A Superb Mind

Collected Essays, by George Lichtheim. New York: Viking Press. 492 pp.

George Lichtheim fitted ill the technological age whose coming he augured. He was, genuinely, a writer: one of the rare breed whose craft is saying forth, transforming unwieldy reality into the freedom of the word. His occasional essays are the essential Lichtheim: brilliantly, often scathingly evoking a shock of recognition.

That recognition is most direct as Lichtheim hammers away at our fundamental experience and his fundamental insight, the rise of the managed society, which no longer happens in the margins of productive processes but rather is done. Society has become an act rather than an event. Not owners and toilers, but technic...