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Marshall Berman was born in the South Bronx in 1940. Over the next three decades, he watched his lower-middle-class neighborhood turn to ruin. Between 1948 and 1972, Robert Moses—who years later became the Faustian villain of Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air—built the Cross Bronx Expressway. It ravaged the South Bronx, cutting it up into bits and pieces and bombing out other areas completely, including much of Berman’s own neighborhood, Tremont. In the 1970s, the less systematic destruction began. New York City was broke and its outer boroughs were in a state of neglect and disrepair. “The Bronx finally made it into the media,” as Marshall recalled in an essay about the ’70s. The headline: “The Bronx Is Burning!”

The self-destructive tendencies of New York City—and, more generally, of modern urban life—were to become the central preoccupation in Berman’s work. His first book, The Politics of Authenticity (1970), took eighteenth-century Paris and its two most brilliant thinkers, Montesquieu and Rousseau as a case study for what culminated in the revolutionary violence at the end of the century. All That Is Solid, which came twelve years later, was something less and something more. It marked the end of a promising, though contained, academic career in the vein of his college and early graduate school mentors—Peter Gay, Lionel Trilling, Isaiah Berlin—and the blossoming of a startling and radical new voice in social criticism. Tracing an arc of violence and destruction from Goethe’s Faust to New York City’s Moses, Berman argued that modernism, when coupled with the toxic tendencies of industrial capitalism, wreaked havoc on man’s psychic and spiritual life as well as his social and economic conditions.

Both works and the many essays that came before and after also insisted there was another side of modern life. A figure like Robert Moses, eschewing the humanist impulses of city life and modernist aesthetics, sought to rid New York of its creative chaos. But the modern city could also be a place for human creativity and rebirth and Berman was drawn to those figures who embodied this vision. From Marx to Lukács, Baudelaire to Run-DMC, the intellectual and creative brilliance of modern urban life, fractured and chaotic as it is, could help build us anew. From alienation came freedom, and from modernity’s ruins came new life. “All that is solid melts into air” was Marx and Engels’s lament about what had happened to life under capital; for Berman this was also a credo for how to rebel against it.

The opening chapter of Politics of Authenticity is titled “The Personal is Political.” I’ve always wondered about this title—it being, even then, somewhat of a flat-tire turn of phrase. But I think what Berman meant was something more nuanced: that the political should be personal. As Corey Robin and others have pointed out, Berman’s historical and philosophical narratives were almost always suffused with personal trauma. This, perhaps, reached its fullest expression in All That Is Solid, where he moved from eighteenth-century Paris to his own midcentury New York, and also in his later essays collected in Adventures in Marxism. But his turn to the personal went well beyond the fact that he was now writing from his home turf; it was, rather, an attempt to make our politics more personal, more felt.

For Berman the failure of modern capitalism—in both its industrial and postindustrial phases—was as much about the emotional suffering it caused as its unequal distribution of goods and services. This was why Berman found the young Marx, who writes of alienation, and the young Lukács, who writes of a particular form of alienation (reification), so appealing. Their ideas were ways of explaining what Berman already suspected was wrong with the world he inhabited: It was not so much that his father was a failed garment-district middleman but that his father had suffered the psychic costs of this failure.

This personalization of Marx and of social criticism more generally was what lent Berman’s thinking its poignant erudition. It is what also drew him to the humanist side of the Left. “Even when capitalism was highly successful,” Berman wrote, Marx helped him realize that it “could be humanly disastrous, inflicting upon people insult and injury by treating them as nothing more than a commodity.” The great injustice of modern life was not just the inequalities it produced but also the high tax they placed on us: the ways in which they limited our range of expression as well as our formal freedoms, our libido as well as our workweek—the ways they helped turn whole neighborhoods into expressways.

One does not always practice what one preaches. But it was precisely this sensitivity to human feeling that made Berman so lovely as a person. He cared. His generosity came casually to him. He lent me Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture (a reason why I went to graduate school). He read a fellow editor’s four-year-old undergraduate thesis in an afternoon and then offered detailed notes and corrections. He even tried, unsuccessfully, to get Michael Walzer to listen to Bob Dylan.

A common refrain at Dissent meetings is, “So what do we think about this?” Berman often phrased it, “So how do we feel about this?” When I was at something of a romantic impasse several years ago, he steered our lunch conversation away from edits on a review of his to narrate a comically failed early romance.

