Abstract
This review treats Mark Greif's remarkable inquiry into what he calls the crisis of man and man-talk: the invocation to inquire into humanity that Greif traces out through various genres of writing (philosophy, journalism, literature, and literary criticism) through a succession of decades (1930s–1960s) within an exclusively North American US context. As seems suitable for this journal, the review focuses primarily on Greif's own standpoint and methods. In its first half, it identifies and ultimately questions Greif's decidedly anti-hermeneutic stance. Greif cordons off his own discourse from those he treats, picking an approach that prevents his making their questions his own, despite the fact that many of his chosen texts raise issues pertaining to how history, especially intellectual history, is to be conducted. In the review's second half, two key instances are surveyed: Greif's discussions of Hannah Arendt and of Ralph Ellison.