Requiem for modern politics : the tragedy of the enlightenment and the challenge of the new millennium /

Ophuls's requiem warns of the need for social criticism despite the virtually worldwide triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism. Ophuls, continuing the theme of his Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (CH, Oct'77; revised as Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited, 1992), finds this triumph hardly worth celebrating. He indicts the failure of the Enlightenment and its progeny of liberal polities to produce a moral order that would guide civilization's attempts to live peacefully with nature while creating a social context of personal human development. He reveals both the internal contradictions of those thinkers, from Hobbes to Marx, who participated in ushering in modernity and the far-reaching legacies of their arguments. Modernity's application of rationality to technology and politics has devoured the very basis of its supposedly moral underpinnings, which had allowed it to criticize premodern moral and social orders; and reliance on the ethos of democracy, pluralism, and capitalism tragically has resulted in a terrifying moral entropy--a 21st century of nihilism and self-destruction. Ophuls suggests a neo-Aristotelian, communitarian solution that involves both society and nature. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. J. R. Pottenger; University of Alabama in Huntsville