Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: An evolution in the rules of thought --
Pt. 1. Freud to Wittgenstein. The sense of a beginning.
Ch. 1. Disturbing the peace.
Ch. 2. Half ’ way house.
Ch. 3. Darwin’s heart of darkness.
Ch. 4. Les demoiselles de modernism.
Ch. 5. The pragmatic mind of America.
Ch. 6. E = mc2.
Ch. 7. Ladders of blood.
Ch. 8. Volcano.
Ch. 9. Counter-attack --
Pt. 2. Spengler to animal farm. Civilisations and their discontents.
Ch. 10. Eclipse.
Ch. 11. The acquisitive wasteland.
Ch. 12. Babbitt’s Middletown.
Ch. 13. Heroes’ twilight.
Ch. 14. The evolution of evolution.
Ch. 15. The golden age of physics.
Ch. 16. Cold comfort.
Ch. 17. Inquisition.
Ch. 18. Cold comfort.
Ch. 19. Hitler’s gift.
Ch. 20. Colossus.
Ch. 21. No way back.
Ch. 22. Light in August --
Pt. 3. Sartre to the sea of tranquility. The new human condition and the great society.
Ch. 23. Paris in the Year Zero.
Ch. 24. Daughters and lovers.
Ch. 25. The new human condition.
Ch. 26. Cracks in the canon.
Ch. 27. Forces of nature.
Ch. 28. Mind minus metaphysics.
Ch. 29. Manhattan transfer.
Ch. 30. Equality, freedom, and justice in the great society.
Ch. 31. La longue dur’e.
Ch. 32. Heaven and earth --
Pt. 4. The counter-culture to Kosovo. The view from nowhere, the view from everywhere.
Ch. 33. A new sensibility.
Ch. 34. Genetic safari.
Ch. 35. The French collection
Ch. 36. Doing well, and doing good.
Ch. 37. The wages of repression.
Ch. 38. Local knowledge.
Ch. 39 ’…The best idea, ever’.
Ch. 40. The empire writes back.
Ch. 41. Culture wars.
Ch. 42. Deep order.
Conclusion: The positive hour.

From Freud to Babbitt, from Animal Farm to Sartre to the Great Society, from the Theory of Relativity to counterculture to Kosovo, The Modern Mind is encyclopedic, covering the major writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers who produced the ideas by which we live. Peter Watson has produced a fluent and engaging narrative of the intellectual tradition of the twentieth century, and the men and women who created it.