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Cabbages and Kings is a rather whimsical title (borrowed from Lewis Carroll) for a collection of what are, for the most part, learned essays on serious subjects. But the collection has a somewhat whimsical spirit as it brings together writings on many things, such as style in life and art, in restaurant design, and in the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde; relations between liberalism and conservatism, Islam and the West, church and state, Modernism and Postmodernism; ideas of Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Alexis de Tocqueville, and a daughter of Karl Marx; as well as the story of a Japanese detention camp, the necessity of laughter, and how to think about the meaning of life.
And yet for all of its variety of subjects, Cabbages and Kings has an underlying theme. That is a humanistic way of life. Whether exploring the nature of style or the aspirations of Modernism, the character of popular culture or the ethics of civility, the tangles of self-consciousness or the sense of cultural decline at the end of the twentieth century, the perspective of humanism prevails. That perspective embraces ideas of many kinds along with the desire to shape a world that gives humanistic meaning to life.
Overall, Cabbages and Kings is a spirited adventure in ideas, culture, and humanism engaging both mind and imagination as it takes readers through a variegated intellectual landscape.
