The Intellectual Origins of Modernity
About this ebook
Underlying the Promethean passion there was modernity—humankind's project of self-creation—and enlightenment, the existence of a constant tension between the actual and the desirable, between reality and the ideal. Beneath the weariness, the exhaustion and the skepticism of post-modernist criticism is a refusal to take Promethean horizons into account. This book attests the importance of reason, which remains a powerful critical weapon of humankind against the idols that have come out of modernity: totalitarianism, fundamentalism, the golem of technology, genetic engineering and a boundless will to power. Without it, the new Prometheus is liable to return the fire to the gods.
About the author
David Ohana is Professor of Modern European History at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He has been affiliated with the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, the Paris-Sorbonne, Harvard University, and the University of California at Berkeley. He specializes in comparative national mythologies.
