In a series of articles published in Commentary between 1967 and 1976, Barrett presented his interpretation of such modern philosophers as William James, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Readers of these provocative and lively essays could have easily predicted their eventual publication in a single volume.

The Illusion of Technique is that volume. Rather surprisingly, Barrett has chosen to embed his reflections on major figures in 20th-century philosophy in an examination of "the nature of technique—its scope and limits."…

Barrett's thesis about "technique" provides him with both villains and heroes. His villains are sometimes the technicians who design detention camps to exorcise such quirky souls as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, sometimes the computer people who would love to reduce all human activity to a simple formula, sometimes social scientists of a behaviorist bent.

For the "bland summer hotel" that B. F. Skinner presented as a Utopian ideal in Walden II, Barrett...