By now, readers of this book know that prose is its only true hero. It wasn’t meant to be; it just happened, in trying to do justice to the achievements of bourgeois culture. Prose as the bourgeois style, in the broadest sense; a way of being in the world, not just of representing it. Prose as analysis, first of all; Hegel’s ‘unmistakable definiteness and clear intelligibility’, or Weber’s ‘clarity’.
The Bourgeois: Between...
