The Perils of Uglytown

The Perils of Uglytown introduces the concept of structural misanthropology, and explores it through the close reading of selected passages in texts that range from Thucydides and Plato to Shakespeare and Rembrandt.

The Perils of Uglytown develops a new concept, structural misanthropology, and traces its operation first in the dialogues of Plato and then in the work of humanists, playwrights, and painters of the Renaissance in Italy, England, and the Netherlands.

With characteristic wit, Harry Berger, Jr., brings his flair for close reading to texts and images across two millennia that illustrate what he calls “structural misanthropology.” Beginning with a novel reading of Plato, Berger emphasizes Socrates’s self-acknowledged failures. The dialogues, he shows, offer up, only to dispute, a misanthropic polis. The Athenian city-state, they worry, is founded on a social order motivated by apprehension—both the desire to take and the fear of being taken. In addition to suggesting new political
and philosophical dimensions to Platonic thought, Berger’s attention to rhetorical practice offers novel ways of parsing the dialogic method itself.
In the book’s second half, Berger revisits and revises his earlier accounts of Italian humanism, Elizabethan drama, and Dutch painting. Berger shows how structural misanthropology helps us to read the competitive practices that characterize Renaissance writing and art, whether in Machiavelli’s constitutional prostheses, Shakespeare’s pageants of humiliation, or the elbow jabs of Dutch portraiture.