However much we project our own epistemological neurosis back onto Plato and Aristotle, onto Aquinas and Scotus, the problem of knowledge did not predominate in Greece or medieval Europe. The habit of hyperbolic doubt coincided with the rise of the natural sciences, and has stayed with us pretty much since.

But the culture is shifting again; slowly, invisibly and over several generations, but with its own attendant prophets, who are re-creating philosophy as a new mode of thinking. Those prophets are Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Dewey, writers who do not think the problem of knowledge—of an individual perceiver finding an infallible denotation for an independent reality—is problematic at all, but purely artifactual, a ghosting across a screen. In his later work, Rorty wrote about his three heroes in a general-interest shorthand that enraged his analytic colleagues, and aroused suspicions from the lit crits, who prefer a continental fog bank to plain speech. But Rorty had done the heavy lifting already. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), a modern classic, he had considered, with argumentative rigor and historical depth, how a single metaphor had guided the quest for a fully untainted, metaphor-free mode of thought. He had been the Nietzschean camel, only to give up, in the end, a chortle, a smirk, a shrug. Stories instead of arguments. Lowly wisdom in place of priestly grandeur.

How dreary to see this life project handed over to the carapace of un-imagination. The question Rorty always asked, directly or by implication, was simply: Do you have the self-respect to live without my authority? What a blessed man. I shall miss him so much, I’m not sure my answer can ever be yes.

Stephen Metcalf is Slate’s critic at large. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

To read is to be slightly ill. And the symptoms only worsen when reading something good. A 19th-century novel, a Bleak House or an Anna Karenina, commits us to its pages with a consumptive fatigue. Moral vitaminists assure us that the habit of contemplative isolation, with its accompanying lowering of vital signs, is somehow salutary, that to read is to be a little more alive. But let’s be honest: To read is to be a lot more dead. (In the best sense of the word, of course.)

The delights of Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader begin with its title, a gentle but deft play on words, and flow forth in easeful perfection for the 120 pages that follow. (The infallible Mr. Bennett is the Brit responsible for such wonderful imports as Beyond the Fringe, Talking Heads and The History Boys.)

The uncommon reader is the queen of England, who, upon following a pair of braying royal corgis outdoors, discovers a large van, the “City of Westminster travelling library,” parked in a courtyard. Here she meets young Mr. Seakins, a ginger-haired kitchen worker and avid bookworm, whose odd deportment—he appears nearly unconscious of her regal station—intrigues the Queen.

Acting on Seakins’ recommendations, she slowly works her way up, from Compton-Burnett to Thackeray, Dickens and Eliot, and finally to the mountaintop, to Proust, having become an unlikely but passionate and discriminating consumer of literature along the way. What the woman now relishes (questing introspection, banter about Genet), the office cannot tolerate: Her aids notice her becoming as listless in her public duty as she is painfully earnest in her private discourse, and conspire to scotch off the habit before it precipitates a crisis.

This modest but sturdy novella is a spoof of two ridiculous holdovers: the British monarchy and high literary values. The first Mr. Bennett deflates, without urgency; the second he defends, without urgency. True wit relaxes, the author argues implicitly; it never overexcites. When the Queen engages the prime minister with her new learning, Mr. Bennett murmurs, “This was not a good idea. The prime minister did not wholly believe in the past or in any lessons that might be drawn from it.”

When her security detail blows up, as a precautionary measure, the novel she’s been reading, Her Majesty responds, “Exploded? But it was Anita Brookner.” And my personal favorite, no less amusing for being inevitable: “[T]here were many who hoped for a similar meeting of the minds by saying they were reading Harry Potter, but to this the Queen (who had no time for fantasy) invariably said briskly, ‘Yes, one is saving that for a rainy day,’ and passed swiftly on.’”

Reading undoes the Queen where she most lives, so to speak; it mucks with her sense of hierarchy, of social station. “The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not.” Well, yes, exactly right. On the one hand, the great books abide in a state of more-or-less permanence, granite outcrops left exposed by a glacial recession, un-reckonable by fashion or whim; on the other hand, they are modesty in its rawest form, a record of serial failure in the face of loss and death.

Books, the really good ones, the ones that, no matter how hard we try to desecrate them with pomp or inattention, won’t go away, remind us of what it’s like to be alive. (The unpardonable cheek.) So, though apparently small in obvious scale, The Uncommon Reader is quite lovely in ambition: a little cameo that, if you look closely, is about a very public woman waking up, late in life, to the fact that she has seen everything but the world.

Stephen Metcalf is Slate magazine’s critic at large.

Wait, check that.

The world is the sum of its (empirical) parts. These behave regularly, and the rules of their behavior can be made perspicuous. One day, thanks to the successful in-captivity mating of behavioral economics with string theory, science will have swallowed all knowledge. There will be nothing we don’t know, and an abbreviated course catalog will reflect this: The Theory of All Theories (Prereq: Introduction to the Theory of All Theories). All Babel translated, all beans counted, all Da Vinci decoded; and all of it bits and bytes, stored on a central server. Finally, the human serpent is nowhere.

Crap. Give me another go, alright?

It’s kind of a bit of both. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, good night!

So Michael Frayn might have written. Instead, he gave us The Human Touch. As the author of Copenhagen (1998), a prize-winning play about the relationship between the physicists Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, Mr. Frayn is well-practiced at taking the most abstruse ideas and making them entertaining for a lay audience; and much of The Human Touch is an elegant summation of the uneasy relations between (hard) science and (soft) humanism, so long as elegant isn’t taken to mean “concise.” This is a volume, in every sense of the word; Bishop Berkeley himself couldn’t temporize it into corporeal nonexistence. Reader, be warned: The Human Touch is long.

And why shouldn’t it be? Mr. Frayn has laid out for himself a nearly impossible task. As he puts it, he wanted to answer one modest question: “Are the qualities (physical, moral, aesthetic) that distinguish one thing from another objective realities, or are they subjective imposition on things?” My sympathies are immediately with him, and with his book. Mr. Frayn is most often a lovely writer, and in precisely that British way, when the British set aside their pretentious pretense to an utter lack of pretense and engage with ideas. He writes companionably, fluidly and lucidly. He’s both trying to do away with the small bore, lab-coated problem-solving of analytic philosophy, itself a pathetic sort of science envy, and engage with the cosmos; and to work beyond the current dead-end enmity between the “two cultures” (as C.P. Snow had it) of science and the humanities.

