Hard Times and Innovative Theory
| Autor: | Fred M. Frohock |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2004 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | International Studies Review. 6:120-122 |
| ISSN: | 1468-2486 1521-9488 |
| DOI: | 10.1111/j.1079-1760.2004.00378.x |
| Popis: | Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust By Ira Katznelson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 208 pp., $27.50 (ISBN: 0-231-11194-0) That we live in strange and hard times has been an observed fact of life for anyone witnessing the twentieth century. In Desolation and Enlightenment , Ira Katznelson has written a rich and thoughtful overview of critical works in political inquiry and history that have attempted to understand these times—with their spectacles of total war, totalitarianism, and in particular the holocaust. Katznelson's guides are venerable, including primarily Karl Polanyi's (1944) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times and Hannah Arendt's (1968) The Origins of Totalitarianism but also the work of a melange of great and near great scholars, such as David Truman, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Robert Dahl, and Richard Hofstadter. The list is drawn in part from notables in Katznelson's academic circles. Hofstadter and Truman were his teachers when he was an undergraduate at Columbia University; as a junior faculty member, he attended Arendt's lectures at the New School, and so on. But the list also suggests a chart representing some of the main intellectual currents in twentieth-century Western political thought. As a result, Desolation and Enlightenment is a return to a time and place of great historical change and to some of the figures who tried to make sense of events that were nearly unintelligible to those who experienced or witnessed them. The challenges presented by these events are familiar by now in social theory. Both Polanyi and Arendt recognized that the version of evil endemic in the twentieth century was new and “previously unknown to us” (Arendt, quoted on p. 72). Moreover, it defeated many of the guiding principles and forms of social organization that had developed since … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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