In a pluralistic society without absolute standards of judgment, how can an individual live a moral life? This is the question Robert Musil (1880-1942), an Austrian-born engineer and mathematician turned writer, asked in essays, plays, and fiction that grapple with the moral ambivalence of modern life. Though unfinished, his monumental novel of Vienna in the febrile days before World War I, "The Man without Qualities, " is identified by German scholars as the most important literary work of the twentieth century.
In a fresh examination of his essays, notebooks, and fiction, Patrizia...

In a pluralistic society without absolute standards of judgment, how can an individual live a moral life? This is the question Robert Musil (1880-1942), an Austrian-born engineer and mathematician turned writer, asked in essays, plays, and fiction that grapple with the moral ambivalence of modern life. Though unfinished, his monumental novel of Vienna in the febrile days before World War I, "The Man without Qualities, " is identified by German scholars as the most important literary work of the twentieth century.
In a fresh examination of his essays, notebooks, and fiction, Patrizia...