He starts strongly, with a nicely wrought précis of the state of the debate, summing up the work of the relevant philosophers of science, pre-eminently Kuhn and Popper, and the scientists who grappled honestly with the philosophical puzzlements thrown up by quantum physics, notably Einstein, Planck, Bohr and Heisenberg. Then the central problem sets in.

Philosophy is an exacting discipline. It proceeds by three principal methods: platitude, tautology and error. Should the initiate falter, and make a positive or progressive contribution to human knowledge, he would become, in the instant, a mathematician or a scientist, not a philosopher. (Give me one counterexample and I will gladly re-Kant.) What philosophy can do, and beautifully, is limn the boundaries of human ignorance, but with no recourse, ever, to human superstition. By doing this with scrupulous honesty, it creates a new kind of description of what it’s like to be a human being, the universe’s sole source of ignorance, of not-knowing, of openness and incompletion. “The world is everything that is the case,” or “Being is not something like an entity” are truthful but not factual statements: They opened up a line of creative argument and foreclosed nothing. You’re less likely to create an enduring legacy with sentiments like “This is what it comes down to in the end: the world has no form or substance without you and me to provide them, and you and I have no form or substance without the world to provide them in its turn.”

Making scientific realism chime benevolently with postmodernist chicanery is not the same as resolving an apparently hopeless contradiction with dialectic, any more than waving a sheet of paper brings peace in our time. Philosophy is not progressive, but neither is it solely descriptive. When we’re told, by some quite reputable philosophers, that consciousness is a hopeless mystery, the rigor of the path they took to get there ennobles the dead end. If nothing else, their confusion enlightens us somewhat from bearing the burden of the mystery entirely alone. Ironically, when an author writes about something as vexed as consciousness lightly, the burden of the mystery only feels heavier. Here then is Michael Frayn: “Someone jabs a pair of dividers into us and we scream. The jab sets the tone of the exchange; the exclamation is our helpless response. At the other end of the scale are hallucinations in the dark, where there is no external given at all, and everything has been supplied from our end. In between come a range of possible conversations, which seem as difficult to examine, as vanishingly elusive, as all the other conversations we have—as beyond examination or description as a row or a reconciliation with someone we love.”

Once committed only to reveling—poetically, let me hasten to add, often exquisitely, though never, ever economically—in the mystery, while pretty much forswearing precise argumentation, there’s no corner of human experience you can’t conjure with idly. The laws of nature, rule-following, consciousness, storytelling, cosmology, Pushkin, Robbe-Grillet and of course (here, kitty, kitty) the ubiquitous Schrödinger’s Cat, all come in for their care and feeding. I am as starved as anyone for a philosopher to defy the flyspecking of the tenured specialists, to light the collective mind on fire. But The Human Touch took me to a most unexpected place: It left me longing for peer review.

Stephen Metcalf is Slate magazine’s critic at large.

Negulesco is almost the anti-auteur, an illustration, as the film historian David Thomson has aptly put it, of the "power of the studios over minor talents." Negulesco first made his name in the 1940's as a director of Casablanca-style pictures for Warner. The best of these, The Mask of Dimitrios, is a bleak and densely plotted homosocial thriller matching Peter Lorre with Sydney Greenstreet. Negulesco cranked out half a dozen such pictures, roughly in the style of Curtiz, before moving over to Fox, where he promptly became an equally passable craftsman in the prevailing taste of that studio in the 50's.

He then made his name all over again, dutifully splashing what we now call women's fiction across the Cinemascope screen, saturating it in opalescent colors. Here Negulesco's films are filled with everything but Negulesco: The source material, as well as the attitudes and atmosphere of the times, bleed through every underdirected frame. The most famous of the women's pictures that Negulesco helmed is How to Marry a Millionaire. But the most diverting is surely The Best of Everything, a trashy bit of cinematic superannuation about a New York City on the verge of the 60's, just out on DVD.

The time is 1959. Cars have fins like sharks, men wear hats, and the women-well, women wear hats, too, and now that you mention it, have fins like sharks. Their suits are cut to cut you back, with shoulder blades at knifing angles and breasts jutting like munitions. A great era of liberal consensus, affluence and sartorial propriety is dwindling to its overripe finale. Johnny Mathis croons to us over an aerial shot of the Manhattan skyline, already a little dusky with pollution.

A young, impossibly beautiful Hope Lange steps off a bus and holds up an ad, clipped from the morning paper: "Secretaries-You Deserve The Best of Everything." In front of her stands the glorious Seagram building, of which we get many an eyeful. (It's as if Negulesco is asking: What goes on in these big, cold, thrusting, Continental-style buildings?) With its aura of chintzy opulence, The Best of Everything catches exactly the last seconds of the 50's, when America's self-confidence had gone a bit off and words like "integration" and "blue jean" are about to upheave the lot. But it also comes before another word that changed life as we know it: "cubicle." In those days, secretaries sat in a vast, open common space, known as the "pool," surrounded by the firmly shut doors of management offices. Lange is a Radcliffe grad who starts at the bottom, firmly beneath the boot of Joan Crawford, an embittered, lovelorn editor.

The Best of Everything-with its pin curls, Schrafts and no Pan Am building-is a delight as a time capsule; but it's also a question, to which our own little epoch has posed the answer "A bloody lot, thank you." The question is: How much will the world trade on sex and naked, hot-eyed ambition going forward? The Best of Everything follows directly in the footsteps of Peyton Place, which had been a succès de scandale only two years previously, in testing the limits of Hollywood's post-code patience. "And what about … fun?" asks the office masher, a 55-year-old alcoholic loath to get on tonight's 5:42 to Westport. "Would you like to meet someone you could have some … fun with? Without necessarily being in love?"

The movie that follows is an encyclopedia of pre-feminist caddishness. Along with the masher, we get a young Robert Evans, a Sutton Place lizard in stocks and bonds who, we come to understand, has escorted more than one woman to the doctor; and Louis Jourdan, a famous theater director who delivers the now-universal sentiment perfectly: "I love you … approximately."

