Edition: U.S. / Global  The Global Villain  By Barry Gewen
Published: March 30, 2003   Liberty, Commerce, and Violence  in
an American World.  By Jedediah Purdy.  337 pp. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf. $24.  JEDEDIAH PURDY was the wunderkind du jour a few
years ago. In 1999, when he was 24, he published ''For Common
Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today,'' an
ambitious assault on his own generation for its narcissism and
self-absorption. Purdy's target was the ironic sensibility that,
he said, had infected just about everyone under 35; his arch
villain was Jerry Seinfeld, ''irony incarnate.'' In a cynical
Seinfeldian world -- also the world of ''Saturday Night Live''
and ''Beavis and Butt-head'' -- nothing mattered, nothing was
true; it was ''all spin, all the way down.'' ''For Common
Things'' was a courageous book, not only because it was
articulating a decidedly unfashionable view but also because it
is hard to attack irony without sounding like a pill. Purdy
could sound like a pill. His calls f