Enlightenment and Totalitarianism A Book Review of  Critique and Crisis, Enlightenment and the  Pathogenesis of Modern Society

Joodi, Behnam; Tavassoli Roknabadi, Majid

doi:10.30465/crtls.2021.27699.1633

Enlightenment and Totalitarianism A Book Review of Critique and Crisis, Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society

Document Type : Research

Authors

Behnam Joodi ¹

Majid Tavassoli Roknabadi ²

¹ PhD of Political Science, Political Thoughts, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Law and Political Science, Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch, Tehran, Iran

² Associate Professor of Political Science, Political Thoughts, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Law and Political Science, Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch, Tehran, Iran

https://doi.org/10.30465/crtls.2021.27699.1633

Abstract

The main focus of this article is a review of Critique and Crisis, Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society by Reinhart Koselleck. Critique and Crisis was first published in German in 1959 and published in English in 1988 by The MIT Press. Koselleck’s book attempts to explain the Utopian ideas of the twentieth century by looking at their origins in the eighteenth. The main idea of Critique and Crisis is that the Enlightenment itself became Utopian and even hypocritical because-as far as continental Europe was concerned-it saw itself excluded from political power-sharing. The structure of Absolutism, which was rooted in the dichotomy between sovereign and subject, between public policy and private morality, prevented the Enlightenment and the emancipation movement produced by it from seeing itself as a political phenomenon. Instead the Enlightenment developed patterns of thought and behaviour which, at the latest from 1789 onwards, foundered on the rocks of the concrete political challenges that arose. The Enlightenment succumbed to a Utopian image which, while deceptively propelling it, helped to produce contradictions that could not be resolved in practice and prepared the way for the Terror and for dictatorship. The main idea of Koselleck’s book seems to be based on the idea of Carl Schmitt in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, which he explains and expand in this book. Koselleck’s critique and its historical entwinement with twentieth-century totalitarianism is a biased or willfully selective picture.

Keywords

Reinhart Koselleck

Carl Schmitt

Crisis

Critique

Enlightenment

Subjects

political science

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