Alas, the cynicism runs only so deep. Next to The Apartment, or certainly Sweet Smell of Success, The Best of Everything is a dandelion caught in a spring breeze. To us now, The Best of Everything is a delicious curiosity, the prequel to Sex and the City. That show was rescued from its own tendency to squalor by the sadness and amity holding the four women together as friends. At the heart of that friendship was a question posed here explicitly by Lange: "What is it about women like us that makes you hold us so cheaply?" And a wonderful salud, also offered by Lange: "Here's to men! Bless their clean-cut faces and their dirty little minds!"

To begin, there's the struggle of genuine emotion against the cauterizing power of iconic faces. How much energy is spent making film stars seem utterly inhuman-inhumanly beautiful, relaxed and clever-only to expend that much more energy making them seem, when they attach to an indie-style feature, plausibly ordinary? When we first meet Jude Law (he who rose Venus-like from the spume in The Talented Mr. Ripley, only to ruin my marriage and everyone else's), his Dan is meant to be a modest schlub, a lifer at a London paper who writes and edits the obituaries. ("This is me," he says to Alice when they arrive at his workplace, a dour glass-skinned high-rise.) The early dialogue is sharp and promising, as Dan and Alice meet and banter and fall in love. We leap forward in time by a year, and discover that Dan has cannibalized the story of Alice's life as a New York stripper for his first novel. Sitting for the book-jacket portrait, he falls immediately in love with Anna, his photographer. As Anna, the arty portraitist, Julia Roberts starts slowly-she's the living embodiment of a certain style of knit-browed overconcern Hollywood stars fall back on, especially when forced to act with Brits-but she gathers a serious head of steam, and by the credits has delivered a fine performance.

From its tantalizing beginning, Closer turns into a four-part roundelay vaguely in the Neil LaBute mode, in which vengeful sex is had by all, with all, and in virtually every possible config. When the movie wears its own true colors, it works nicely-that is, when Closer is sexy and cold and arch, and people approach one another as virtual strangers. And then there's Clive Owen. With his faceful of sebaceous stubble, Mr. Owen is the one element of true danger in Closer, and all of its desperation and rage comes from his turn as a cockney made good as a dermatologist. (Clive Owen is the one man since Sean Connery born to play 007, but no doubt Byzantine double-dealing in the front office will prevent it from ever happening.) Mr. Owen's Larry could split you down the middle with a look … or will he himself break apart? Unlike his co-stars, who must soldier admirably against their own prettiness, Mr. Owen is that rare beautiful man who's more than once suspected he's butt-ugly. No disbelief here suspended: Mr. Owen's Larry is a man who likes strippers, prostitutes and whatever trade he can scare up on the Net. The most vicious dialogue is given to Mr. Owen's mouth to spit, and spit it does. "She has the moronic beauty of youth," he says, dismissing Alice, who he will later come to beg for sexual absolution. "Have you ever seen a human heart?" he asks Dan. "It looks like a fist wrapped in blood."

Well, except when it's pumping $9 water. Would that this were Clive Owen's movie, a bitter meditation on the cowardly and wretched things people do to one other. But it's the movie of the great toy beauty, Natalie Portman. As a sex worker who may be fabricating her entire past, she's meant to be cheeky and wounded, an obscure object of desire, and the key to Dan's every happiness. Ms. Portman is not at all a bad actress, but she may be too inviolably flawless. When she spits her lines back at Mr. Owen-"When I was in flares you were in nappies." "My nappies were flared"-we sense behind them a life left untouched by sleaze. So it is with Closer, a quiet, gelid, murmuring and deeply uninvolving movie, an utter pleasure to watch-and then forget.

But Zanuck was dead right about one thing. "You've got one wife too many," he told Mankiewicz, who dutifully dropped one from the script. Thus was born the perfectly weird, and weirdly perfect, mix of postwar optimism, cynicism, cigarettes and cocktails that is A Letter to Three Wives (1949), a movie that might have been regarded as Mankiewicz's masterpiece had he not followed it up a year later with the nearly flawless All About Eve. As it is, A Letter to Three Wives comes in for its share of dim half-remembrance and polite admiration. (Inevitably so: It's the unofficial precursor to Desperate Housewives, and it did win a pair of Oscars, Best Director and Best Screenplay.) But save up your decorous appreciation for the next Anthony Minghella. This film deserves to be watched-with the same waspish relish with which it was made.

"To begin with," a voiceover tells us, as standard images of middle-class affluence pass across the screen, "all the incidents and characters in this story might be fictitious and any resemblance to you-or me-might be purely coincidental." The opening shots are nothing more than postwar B-Roll-a commuter train, cars drifting by like chrome wedding cakes, a wide and busy main street; the only thing fixing our attention is the boredom and condescension of that voice. "Just plain Main," it says, dropping the words like petals into a bowl. "Drug, dry goods, and those horrible little chain stores that breed like rabbits."

The exquisite contempt belongs to Addie Ross (played by Celeste Holm, whom we never see), who with every lilting syllable tells us she is way too fine for just plain Main. The vignettish opening scenes introduce us to three married couples, each with a husband who nurses an obsession for Addie, their childhood friend. Addie Ross, we learn, is the answer to every man's second guess. Just as the three wives are boarding a ferry for an all-day outing, they discover that one husband-they don't know whose-has fled town with Addie. The story of each marriage, and the shadow thrown over it by Addie's perfection, is then told in three successive flashbacks.

What lifts A Letter to Three Wives above melodrama? The movie is saturated with Mankiewicz's intelligence, of course, but also something more. Richard Burton once described Mankiewicz, for his wit and lack of Hollywood ostentation, as an "Oxford don manqué." It ran in the family: Older brother Herman, screenwriter for Citizen Kane, assembled a distinguished library of first editions and could be happened upon reading aloud from Finnegans Wake. (Herman was famously unable to keep silent in the face of the rich philistine. When Columbia Pictures kingmaker Harry Cohn once said he knew a picture was bad when "my ass wiggles all over the chair," Herman asked if Cohn's ass was "wired to a hundred and forty millionother American asses?" Cohn promptlyfired him.) Their father, a German immigrant, toiled virtually his whole life to become a college professor, which he finally did at the age of 59.