That review—one of his late classics—told the story of Ka, Blue, and Ipek, the characters that form the sad, mostly unconsummated love triangle that anchors Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. For Berman, the center of the novel was not the clash between the secular and religious, the modern and the traditional. It was love: love won but also, more commonly, lost. This was our most modern of disasters: the suggestion of freedom, the age of liberation, and yet nothing. We can speak and be heard, touch and embrace, but something about modern life seems to stop us from loving. Ka and Ipek, plotting to escape the religious violence of Anatolia, never catch their train. They dream of a place where they can overcome what keeps them apart. But the currents of history, or at least the currents of Pamuk’s novel, stop them.

Berman wrote:

In the history of modern culture, the archetypal couple presiding over Ka’s and Ipek’s fantasies and hopes come from the moment of the French Revolution: they are Papageno and Papagena, from Mozart’s Magic Flute. Ka and Ipek, two centuries later, would be a modernist variation on Mozart’s theme. Their embraces will be accompanied by all the latest mass media, by movies and television, by computer hookups and hyperlinks, and by dreams of America—of undubbed America (Pamuk highlights this), an America in as raw and direct a form as they can imagine. Americans can feel proud to be part of their dream life and their pursuit of happiness.

Why shouldn’t they have all this? In fact, it is only drastic last-minute plot intervention by the author that keeps the heroine off the train to freedom. Maybe Pamuk thought it would be a better story this way, and if he did, who knows, maybe he was right. Maybe stories of love crushed are more poignant than stories of love fulfilled. Or maybe the best story is love crushed after it’s fulfilled.

But for Berman, this was not enough. As he ended the review, turning back to his own life as he often did in his essays, he wrote:

But there’s a difference between the logic of a story and the logic of history. At the start of the twenty-first century, our history may be more open than our literature. A great many people have got out of nightmarish situations all over the globe, and America has given them space to breathe. On any Saturday or Sunday afternoon, at Herald Square, on Telegraph Avenue, in shopping malls in all sorts of American places I and Pamuk have never heard of, you can find couples that look a lot like Ipek and Ka (they are often of different colors), schlepping their babies around in ultramodern snugglies, overflowing with new life.

When I read these last passages of his review I was kind of surprised. It was early 2009, and not exactly a time, despite Obama’s election, to be proud of the United States. A great many people had certainly escaped nightmarish situations all over the globe, and sometimes because of our beneficence. But the United States also was one of the many sources of these nightmarish situations and certainly not always a place of relief.

But what troubled me most about these last paragraphs was not that Berman still could mine a deep reserve of hope and possibility in the midst of so much disappointment. It was that he had found, in a novel about political violence, a story of unfulfilled love: a narrative, as old as Mozart’s Magic Flute, that revealed the deeper sorrow of modern experience—our inability to connect with one another. This was, at least to me, a radically different type of criticism, a criticism that formulated not just social complaint but also psychic and spiritual pain. It was a criticism—a politics, really—of feelings.

When All That Is Solid was published, it was met with a wave of exuberant reviews. The Times called it “generous … and dazzling.” The Voice insisted that it was “a visionary work which by all rights ought to have the impact of such sixties bibles as Growing Up Absurd and Life Against Death.” It did, in many ways. And Berman always was grateful for the recognition it brought him, even if in later years I think he felt burdened and hemmed in by its success.

But the Left, being the Left, had a variety of responses, not all kind and perhaps none as stinging as Perry Anderson’s. Writing in the New Left Review, Anderson argued that the book confused modernist visions of release with radical ones of liberation. “For all its exuberance, Berman’s version of Marx, in its virtually exclusive emphasis on the release of the self, comes uncomfortably close—radical and decent though its accents are—to the assumptions of the culture of narcissism.”

For Berman, this must have particularly stung, because the underlying argument of All That Is Solid was that modernism can help people come closer together: Creative expression, in the street as well as in the museum, was an effort to find communion. Modernist art, urban culture—these were ways to repair our present state of alienation. They were means to overcome loneliness.

