Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures)

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. During and especially after the Second World War, 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 Western 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 western 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 holocaust. Confronting their period's dashed hopes for reason and knowledge, they asked not just whether the Enlightenment should define modernity, but which Enlightenment we should wish to have. Decades later, in the midst of a new type of war and reanimated discussions of the concept of evil, we share no small stake in assessing their successes and limitations.

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.

Foreign Affairs

The horrors that culminated in the 1940s — world war, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust — dealt a severe blow to Western society's faith in the Enlightenment, rationality, and human progress. In this masterful excursion into the history of ideas, Katznelson explores how a reconstructionist generation of political scholars has since attempted to make sense of these dark times and rethink the bases of political theory and liberal community. The book is organized around a sequence of intellectual portraits. Hannah Arendt's treatise on totalitarianism and Karl Polanyi's analysis of the geopolitical structures of the liberal international order offered new insights into large-scale historical change. David Truman and Richard Hofstadter searched for ways to reconcile liberal democracy with the new modern state. Harold Lassell, Robert Dahl, and Charles Lindblom pioneered policy studies that sought to harness technological advances for larger social ends. Katznelson contends that these intrepid intellectuals were united in their determination to maneuver between nihilism and absolutism while preserving their ideals in an age of global catastrophe. Although the book was written largely before the attacks of September 11, 2001, it speaks powerfully to today's struggles to reconcile liberal values with a new threat of violence.

At the University of Chicago celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of its Social Science Research Building in November 1955, Harold Lasswell concluded his remarks by reflecting on the role of social scientists "in the social process," which he summarized as that of "reconstructing our institutions of enlightenment." contents Preface and Acknowledgments Chapter 1 beyond the common measure Chapter 2 the origins of dark times Chapter 3 a seminar on the state Chapter 4 a new objectivity Index