JosephMan-kiewiczwasto Hollywood, and to the Cosmopolitan story from which A Letter to Three Wives was derived, what Addie Ross was to just plain Main: an arrogant bastard who filled his best movies with an enlivening contempt. Addie is an honorary Mankiewicz, but so too is a young Kirk Douglas as Husband No. 2, George, a schoolteacher whose wife out-earns him by writing radio dramas. George's pedantry, his love of Schubert and Brahms and Keats' odes, is made up for by his great good humor; and when his wife invites a sponsor, the hatched-faced Mrs. Manleigh, over for a formal dinner, George can barely contain himself. ("Sadie may not realize it," Mrs. Manleigh says of George's housekeeper, who plays the radio while she cleans, "but whether or not she thinks she's listening, she's being penetrated." George: "Good thing she didn't hear you say that.") Next, Mrs. Manleigh claims that "Radio writing is the literature of today, the literature of the masses"; Herman-like, George explodes: "Worry, says the radio. Will you lose your teeth? Will your cigarettes give you cancer? Will your body function after you're 35? If you don't use our product, you'll lose your husband, your job, and die! Use our product, and we'll make you rich, we'll make you famous!"

In A Letter to Three Wives, Mankiewicz captured the gathering hysteria that was to be America going forward. It's all there: advertising, housewives and nerves drawn taut like piano wires. In later years, Mankiewicz liked to catch his movie on the tube, to see if stations would cut George's angry speech. Typically, they did.

Alain de Botton approaches every subject like it's virgin territory. At first this, can be disorienting: Am I reading a book, or grading the essay portion of the SAT? After a while, though, it gets a little

sad, like watching Vasco da Gama plant a flag in Times Square.

Can he really believe he's the first on the scene? Like fellow moral nutritionist and Great Books drone Jedediah Purdy, Mr. de Botton limits himself to personal observation and the timeless masterworks of Western Civ. As for sociology, anthropology, psychology, economic theory-if it's not Marcus Aurelius, Proust or Kant, out with the bathwater! What's left is Mr. de Botton himself, a crateful of Harvard Classics and an audience he insists on treating like rapt children.

In book after book (he's now on No. 7), he selects literary masterworks, pumps them up into highbrow fetish objects, then inserts them into a middlebrow self-help narrative. To a certain reader, it's enormously flattering to believe Proust, like yoga or Atkins, can change your life. And in one way, at least, the idea has worked like a charm: As his Web site boasts, "De Botton's works have been bestsellers-selling in the many hundreds of thousands in many different territories over the last eleven years."

In the formula's latest iteration, Status Anxiety , Mr. de Botton argues that the progress of the 20th century was towards open revolt against inherited privilege and nepotism. This placed upon us the enormous burden of self-making, while endowing success-most commonly in the form of financial triumph-with a new quality of moral superiority. And if success in a culture without birthright is deserved, so too is failure, which signals a lack of virtue or insufficient mettle. The net effect is that social esteem is poorly distributed-it gravitates too easily towards the shallow and the meretricious-while low social self-esteem, the sneaking suspicion the world finds you drab, becomes almost universal.

Status anxiety is abetted, Mr. de Botton tells us, by an advertising regime that convinces us we need better and more stuff, and by profile journalism, which reminds us how far short we've fallen of the celebrity ideal. Perversely, economic growth brings with it a decline in psychic well-being. "A sharp decline in actual deprivation," he writes, "may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense or fear of deprivation."

(For a far more elegant and original general-interest account of the plight of the middle classes, in almost precisely these same terms, see Barbara Ehrenreich's Fear of Falling . For a far more nuanced and challenging account, try, if you dare, le maître penseur Français , Pierre Bourdieu and his high-theory classic, Distinction .)

Meanwhile Mr. de Botton has rehashed-without citation-a century of academic and pop sociology. To support his argument, however, he makes a bold move. He declares that our need for status is "the story of our quest for love from the world." No doubt many C.E.O.'s and rock stars are, beneath it all, damaged children whose craving for public adulation is a tragic necessity. But is all status-mongering really the quest for love? Isn't it sometimes relief-seeking from the bite of envy? Or the need for symbolic power? Or plain greed? By recasting the argument in terms of love, Mr. de Botton gets to cozen his readers under the guise of reproving them. Like the deluxe guru he is, he's saying: Don't worry, you aren't shallow for wanting a 7 Series B.M.W. or to walk away with the Palme d'Or. You are the deprived child, and what you really want is beautiful and exalted.

The second half of Status Anxiety is devoted to "Solutions," as Mr. de Botton calls them, or the use of the Great Books as a kind of Zoloft for the status-anxiety-afflicted soul. By his lights, philosophy and novels serve as reminders. Of what? Of our own "true and irreducible" self; that there's an honored history of dissent from the ideal of financial triumph; and, finally (cue organ music), that death will one day level us all. "It is the rich, the beautiful, the famous and the powerful," he assures us, "for whom death has in store the cruellest lessons." For Mr. de Botton, all literature is wisdom literature; and once committed to paper, anything from Matthew Arnold to Zadie Smith can be stripped down, reconditioned and sold off as a string of sage utterances. (That literature can be dark, ironic, prophetic, savagely ambivalent, or God forbid, funny, you'd never know.)

Which raises the question: How much real respect does Mr. de Botton display for the traditions he so solemnly invokes? The great Ruskin once fulminated at his contemporaries: "When you retire into inactive life, you may, as a subject of consolation for your declining years, reflect that precisely according to the extent of your past operations, your life has been successful in retarding the arts, tarnishing the virtues, and confusing the manners of your country." Mr. de Botton summons him with: "Incensed by their wrongheaded prioritizing, John Ruskin excoriated nineteenth-century Britons … for being the most wealth-obsessed people in the history of the world." Even the friendliest critic would admit this style is unliterary. It sounds vaguely philosophical-but only if you forget that philosophy has supported many idiosyncratic writing styles, from the engaging conversationalism of William James to the great, strange music of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Mr. de Botton's prose reads like a sample translation from the World Esperanto Society. "Thesis," he announces up front: "That the most profitable way of addressing [status anxiety] may be to attempt to understand and to speak of it."

It is this penchant for philosophy that shows up how strangely unphilosophical a writer Mr. de Botton is. Philosophy starts with questions that lie at the edge of the ponderable. Are there only ideas, or things-in-themselves? If a lion could talk, would we understand him? Would it have been just for Gauguin to ditch wife and child had he been untalented? The lines Mr. de Botton draws are bright and easy, and tend to reaffirm homiletic truths; for example, we possess a private, dignified self, which our hunger for worldly recognition offends. Why not ask a hard question or two? Is Rawls right when he writes, "A rational individual is not subject to envy"? Is there such a thing as a natural aristocracy? (The idea has had lasting power: There are versions of it in Rousseau, Carlyle, Jefferson, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.) Is sending your kids to a private school no different-as some economists believe-from bequeathing them the family estate?