Always generous, Berman responded this way:

I am grateful to Perry Anderson for remembering The Politics of Authenticity, and for pointing out the continuities between that work and what I’m doing now. Then as now, I’ve been trying to develop a theoretical vision of the unifying forces in modern life. I still believe that it’s possible for modern men and women who share the desire to “be themselves” to come together, first to fight against the forms of class, sexual and racial oppression that force everyone’s identity into rigid moulds and keep anyone’s self from unfolding; and next, to create Marx’s “association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Nevertheless, All That Is Solid, and what I’ve written here, have a much thicker density and a richer atmosphere than my earlier work. This is because I’ve tried increasingly to situate my exploration of the modern self within the social contexts in which all modern selves come to be. I’m writing more about the environments and public spaces that are available to modern people, and the ones that they create, and the ways they act and interact in these spaces in the attempt to make themselves at home. I’m emphasizing those modes of modernism that seek to take over or to remake public space, to appropriate and transform it in the name of the people who are its public. This is why so much of All That Is Solid is taken up with public struggles and encounters, dialogues and confrontations in the streets; and why I’ve come to see the street and the demonstration as primary symbols of modern life.

Another reason that I’ve written so much about ordinary people and everyday life in the street, in the context of this controversy, is that Anderson’s vision is so remote from them. He only has eyes for world-historical Revolutions in politics and world-class Masterpieces in culture; he stakes out his claim on heights of metaphysical perfection, and won’t deign to notice anything less. This would be all right, I guess, except that he’s so clearly miserable over the lack of company up there. It might be more fruitful if, instead of demanding whether modernity can still produce masterpieces and revolutions, we were to ask whether it can generate sources and spaces of meaning, of freedom, dignity, beauty, joy, solidarity. Then we would have to confront the messy actuality in which modern men and women and children live. The air might be less pure, but the atmosphere would be a lot more nourishing; we would find, in Gertrude Stein’s phrase, a lot more there there. Who knows—it’s impossible to know in advance—we might even find some masterpieces or revolutions in the making.

Marxism and modernism, for Berman, happened on the ground, in the world. In this sense, he was a “connected critic”. But for Berman it was not enough to address the specific material needs of a community; the critic had to also address its spiritual and emotional ones: the subterranean desires that, when unfulfilled, also limit the range and variety of our freedom. “The complaint against democratic capitalism,” he argued, “was not that it was too individualistic, but rather that it wasn’t individualistic enough: It forced every individual into competitive and aggressive impasses (‘zero-sum games’) which prevented any individual feelings, needs, ideas, energies from being expressed.” There was a need for a new moral basis for the Left’s critique of what capitalism and modern life did to people. As he put it in Politics of Authenticity, there needed to be “a Marxism with soul.”

“Marxism with soul,” I think, always had a double meaning for Berman. It meant a Marxism that moved beyond the structuralist analyses and historical determinism of its more orthodox readings of the tradition. But it also meant that Marxism needed to address the soul. It had to be modern, carrying with it the messy energy and rhythms of our particular moment. This meant engaging with everyday culture, in all of its messiness, wherever it emerged. Berman never shied away from this, in appearance or commitment: His hair and beard sprang out in curlicues of gray and black, his shirts were almost always wrinkled tie-dyes. He had Freud and Marilyn Monroe bobble-heads on his desk at home. His body, in later years, was ailing; this was clear to many of us. But even as Berman got older, he was always full of life and surprises. At one meeting, having fallen asleep, he woke up to one of Dissent’s standard discussions despairing over the “state of things.” Sitting up in his chair he proposed we adopt a new motto: “Keep on truckin’!”

Berman’s sense of humanist exuberance, his vision of a feeling Left, offered many around Dissent a view of a different kind of left politics. Social criticism as psychic complaint has a long history, going back as far as Emerson, and finding its twentieth-century expression in figures like William James, Randolph Bourne, Paul Goodman, Ralph Ellison, Susan Sontag, and Ellen Willis. But Berman was our practitioner. It was not only the creative self to which he was committed. He was committed to masterpieces and revolutions, to solidarity and liberation, to utopias that exceed present imagination. He was also a master at finding meaning in the face of ruin and emptiness. He insisted that politics not only be one of feeling but also one that addressed the world as it was. It must seek out that Leibnizian imperative: the best of all possible worlds.

After a Dissent meeting in Soho shortly before he died, Berman and I walked up to the 1 train together. As we trod Wooster’s cobblestones, Berman kept pointing at various buildings and remarking on the artists who once lived there. Everything, he said, changed in the 1980s. Art became expensive—to make, to buy, to view. The art community was replaced by a financial one. On cue, a group of young people passed: a clatter of heels, a scent of cologne. Embarrassed for my generation, I said, “It’s a shame it’s all gone.” “No,” Berman said, “it’s back. Look at all the young people.”

David Marcus