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DAVID MAZELLA. The Making of Modern Cynicism. Charlottesville: Virginia, 2007. Pp. xi + 305. $35.
Johnson wrote, "The natural flight of the human mind is not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope." Mr. Mazella, explaining why the contemporary view of cynicism is universally pejorative, argues that "Cynics are feared because they threaten the public with a genuinely worrying prospect, a future without hope of meaningful change. At the very least, cynics foresee a future in which individuals have little chance of fixing their problems or improving their conditions in life or at work." With fourth century BC philosopher Diogenes of Sinope as his terminus a quo, Mr. Mazella surveys the protean nature of the word and its concomitant meanings through its manifestations in, especially, Shakespeare Timon of Athens), Davenant, Lyttelton, Rousseau, Burke, Isaac D'Israeli, Wilde, and Foucault. Foucault also provides modern context for Mr. Mazella's approach, as do a plethora of contemporary social historians, especially Theodor Adorno, Alan Keenan, and William Chaloupka.
Readers of the Scriblerian may be most interested in the third chapter ("From Rude Cynics to 'Cynical Revilers' "), with its specific discussions of Davenant, Shaftesbury, Fielding, and Lyttelton, "when the breakup of rhetoric reduced Diogenes and Cynic philosophy to burlesque figures, doubly displaced parodies of a once-robust philosophy." Diogenes is reshaped to suit each writer's rhetorical purpose. In Davenant's staged debate, The First Day's Entertainment at Rutland House (1656), speeches against the theater...