But the presence of irony or ambiguity only troubles the dispenser of wisdom. You'd never know it from his argument, but the literary masterworks Mr. de Botton promotes as cures for status anxiety were once status symbols themselves. They constituted the cultural capital of the (then new, now old) Anglo-European bourgeoisie, for whom universities were a cross between aristocratic finishing schools and gateways to the earliest professions. This vaguely Marxist-sounding argument has its roots, ambiguously, in Marx, who could not finally make up his mind about the value of great art, but has been taken to a literature-crushing extreme by Bourdieu and his acolytes in American English departments. Does telling the story this way rob a great book of its value, by regarding it merely as a status marker? Only if the story stays half-told. For there's a bittersweet twist: Thanks to the vulgar love of money that Mr. de Botton so studiously deplores, the great books are now largely ignored by our economic elite. As a result, they have been forever untethered from their old, stuffy Oxbridgian associations.

For all its show of great and careful learning, Status Anxiety is ad hoc and sloppy. The author claims that the American Revolution "[i]n a stroke … transformed American society from a hereditary, aristocratic hierarchy … into a dynamic economy in which status was awarded in direct proportion to the (largely financial) achievements of each new generation." In fact, the Bay Colonists had formed radical views on inheritance practices and hereditary authority while still in England. He gets Marx's labor theory of value exactly wrong when he writes: "There was, for Marx, an inherently exploitative dynamic within the capitalist system, for employers would always try to hire workers for less than they made from selling their products, then would pocket the difference as 'profit.'" (Marx didn't believe an employer pocketed a little extra from the till. For Marx, prices were an abstraction, a total falsity; the only real value was the amount of human sweat it took to produce a commodity.) He treats Matthew Arnold like a rumor picked up around the water cooler when he reduces Culture and Anarchy to the bromide, "Great art [is] … an effective antidote for life's deepest tensions and anxieties."

Am I being picky? To misrepresent Marx, after having dropped his name in a show-offy way, is like carrying around a motorcycle helmet without actually owning the bike. It might get you the girl, but eventually she'll want to go for a ride.

Yes, I find this book awful. Not only awful, but uniquely awful, because it is so dispiriting. A consumer society does in fact thrive on insecurity, and those facts of life that mitigate that insecurity (committed parents, small and livable communities, schools that actually educate, and a living civic and aesthetic tradition that points a person to a life of self-respect) are now under constant assault. To identify precisely the right problem, offer as a solution "the best which has been thought and said," and then show so little real respect for the ideas and intellectual traditions under discussion-this only reaffirms the hopelessness which motivated the book in the first place.

Over the years, Mr. de Botton has largely gotten a free pass-he was young, mediagenic, presumably intelligent and devoted to elevated subjects. But he's now honored, successful and routinely converts his books into TV programming for the old Beeb. (That explains the robotic voice: It's the robotic voice-over.)

Reading and caring about an idea is different from putting a book on an altar, surrounding it with a glamorous fog, then scraping before it like it's the ancestral totem. And above all, dear reader, do not mistake this scraping for humility, much less wisdom. Status Anxiety holds two messages for you, two messages only, and neither has anything to do with "the best which has been thought and said." They are: In your fallible human bosom where desire now lies, there a snorey, blasé Old World self-importance should take its place . And consequently: Of the many media personalities now competing for your attention, dear viewer, know to esteem me, Alain de Botton, the highest .

Stephen Metcalf reviews books regularly for The Observer.

Blood , by Edward Conlon.

Riverhead, 562 pages, $26.95.

The

notable first-person genres of the past 10 years or so-spoiled-child memoir,

abuse memoir, depression memoir (did I mention spoiled-child memoir?)-attest to

a world in which high literacy and genuine hardship no longer go together quite

as commonly as they once did. War once took care of this, at least for men: It

yoked brutal experience to literate young people, prematurely and routinely. My

father, who went to Princeton, barely mentions his World War II experiences

along the Burma Road. If, however, like Oliver Stone or John Kerry, you left

Yale to fight in Indochina, you might dine out on the decision for the rest of

your life. As world wars gave way to regional police actions, and as an ethos

of shared sacrifice gave way to student deferrals, everything changed. In a

world of unequal sacrifice-a world that creams talent efficiently, then

shelters it from misery-the gulf between the literary and the nonliterary world

deepens.

Here

comes a stunning exception to prove the rule. Starting in the late 90's, under

the pseudonym Marcus Laffey, The New Yorker ran a series of columns

called "Cop Diary." Written in the first person, they told the story of a young

officer's fairly run-of-the-mill career in the NYPD, in prose that was anything

but run-of-the mill. At its best, "Cop Diary" recalled the old New Yorker -not

the famously twee New Yorker of the Shawn era, glorious as that could

be, but an older old New Yorker , a kind of laconic blarney with

roots deep in Joseph Mitchell. This was rare indeed: the intersection of high

literacy with lowlife culture at the level of firsthand experience, a

combination that the now-elaborate talent-sorting, talent-creaming apparatus

often seems devoted to making extinct. Who was Marcus Laffey, and just what

sort of throwback-or impostor-was he?

Laffey

has since been outed as one Edward Conlon, a now 40-ish Harvard graduate who

made his way, over the course of roughly a decade, from New York City beat cop

to gold-shield detective. Mr. Conlon has come clean with the entire story

behind Laffey and his life on "the Job," as cops refer to it with a certain

rueful pride. Blue Blood , his quietly remarkable memoir, is less a

shoot-'em-up or po-faced Law and Order procedural-in fact, it's not

remotely either of those-than an unusually sensitive reflection on criminality,

police culture and the role of social class in America. The reason for the

sensitivity, and for the unbridled enthusiasm with which the memoir is being greeted,

is as surprising as it is refreshing: Mr. Conlon completely bollixed the

post-Vietnam, meritocratic storyline.

