Desolation and enlightenment : political knowledge after total war, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust / Ira Katznelson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Katznelson, Ira.

Series:

University seminars/Leonard Hastings Schoff memorial lectures

Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Political science--Philosophy.

Political science.

Human behavior--Philosophy.

Human behavior.

Political psychology.

Political sociology.

World politics--1945-1989.

World politics.

War (Philosophy).

International relations--Philosophy.

International relations.

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945).

Jews--Public opinion--History.

Jews.

Total war.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvi, 185 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, c2003.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

During and especially after the Second World War, a group of leading scholars who had been perilously close to the war's devastation joined others fortunate enough to have been protected by distance in an effort to redefine and reinvigorate Western liberal ideals for a radically new age. Treating evil as an analytical category, they sought to discover the sources of twentieth-century horror and the potentialities of the modern state in the wake of western desolation. In the process, they devised strikingly new ways to understand politics, sociology and history that reverberate still. In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West's moral bearing. In light of their epoch's calamities these intellectuals insisted that the tradition of Enlightenment thought required a new realism, a good deal of renovation, and much recommitment. This array of historians, political philosophers, and social scientists understood that a simple reassertion of liberal modernism had been made radically insufficient by the enormities and moral catastrophes of war, totalitarianism, and holocaust. Confronting their period's dashed hopes for reason and knowledge, they asked not just whether the Enlightenment should define modernity, but which Enlightenment we should wish to have. Decades later, in the midst of a new type of war and reanimated discussions of the concept of evil, we share no small stake in assessing their successes and limitations.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

One: Beyond the Common Measure

Two: The Origins of Dark Times

Three: A Seminar on the State

Four: A New Objectivity

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780231507424

0231507429

OCLC:

818856531