The most endearing thing about this book is its ambitious scope and range, sampling from all kinds of artistic, literary, and political movements as well as theories of urban life and architecture throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The drive to distill what is essential about modernity from such a broad, eclectic set of sources makes the book feel like a relic in its own right. It reminded me what is lost in today's scholarly writing, driven by academic job market imperatives to confine itself to a subfield of an already hyper-specific discipline.

It’s a shame, because this kind of thing is fun as hell to read even when you aren’t totally on board. There was plenty I found unconvincing, especially aspects of his ‘reinterpretation’ of Marx, but those still never felt like a demerit to the project as a whole. The St. Petersburg section—the longest in the book—was a high point and would be worth reading on its own.

The book’s central argument is that modernism and modernization—while conventionally sequestered as discrete concepts—warrant joint consideration. They are distinct but interdependent and co-constitutive phenomena, two aspects of a single motive force that compels society's ceaseless development. They alternate between being the primary and secondary term in a process of constant revolutionizing motion that is both destructive and creative.

As a thesis goes it's not exactly groundbreaking, but that's not really the point. The way that it functions as the connective tissue between so many figures and places and historical moments that don’t seem at first glance to belong together in the same book is consistently exciting. This is what criticism should strive for.