The

only blue in Mr. Conlon's blood isn't Brahmin-it's pure Irish cop. His

great-grandfather, Sergeant Pat Brown, used to "carry the bag on Atlantic

Avenue" (he transported the mob's ill-gottens for them), and his Uncle Eddie

was an officer on the force. It was Mr. Conlon's father who, as a career F.B.I.

agent, vaulted the family's fortunes forward. The father appeared to the son as

"the image of a G-man: tall and prematurely silver-haired, with a trench coat

and fedora, a profile in sternness and probity that masked a playful curiosity

and a devious sense of humor." After growing up a normal enough miscreant in

working-class Westchester, Mr. Conlon continued the family's upward mobility by

attending Harvard. But after Harvard and the usual false starts, he joined the

NYPD. To have lurched from teenage Yonkers rogue to Yard-trodding scholar and,

finally, to Bronx flatfoot was, as Mr. Conlon himself puts it, "closer to a

crime against nature than a bad career choice." Better to have told his parents

he was "going back to Ballinrobe, to tend a few sheep and dig potatoes with a

stick."

To

be equal parts street and Ivy gives you universal credibility; and to straddle

class lines in a world in which they only get more rigid automatically makes

you a darling. But it also makes for a life of proliferating embarrassments.

When a sergeant at the Police Academy asked Mr. Conlon if he had really attended

Harvard, he replied with a pettifoggery worthy of his white-shoe classmates:

"Not lately, Sarge" is the literal truth camouflaged as sarcasm. So committed

was he to obscuring his credentials that when NYPD forms asked for his alma

mater, he hoped his scrawl would be misread as "Howard."

Mr.

Conlon's embarrassment makes for a curiously unstable literary voice, one that

drifts back and forth from polished but vivid old school ( McSorley's

Wonderful Saloon ) to a quiet but persistently defensive machismo. He seems

at pains to tell us about each of his life's many fistfights-almost the only

thing he tells us about his Harvard years was that, upon arriving, he

brawled-but then he shuffles his feet, aw shucks , and claims to have

lost most of them. In the next breath he explains, "The word 'investigate'

comes from the Latin vestigium …. " There's also a little too much

towel-snapping, Hollywood-ready multi-ethnic camaraderie, as when the Italian

and Irish cops, making light of the Compstat system of gathering crime

statistics, book criminals depending on their ethnicity by using either

"Mickstat" or "Wopstat."

As

if to bring competing energies under control, Blue Blood 's abiding tone

is almost compulsively apothegmatic. A long digression on the murder of one of

his father's informants wraps up with "We all have our vocations, and we all

have our mysteries." A few pages later, a fascinating discussion of how the

race of a perp and the race of a cop will define their interaction cuts off

with "In the end, the color of your skin doesn't matter but the thickness of it

does." More disappointing is the book's failure to reflect deeply on the nature

of drug busts. By far Mr. Conlon's most satisfying experience as a police

officer was working on the Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit, and the pace and

vivid grittiness of these portions of the book show it. He played his role in

enforcing the draconian Rockefeller drug laws, and yet this disappointing feint

is as far as he gets when the time comes to assess the policy's wider significance:

"The Urban League had published a report on cities that stated that one out of

every three black men in their twenties was in prison, on parole, or on

probation. It is a devastating number, and a national disgrace, and I haven't

got the least idea what to do about it, except for my job."

But

these are quibbles. Whether at the knees of his cop elders or around the

seminar table, Mr. Conlon learned how to talk to old ghosts, and then to write

about it gorgeously. By far the finest sections of the book-and these are truly

magnificent-recount old half-forgotten histories, from Pat Brown's to Serpico's

and Popeye Egan's. (Egan is best remembered as the model for Popeye Doyle in The

French Connection . After the movie he floated along, a legend and a

raconteur who, unlike his partner Sonny Grosso, couldn't parlay his newfound

fame into a showbiz afterlife. He eventually became a departmental scapegoat

and died broke and alone.) All this adds up to a gripping social history of New

York policing. But almost more importantly, Blue Blood demonstrates how

sharpening to the senses it is when language and reality chasten one another.

"The kid on the bench is a kid on a bench," Mr. Conlon tells us, "and it takes

time for his context to prove him to be anything more. You watch who he watches,

who approaches him. And as you do, figures emerge from the flow of street life

as coordinates on a grid, as pins on a map." Ed Conlon is one gifted writer. I

bet he's an even better cop.

Stephen

Metcalf reviews books regularly for The

Observer .

All pop criticism is bad. Like a boring dinner guest, it's garrulous and name-dropping. Under the pretense of informing you, it glories in your ignorance. It reeks of junk-strewn garrets and a degrees in semiotics from Brown. Why is it all so bad? Rock 'n' roll represents the final triumph of what Cynthia Ozick has called aural culture over literate culture. "I Dig a Pygmy, by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf Aids. Phase One, in which Doris gets her oats." Ring any bells? John Lennon shouts it out during the famous rooftop concert at the end of the documentary Let It Be. In an aural age, what once would have been lost to the Twickenham fog is plucked up, preserved, spliced (onto the beginning of "Two Of Us") and reproduced a trillion times. When anything can be made to last forever, the process is inherently deflationary-too few lives chasing too many memories. For respite we cleave to monuments: Elvis, Dylan, the Beatles.

Luckily, we have Geoffrey O'Brien, who writes about music with unmistakable literary intent while wading happily into the aural tide.

Some childhoods seem designed to produce writers; Geoffrey O'Brien's produced an overwriter. This shouldn't be considered a fault so much as the predictable consequence of his experience. During the Depression, his grandfather ("Pop") led a traveling band, known as the Rainbow Club Orchestra (no rainbow, no club, barely an orchestra) through the more down-in-the-mouth precincts of eastern Pennsylvania. (Pop wanted to play jazz; the locals demanded polka.) When she wasn't touring with a musical, his mother was a stage-actressy presence; his father was the voice of the Morning Man on WOR-FM in New York City. Thus Geoffrey O'Brien, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and the editor in chief of the Library of America, had the good fortune to grow up in a family of Salingeresque hams, surrounded by good musical taste, on an Upper West Side that had yet to price out the last of its seedy idiosyncrasy. With a well-earned and tenderly nursed nostalgia, he has written Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life. Part Proustian rumination, part aural encyclopedia, the book is, from beginning to end, a messy and challenging delight.

