The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism.(Book review)

Historian, The, June, 2007 by Gregor, A. James

The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism. By Richard Wolin. (Princeton, N.J." Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 375. $29.95.)

This author's excellent study provides the reader with an informed survey of some of the more important intellectual trends of the twentieth century, employing the writings of a selection of Europe's avant-garde authors. One of the most disquieting of those trends is that which sought the renunciation of what are generally referred to as Enlightenment values: "the predominance of science, reason, democracy, socialism, individualism, and the like" (3-4). The rejection of those values by "Counter-Enlightenment ideologues" constitutes the central concern of Richard Wolin's...

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