Desolation and Enlightenment

Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust
anniversary Auflage
ISBN: 978-0-231-19788-5
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 208 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 411 g

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.

This anniversary edition of Desolation and Enlightenment features a new introduction in which Katznelson reflects on recent challenges.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Katznelson, Ira (Columbia University)

Katznelson, Ira

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Theorie, Politische Philosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface and Acknowledgments
1. Beyond Common Measure
2. The Origins of Dark Times
3. A Seminar on the State
4. A New Objectivity
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Ira Katznelson is interim provost, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, and deputy director of Columbia World Projects at Columbia University. He is the author of many acclaimed books, including When Affirmative Action Was White (2005) and Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2013).