Be Not Afraid: A Denunciation of Despair

Romano Guardini, in the wake of World War II, wrote: “The signs of the times have indicated…with all the spontaneity of a genuine symptom, that the human personality is in danger.” Diagnosing and treating the cause of this symptom was, for Emmanuel Mounier, a mission of the utmost urgency. His philosophy of personalism represented “a total effort to comprehend and outgrow the whole crisis of the twentieth-century man.” Be Not Afraid is a précis of Mounier’s thought: his critiques of materialism and scientism; his Péguy-inspired dialectic of revolution; his distrust of the structures of liberalism and dismay at the uninhibited sprawl of capitalism; and the conflict between his sympathies toward Marxism and his acceptance of the Christian gospel that “in hope we are saved.”
An impassioned appraisal of past and present, Be Not Afraid: A Denunciation of Despair sheds fulsome, at times uncomfortable, light on the life of the Western mind at the midpoint of the twentieth century.