This chapter focuses on the institutions of middlebrow culture in America, exploring their role in disseminating and also critiquing modernism. The smart magazines, reprint series, and book clubs of the interwar and midcentury period worked to create new audiences for modernist writing and to make difficult texts more accessible. Yet the discourse of the middlebrow – with its emphasis on affective response and its skepticism about experiment – formed a counterpractice to modernist and New Critical formalism. Middlebrow institutions were oriented toward self-improvement and the education of taste, and debates raged about whether their effect was to democratize culture or to standardize it. The chapter considers the tastemakers of the era, ranging from Vanity Fair and The Crisis to the members of the Algonquin Round Table. It also discusses the novelists – such as Anita Loos and Sinclair Lewis - who satirized the culture of upward mobility that emerged in the US following World War I.

Frederick Douglass’s perspective on temperance had much in common with the arguments articulated by northern free black conduct writers, reformers and institution builders. Like many of them, Douglass believed that the rhetoric and daily practice of temperance served the larger fight against slavery and racism by contributing to the forms of black self-mastery, independence, and self-determination most feared by proponents of slavery in the United States. Alcohol consumption, meanwhile, cultivated exactly the kind of dependence preferred by slaveholders. Emphasizing its revolutionary potential for African Americans, Douglass characterized temperance as essential for the black freedom struggle throughout his career, continuing to make his case for temperance even in the last decades of the nineteenth century when African Americans faced the specter of the rise of Jim Crow and the encroachment of new forms of oppression and servitude.

Provides a philosophical evaluation of the Socratic views discussed in the main body of the book. Is this an ethical philosophy we should admire, or one we should reject? What should we make, from a contemporary philosophical point of view, of Socrates’ commitments to motivational intellectualism, to a craft model of ethical knowledge and achievement, and of his proposals for how we should go about ethical self-improvement? Scholarship aims to understand the thoughts of others. But once we do understand them, it is appropriate also to consider how we should assess the actual philosophical merits of the positions attributed to the focus of scholarly attention. What should we think of Socrates as a philosopher?