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

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Katznelson, Ira, author.

Series:

• University seminars/Leonard Hastings Schoff memorial lectures.
• Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Political science--Philosophy.
• Human behavior--Philosophy.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (204 pages).

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, [2020]

Summary:

During and especially after World War II, 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 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 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 the Holocaust. Confronting dashed hopes for reason and knowledge, they asked not just whether the Enlightenment should define modernity but also which Enlightenment we should wish to have.

Contents:

• Frontmatter
• 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:

• Includes index.
• Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-231-55239-4

OCLC:

1202459286