Sonata for Jukebox opens with a relatively by-the-numbers essay on Burt Bacharach, for whom Mr. O'Brien displays an instinctive affinity. Mr. Bacharach's music, with its tipsy elegance and what Mr. O'Brien calls its "well-bred melancholia," always carried with it a vague aura of anachronism. It paid no heed to Elvis-made America and the global upheaval that proceeded under the banner of the Beatles. Instead, it created a competing sound for a generation that wasn't joining in the youthquake: "Here was adult romance, born under the same astrological signs that presided over Sex and the Single Girl (book and movie), the Pill, and the perfume ads that instructed 'Want him to be more of a man? Try being more of a woman.'" Mr. O'Brien is brilliant on how the songs, deceptive little profiteroles, on inspection open up to reveal a surprising compositional intricacy. Throughout the volume there are similarly astute essays, on the Beatles, Brian Wilson and that final gateway to total pop-culture snobbery, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.

But the heart and soul of Sonata for Jukebox is autobiography. After all, in an age of recording devices and mass commercial exchange, people don't ask of a piece of music "Is this beautiful?" based on, say, its proportion and harmony. They say "This is me" or "This is mine," because it evokes intense feelings of personal allegiance. About our favorite music, we're essentially saying, "This reminds me of me"-which isn't as vacant as it sounds. The burden of good taste is simply thrown back onto the lives of listeners, about which we can ask the traditional questions: Are they unique, self-examined, full? Or common and unreflecting?

The question is only more vexed in a culture in which every sound can be preserved, high and low hopelessly jumbled, genius and detritus lying so close together.

As a child, Mr. O'Brien spent countless hours drinking in the sounds of a radio, which brought him everything from "the Yacht Club Boys to the Modernaires to the Pied Pipers, from the Mills Brothers to the Ink Spots to the Platters, from the Boswell Sisters to the Andrews Sisters to the McGuire Sisters to the King Sisters, from the Mel-Tones to the Hi-Lo's to the Four Freshmen, the Four Lads, the Four Aces. It is the Church of Sound: an ethereal cathedral made of breaths that intermesh to form 'Laura' and 'Poinciana' and 'Perfidia' and 'Stella by Starlight.' In that realm there is mist in the lagoon, the moon shines alone, and the meadow is made of chimes."

The names drop all around like a hailstorm: Hindemith, Perry Como, "Bud, Chet, Prez, Getz, Miles, Hawk, Newk, Monk," Yvette Mimieux (Yvette Mimieux?)-until it feels like we've run through every decibel ever committed to acetate, from ad jingles to, yes, dolphin pings. Writing in a genre so often devoted to monuments-Elvis, Dylan, the Beatles, we get it already-Mr. O'Brien's preference is for sounds that are in danger of disappearing altogether, like the countless hours his D.J. father spent sending schticky little asides out into the ether.

A deep love for evanescence pervades Sonata for Jukebox, and also a love of mystery that, on occasion, threatens to get out of hand. "That I should hear my father first thing in the morning without seeing him (he had driven into the city many hours earlier, while everyone slept) and only hours later-in an entirely different and (from the perspective of the long childhood morning) remote phase of the day-see him, hear his non-radio voice, is just an aspect of the way life in the house goes, part of its obscure system of cues and exits and convergences." Later, he'll claim the Anthology of American Folk Music, which collected for posterity the likes of Dock Boggs and Mississippi John Hurt, "registered a search for hidden correspondences and occulted communications, and [Harry] Smith moved as easily among its implications as a shaman rapidly switching voices during a dialogue with spirits."

Its taste for "occulted communication" aside, Sonata for Jukebox is sharply argued on the question of how recording technology has changed human experience. Gone is the whole world of small merchants ("barely a moment ago, it must have been just before the world war, music was still a matter of sheet music to be played on the piano in the parlor, an immense boon for publishers, copyists, rack-jobbers, song pluggers, piano players, piano teachers, and piano tuners"); that distinctly local arrangement ("If you wanted to hear mountain music you went to the mountains") has been replaced with a globalist consumer paradise: "Free now to drop in anywhere unannounced, we listen in their secret fastnesses to Tibetan lamas or Moroccan jajouka musicians or the throat singers of Tuva."

At this point in the narrative, the Fab Four appear as a kind of relief from the book's unrelenting eclecticism. The Beatles were, in their utter freshness, a liberating force, but also a consolidating one. "Having walked into the theater as a solitary observer with more or less random musical tastes," Mr. O'Brien writes of seeing A Hard Day's Night as a teenager, "I came out as a member of a generation." What comes next in the story, of course, are the hazy-crazy, guerrillas-in-the-midst 60's, when all you needed was your Penguin Freud, some blotter and a friend's mom's vacant classic eight on the Upper West Side to have a good time. Here the narrative is most lush, as Mr. O'Brien captures perfectly the longing and anticipation of being young. (I won't give it away, but one long digression-about a fragile young beauty on the fringes of Mr. O'Brien's social circle and the rock star who befriends her-is particularly satisfying.)

Mr. O'Brien's talent for drawing out a string of associations from a piece of music is impressive, though occasionally it gets the better of him. From writing about himself, he lapses into the second-person singular, an impersonal, vaguely contemptuous "you": "Since you had long since gotten used to hearing canned versions of Bob Marley and Talking Heads en route to the yogurt or the breakfast links, it was not hard to accept the ersatz as ultimate authenticity."

This is a wildly original and at times peculiar book, provocative and deeply felt throughout. In the final chapters, when the author is trolling the dial of "the musical unconscious, the sound of auditory residue, this radio station that will not permit itself to be turned off," the prose becomes relentlessly incantatory; some sections read less like criticism or autobiography than the transcript of a Vulcan mind-meld gone wrong: "For a moment the names are on the table. Then, suddenly, like a pocket turned inside out, they are removed. Nothing refers to anything anymore. The warehouse is indistinguishable space. No songs have lyrics. Or they have lyrics like blank walls. I'm alone forever. The sun is on the lagoon. Welcome to the ice palace." Faced with this sort of passage, one recalls an earlier, wistful aside. "How nice it would be," Mr. O'Brien mused, "to clear away the mass of history and personal association and simply hear the records for the notes and words."

Stephen Metcalf reviews books regularly for The Observer.

