By Randall Smith, The Catholic Thing - One of the most popular genres of non-fiction recently has been social critique. It’s all the rage to tell people where we as a society went wrong. Every aspiring “public intellectual” must stake his or her claim to prominence, it seems, by crafting a credible social critique. There’s Augusto del Noce in Italy, Pierre Manent in France, Charles Taylor in Canada, and Hartmut Rosa in Germany, all with big books, sometimes in multiple volumes.