Review of PERSON/PLANET: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society

• Published in: American journal of orthopsychiatry 1980-07, Vol.50 (3), p.551-554
• Main Author: Shoben, Edward Joseph
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Creativity; Human; Industrial and Organizational Psychology; Orthopsychiatry; Society; Spirituality
• ISSN: 0002-9432; 1939-0025
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1939-0025.1980.tb03313.x

Reviews the book, Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society by Theodore Roszak (1979). Theodore Roszak has established himself as one of the most informed, one of the most civil, and one of the most rational of the proponents of a counter-culture, a radical opposition to what he calls urban-industrial society. As a kind of cosmic poetry, that equation of personal and planetary needs and rights seems attractive. To the degree that it promotes and facilitates a kind of reverential awe in the face of nature’s beauty, power, and mystery, it serves a spiritual function that has genuine value. However that may be, it remains odd that a book concerned, as this one is, with personal freedom should attend so loosely to the conditions under which choice is maximized. From one critically important angle of regard, freedom means precisely the exercise of a wide range of options. The restrictions on freedom in simple primitive societies. Withholding that third cheer is crucial; rejecting culture out of hand is fatally impossible. In appearing to make alienation the cure for alienation, Roszak seems to go at least far beyond the active and person asserting withholding of that third cheer. But he also has examined some of the most serious and distressing problems of our age in a literate and insightful fashion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)