Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (review)

The total collapse of the European geopolitical system of liberal and democratic states in the historical process that culminated in World War II involved unprecedented phenomena—total war, totalitarianism, and the destruction of the European Jews. Taken together, these experiences were so traumatic that the immediate postwar era saw a wide range of intellectual responses. Some conservatives advocated a return to an earlier Christian culture based on religious authority and belief in the supernatural (e.g., T. S. Eliot) or even a revival of the values and epistemology of ancient Greece (e.g., Leo Strauss). Orthodox Marxists, on the other hand, became even more convinced that the capitalist economic system was doomed to failure. Still other observers, alarmed by the invention and use of the atomic bomb, withdrew into a passive skepticism about the ability of humankind to survive at all. These responses shared the conviction that the liberal values and democratic ideals of the Enlightenment, from which modern European political culture had sprung, had proven to be hopelessly inadequate as a basis for civilization.

Ira Katznelson's aim in Desolation and Enlightenment is to show that these responses were (and remain) mistaken. He presents the work of a group of like-minded historians, political philosophers, and social scientists who engaged in what Katznelson describes as "the political studies enlightenment" (p. xiii) of the 1940s and 1950s. These scholars attempted to reconstruct an enlightenment based on the original core values of individualism, freedom (both political and economic), democracy, equality, and universality, but (all-importantly) without the unrealistic optimism and naiveté of so many of their predecessors. These reconstructionists recognized that in order to achieve a new realism, they would have to establish an empirical and scientific basis for understanding how and why humans commit radical evil. This would involve, first, tracing the origins of radical evil by showing exactly how European liberal institutions and civic culture failed in the face of fascism and dictatorship. To convey this aspect of the political studies enlightenment, Katznelson focuses on the work of two Europeans who had witnessed the coming of the new dark age first hand, Hannah Arendt and Karl Polanyi. The second task of the project was to study American political institutions and civic culture more closely in order to learn why they had proved to be relatively stable and successful, and whether there were any institutional and cultural weaknesses that might make American liberalism vulnerable to totalitarian or fascist movements. In regard to the second part of the project, Katznelson discusses works by American scholars David Truman, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, and Robert Dahl, among others. Katznelson emphasizes that the work of the scholars he associates with the political studies enlightenment project constituted "a distinctive approach" to the problem of liberal values in the face of radical evil; these thinkers did not constitute "a school, since they were not bound together self-consciously" (p. 1).

Chapter Two, "The Origins of Dark Times," is devoted to Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism and Polanyi's The Great Transformation and takes up fully one-third of Katznelson's book. Like other scholars who participated in the political studies enlightenment project, Arendt and Polanyi accepted that there had occurred a rupture in history that required new categories of thought and methods of analysis. Consequently, they believed that it was not enough merely to reaffirm liberal and democratic values. Moreover, both rejected attempts to explain the rise of fascism and totalitarianism in terms of German exceptionalism, "modernity" as a whole, or the values of the Enlightenment itself. Instead, they engaged in "risky, difficult, and compelling efforts" (p. 54) to understand the particular historical factors that came together to make these modern evils possible (but not inevitable). For example, Polanyi focused on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century market system that caused so much insecurity and suffering throughout Europe, and whose contradictory effects were crucial to the...