One of the most spectacular debates that has emerged since the late 1970s has been those concerning the taxonomy and ontology of two interrelated historical periodizations, that of the “enlightenment” and that of “modernity.” In the history of ideas in both Europe and America, the duel question of “What is enlightenment?” and “What is modernity?” has been the subject of innumerable books, articles, dissertations, and conferences. The conjoining of both these questions and the interrogation of the reality of the intellectual movements they contend to signify has been the focus of recent work by James Schmidt and Graeme Garrard. Garrard, like Isaiah Berlin a generation before him, has linked the end of enlightenment and the arrival of modernity with the failure of rationality, cosmopolitanism, representative government, and the consequent rise of the totalitarian state. Thus, in this context, to define is to also narrate, explain, and defend oneself against the explanations of others.
For Garrard, political theorist Eric Vogelin, Richard Wolin, Ira Katznelson in his Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust, as well as Zygmunt Bauman in his Modernity and the Holocaust, all of whom in some ways follow Hannah Arendt, the failure of the enlightenment and the advent of modernity can help, in no small measure, to explain the ensuing failure of reason and democracy in the twentieth century. The cataclysms of the First World War, the advent of
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