First Things, Last Things

First Things, Last Things by Eric Hoffer, 132 pages

First Things, Last Things is Eric Hoffer's celebration of cities.  It is the city, he contends, that is the true cradle of civilization, the man-made environment where man is most at home and consequently most himself.  Looking back to prehistory but concentrating on the urban crisis of the '60s, he takes up intellectual arms against the cultural power of Romanticism and its celebration of the wilderness.  This revolt by the urbane against the urban was perpetuated in his own time by the contempt of the affluent for the sources of their affluence.

Hoffer is a generalizer, which means he is inevitably a simplifier, but also, hopefully, a clarifier.  Ironically, his own worldview is remarkably difficult to fit into the conventional categories - the idiosyncrasy of the autodidact preserves him from the cant of left and right alike.