Description
Book SynopsisMatthew W. Slaboch examines the work of German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Oswald Spengler, Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and American historians Henry Adams and Christopher Lasch-rare skeptics of the idea of progress who have much to offer political theory, a field dominated by historical optimists.
Trade Review"Slaboch has written an elegant and important book on the political, philosophical, and cultural meaning and limits of the idea of progress, as understood by major nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers . . . He encourages us to rethink with a more discerning eye our own predisposition to embrace progress, by eruditely reminding us of its complexities-and costs." *
The Review of Politics *
"In his recent book, Matthew W. Slaboch provides an original and erudite study of an eclectic and generally neglected group of thinkers, Neglected in part, according to Slaboch, because of their unorthodox antipathy towards the belief in 'progress,' or 'the belief that humans are capable of making lasting improvements-intellectual and scientific, material, moral, and cultural.' The study not only sheds valuable light on these thinkers and their contributions to political thought, but also offers a promising illustration of the kind of work that might be done in the burgeoning field of comparative political theory." *
Interpretation *
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A Road to Nowhere is a wonderfully suggestive and gracefully written, succinct but never superficial, exploration of a remarkable group of thinkers and critics who have in common one thing and one thing alone: a rejection of the modern ideology of progress." * Daniel J. Mahoney, Assumption College *
"With doubts about the steady forward progress of Western culture coming to the fore politically and socially, this is a timely book. Its strength and the source of its originality is Matthew Slaboch's comparative approach across German, Russian, and American cultural contexts and his articulate and straightforward synthesis of the material." * Richard Sigurdson, University of Calgary *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Chapter 1. "The Same, But Otherwise": Arthur Schopenhauer as a Critic of "Progress"
Chapter 2. The Autocrat and the Anarchist: Nicholas I, Leo Tolstoy, and the Problem of "Progress"
Chapter 3. "The Path to Hell": Henry (and Brooks) Adams on History and Politics
Chapter 4. Critics of the Idea of Progress in an Age of Extremes: Three Twentieth-Century Voices
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