At the beginning of the 18th century, the city of Edinburgh was little more than a filthy medieval backwater-as James Buchan paints it in his wonderful new book, Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind, a town frequently (and from the evidence, fairly) maligned for booze-aided sloth and frivolous litigation. ("Muck" Andrew earned his nickname by disputing 30 years in court over a "middenstead"-a dung heap.) By the end of the century, Edinburgh had become something else entirely, a byword for the finest promises of modern life: freedom of inquiry, the "privacy and variety of conscience" (as Mr. Buchan neatly puts it), openness to talent and feminism. How did Edinburgh pull this off? How did the principle city for a nation of country cousins emerge, not only as the intellectual taste-maker for all of Europe, but as a vanguard for modernity itself?

Crowded with Genius opens on a picturesquely dismal city. The women wear tartan plaids, the men huddle together in dark taverns, the food is godawful. (One week's menu is downright Pythonesque: "Monday: Kale without flesh … ; Tuesday: Kale with flesh, and no ale; … Thursday: Kale with flesh, no ale; Friday: The same as Thursday.") By the middle of the century, though, Edinburgh had been reformed twice, once by history, once by influence of a great man. History's part was played by the failed Jacobite rebellion, which culminated in a killing field in the town of Culloden, in April 1746. With the forces of the Stuart faction routed, Scotland abandoned itself to progress. "The best way forward," Mr. Buchan writes, "was to forget the past, shed any distinctive Scottishness, unlearn the Scots language, reforge links with the Continent … and reveal the innate superiority of Scotland by out-Englishing the English." After 1745, Edinburgh's Protestant institutions flourished-its courts, its church (Mr. Buchan retains the Scottishism, calling it "the Kirk" throughout) and, preeminently, its university-in part because the Catholic Stuarts had been driven from the stage, but also because Scotch Protestantism had been liberalized by the lapsed Presbyterian minister Francis Hutcheson.

Hutcheson bridged the gap, as Mr. Buchan deftly tells it, between the ferocious old 17th-century Presbyters, with their "election, reprobation, original sin and faith," and the new generation growing up within the university and the world of cosmopolitan ambition it implied. In place of hellfire and damnation, Hutcheson emphasized man's moral nature as a kind of passion-a passion for the good as something beautiful, and sufficient as its own reward. It was a philosophy in service of a more secular, pragmatic and frankly commercial culture; and it laid the groundwork for a fully vernacular Enlightenment, following upon the classicist Renaissance, to finally usher out the Middle Ages for good. All this made quite an impression on Hutcheson's most celebrated pupil, a young man who came under his spell at the University of Glasgow named Adam Smith.

The idea persists of intellectual life as something monkish and pure, the scholar's spirit a bright flame, but quiet and private, solitary. (One thinks of Milton poring over his Tasso, or-in Edmund Wilson's perfect rendering-Michelet discovering Vico.) This is not the spirit of the Scots. The Scottish Enlightenment was above all sociable. "We have made Philosophy, as well as Religion," Francis Hutcheson wrote, "so austere and ungainly a Form, that a Gentleman cannot easily bring himself to like it." The Scots out-Englished the English by borrowing the urbane style of the Tatler and the Spectator and applying it to philosophic ends. The result was a body of writing at once complex and accessible, and a mode of thinking centered on man's existence as preeminently social. While Smith's celebrated contemporaries in other countries were caught up in Gothicism, or refining the idea of the beautiful, wounded ego, Smith wrote about people looking at other people: For him, social life is spectatorial without being creepy or intrusive. (This is Foucault, before the fact, turned on its head.) We watch and observe, we sympathize, we sense how we would react in certain situations; we judge others and apply those judgments to ourselves accordingly. Slowly, human life finds itself refined.

In addition to The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith created the idea of political economy when he wrote The Wealth of Nations (1776). As Mr. Buchan points out, in invoking the "Invisible Hand," Smith was postulating a self-regulating commercial society made up of yeoman and artisans, not of giant, shareholder-owned multinationals; and by the end of his life, "[Smith] was expressing the most profound misgivings about the moral complexion of commercial society." Nonetheless, it's often in Smith's name that we underregulate industry and liberate the rich from the burden of taxation. For better or for worse, the influence of Smith-who was read as avidly by Marx as he was by Milton Friedman-cannot be exaggerated.

And yet it's David Hume, not Smith, who emerges as the representative figure in this narrative, a man of "urbanity, gallantry, philosophic courage," as Mr. Buchan puts it. Hume's skepticism was unrelenting; it famously argued that everything in human experience must lead to a knowledge of necessary relations, such as cause and effect. It was so thoroughgoing that it threatened to overwhelm his mind. When "the intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning," Hume returned to a life of women, good company and billiards. He took standing up the initial failure of A Treatise of Human Nature (1739): "Never literary attempt was more unfortunate," Hume famously lamented. "It fell dead-born from the press." Later, of course, Hume's Treatise would redirect the course of philosophy: Kant admitted that reading it woke him from his "dogmatic slumber."

How do you know when a city's renaissance is dying? When its grasp has finally exceeded its reach and the spirit of discovery has given way entirely to fashion, or the spirit of novelty. Mr. Buchan artfully dates the end of the Edinburgh's "moment of the mind" with the understanding, on the part of the poet Robert Burns, that he himself had become "like those other novelties of 1786 that are now hopelessly entangled with him, haggis and the pianoforte and the portrait silhouette and the hot-air balloon." Burns, the ploughman poet, learned the hard reality of the city: that "the men were snobs and the women teases, and that sentiment and politeness cloaked hard realities of power; and that the place had destroyed his gift. Burns's two winters, though they are the climax of Edinburgh's moment in the eighteenth century, are also its end."

A richly descriptive book, Crowded with Genius brings a graceful, urbane writing style to historical scholarship of the highest standard. It's accessible without a trace of condescension. Mr. Buchan, a British novelist and former financial journalist, has a great instinct for the spirit of contradiction that defines much in Scottish life. "Edinburgh is a paradox," runs one pitch-perfect description, "a Classical town rescued from the frigid by a Gothic town rescued from the grotesque."

We New Yorkers should be doubly chastened by James Buchan's book-by its unremitting excellence, and by the possibility that it will go unnoticed. The sad fact is that Crowded with Genius is something of an orphan. Our universities are stuck, thanks to an antiquated tenure system, with literary theory, and our cities populated, thanks to galloping inflation in the housing market, with wannabe moguls. This is a sociable book, a book that reminds us how glorious it can be when venality takes a back seat, and the life of the mind and the life of a great city coincide. Suppose New York does ignore it. Now what would the Edinburgh Scots make of that?

Stephen Metcalf reviews books regularly for The Observer.