Walker Percy’s Last Men: Love in the Ruins as a Fable of American Decline

Abstract

Laden with allusions to philosophy and addressing the gamut of modernity’s political and social quandaries, Walker Percy’s novels present images of our existence as fallen wayfarers in a profoundly disturbed world, and they stand as warnings of where we as a people might soon go. This essay explores the politics and psychology of Love in the Ruins and argues that Percy’s value to political philosophers lies in the way he traces out modernity’s warping effects upon our already fallen nature, and the consequences this has on our ability to resist self-destructive beliefs and actions in times of crisis. Where human community and sincere religious belief once restrained the extremes of human action, Percy develops a striking account of the way people unmoored from the old order lose their way, and perhaps more importantly, cannot develop a self-understanding that might lead them into a coherent, healthy life. Because we oscillate between the angelic and the bestial, our peril stems not so much from Nietzschean quiescence, but in our alternating extremes of thought and behavior.

Keywords: Walker Percy, last man, decline, politics and literature