The intellectual origins of modernity
by Ohana, David
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 usetheir insight to make a world different from the one that they found, and to liberatethemselves fromtheir immemorial chains. This passion created th…
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- Full title :The intellectual origins of modernity / David Ohana.
Summary
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 usetheir insight to make a world different from the one that they found, and to liberatethemselves fromtheir immemorial chains. This passion created the political ideologies of the nineteenth century and made its imprint on the totalitarian regimesthat arose in their wake in the twentieth. Underlying the Promethean passion there was modernity--humankind's project of self-creation--and 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 a refusal to take Promethean horizons into account. This book attests the importance of reason, which remains a powerful critical weapon of humankind against the idols that have come out of modernity: totalitarianism, fundamentalism, the golem of technology, genetic engineering and a boundless will to power. Without it, the new Prometheus is liable to return the fire to the gods.
Read More ↓Edition Statements
- Publication Date:©2019
Publication Statements
- Publisher(s):Routledge
- Place of Publication:New York, NY
- Language:eng
- Publication Date:©2019
The Physical Object
- Description:1 online resource
Edition Identifiers
- ISBN:9781351110501, 1351110500, 9781351110495, 1351110497, 9781351110488, 1351110489, 9781351110518, 1351110519
- DOI:10.4324/9781351110518
- oclc:on1083156520
- LC Classification:CB358
- Dewey Decimal:909.8
Table of Contents
Prologue : the Promethean passion of modernity -- Fom Rousseau to Tocqueville : Janus face of modernity -- 1848 : "We are sitting on a volcano" -- From Marx to Lenin : a red future -- Anarchism, nihilism, racism -- Foucault and beyond -- Epilogue : the end of modernity?
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