Description

Book Synopsis


The Intellectual Origins of Modernity explores the long and winding road of modernity from Rousseau to Foucault and its roots, which are not to be found in a desire for enlightenment or in the idea of progress but in the Promethean passion of Western humankind. Modernity is the Promethean passion, the passion of humans to be their own master, to use their insight to make a world different from the one that they found, and to liberate themselves from their immemorial chains. This passion created the political ideologies of the nineteenth century and made its imprint on the totalitarian regimes that arose in their wake in the twentieth.



Underlying the Promethean passion there was modernityhumankind''s project of self-creationand enlightenment, the existence of a constant tension between the actual and the desirable, between reality and the ideal. Beneath the weariness, the exhaustion and the skepticism of post-modernist criticism is

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Promethean Passion of Modernity 1. From Rousseau to Tocqueville: Janus face of Modernity 2.1848: "We are sitting on a Volcano" 3. From Marx to Lenin: A Red Future 4. Anarchism, Nihilism, Racism 5. Foucault and beyond Epilogue: The End of Modernity?

The Intellectual Origins of Modernity

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    A Paperback by David Ohana

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      Book details

      Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
      Published 6/30/2021 12:00:00 AM
      ISBN-13 9781032093321
      978-1032093321
      ISBN-10 1032093323
      Also in:
      Western philosophy from c 1800

      Description

      Book Synopsis


      The Intellectual Origins of Modernity explores the long and winding road of modernity from Rousseau to Foucault and its roots, which are not to be found in a desire for enlightenment or in the idea of progress but in the Promethean passion of Western humankind. Modernity is the Promethean passion, the passion of humans to be their own master, to use their insight to make a world different from the one that they found, and to liberate themselves from their immemorial chains. This passion created the political ideologies of the nineteenth century and made its imprint on the totalitarian regimes that arose in their wake in the twentieth.



      Underlying the Promethean passion there was modernityhumankind''s project of self-creationand enlightenment, the existence of a constant tension between the actual and the desirable, between reality and the ideal. Beneath the weariness, the exhaustion and the skepticism of post-modernist criticism is

      Table of Contents

      Prologue: The Promethean Passion of Modernity 1. From Rousseau to Tocqueville: Janus face of Modernity 2.1848: "We are sitting on a Volcano" 3. From Marx to Lenin: A Red Future 4. Anarchism, Nihilism, Racism 5. Foucault and beyond Epilogue: The End of Modernity?

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