Morten Høi Jensen at Los Angeles Review of Books:
For the last five decades, the writer and critic George Scialabba has been carrying the torch for two traditions vital to the well-being of any sane and enlightened democracy: secular progressivism and literary criticism. The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia, a new selection of his admired essays and reviews, is the fruit of a life dedicated to both: an eloquent demonstration of one writer’s reading and thinking about modernity, politics, and the possibility of utopia in dark times. The result is the most humane response to our postliberal moment I have yet read.
Originally published in places like The Nation, Dissent, and Commonweal, the essays and reviews collected here were all written between 1983 and 2025. In the first half dozen or so, Scialabba stages a broad metaphysical drama between the Enlightenment tradition and some of its more recent Anglo-American critics, from Allan Bloom and Alasdair MacIntyre to Christopher Lasch and Charles Taylor. In their specific ways, these thinkers hold the belief that progress “is a myth, that historical optimism is the opium of the intellectuals.” Yet far from being your garden-variety anti-liberal cranks, they offer critiques of the modern world that deserve to be taken seriously. After all, “modernity has not turned out altogether well.”
More here.