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.
