Counter-Currents

In 1916, as the world lurched toward the First World War and intellectual fashions turned ever more sentimental, Agnes Repplier stood as a merciless and witty contrarian. Counter-Currents is a collection of essays that attacks the prevailing emotionalism of her age with precision and panache. Repplier, one of America's finest essayists, turns her sharp eye on the cult of feeling: the philanthropists who undermine justice with pity, the journalists who trade in outrage, the social reformers whose good intentions pave roads to catastrophe. She interrogates the rising sentiment around war and responsibility, asking uncomfortable questions about how emotion clouds rational assessment of human choices. The essays on gender challenge the assumptions of both sides. This is not cold conservatism but rather a passionate argument for clarity, for resisting the seductions of easy feeling in favor of hard-won wisdom. A century later, as we navigate our own era of viral outrage and performed sensitivity, Repplier's insistence on thinking clearly against the current feels not dated but urgently necessary.