Henry Louis Mencken was a penetrating writer, who represented the crux of the journalism of America. Then, a philosophical analysis of his work will be useful to understand that journalism. To do this, I have perused A Gang of Pecksniffs[1], which is a compendium of texts engaged against the hypocrisy of mediocre newspapermen. Our point d’appui could be this simple Kantian sentence: we can not know things in an objective manner. Our necessary representations a priori, like geometry and arithmetic, give a form and an order to the various data coming from the exterior world.
[1] Mencken, Henry Louis, A Gang of Pecksniffs. New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House-Publishers, 1955.
