Abstract

The Intellectual Origins of Modernityexplores the long and winding road of modernity from Rousseau to Foucault, and its roots, which are not to be found in a desire for enlightenment or in the idea of progress but in the Promethean passion of Western man. Modernity is the Promethean passion, the passion of man to be his own master, to use his insight to make a world different from the one that he found, and to liberate himself from his immemorial chains. This passion created the political ideologies of the nineteenth century and made its imprint on the totalitarian regimes which arose in their wake in the twentieth. Underlying the Promethean passion there was modernity - man'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 mankind 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.