The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism

by Richard Wolin

Book Overview

Fifteen years ago, revelations about the political misdeeds of Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man sent shock waves throughout European and North American intellectual circles. Ever since, postmodernism has been haunted by the specter of a compromised past. In this intellectual genealogy of the postmodern spirit, Richard Wolin shows that postmodernism's infatuation with fascism has been widespread and not incidental. He calls into question postmodernism's...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691125996
• ISBN13: 9780691125992
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

When extremes meet

Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York and his THE SEDUCTION OF UNREASON is a captivating read. Against a historical background, he posits two modern interludes; one on the German New Right and one on its French counterpart. Putting things in perspective, Wolin reflects on the roots of contemporary postmodern, and sometimes reactionary, thinking. In the 1930's the Left began to adopt some of the ideas traditionally associated with the Right. The expression "les extrêmes se touchent" gained credibility, giving room to the oxymoronic terming of Bataille's "Left Fascism." After World War II Nietzsche and Heidegger, with their critique of reason and democracy, became the intellectual idols of the French Left. Wolin dubs this counterintuitive phenomenon "left Heideggerianism." With the collapse of state socialism and the coming down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, yet again voices from the left began to coincide with traditionally reactionary appeals to Nation, "Volk" and Identity. The Enlightenment twin-concept of reason and progress became the punchbag of the day. This book is largely about this "problematic right-left synthesis." In a critical review, the late Richard Rorty argued that Wolin, although his heart is in the right place, has a hard time separating a philosopher's moral character from his teachings; any thinker who has displayed either hypocrisy or self-deception is unlikely to have any ideas worth adopting. Although Wolin "protests that his book is not an exercise in guilt-by-association", this is according to Rorty actually pretty close to the mark (The Nation 2004). This is, however, not fair. Firstly, what Wolin says appears on p.301 and is a reference to Heidegger's catchphrase "reason is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought" as being a philosophical inspiration for a postmodern worldview. Even if this can lead to conceptual confusion and postmodernists can assume a variety of political hues, "they are hardly `fascists'." Secondly, on page 62 Wolin states that "Nietzsche's status as a prophet of the twentieth century should neither be exaggerated nor sidestepped", and "one can be both a towering writer and thinker a n d a fascist - or, in Nietzsche's case, a protofascist. This lesson challenges our customary notions of intellectual greatness which makes it all the more worth contemplating." Furthermore, in the first sentence of his preface to "The Heidegger Controversy" from 1991, Wolin characterizes Heidegger as "probably the century's greatest philosopher." This conundrum has puzzled philosophers and laypersons alike: how can otherwise brilliant minds be seduced by crude politics? Rather than "digging up the dirt" on famous European thinkers, Richard Wolin critically addresses the philosophical underpinnings of political thought. As a book reflecting on the political inclinations of a range of thinkers, including Jung, Freud, Schmitt, Blanchot, Derrida, and Habermas, it serves

Eye-opening study of some major thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries

Wolin's masterly monograph "The Seduction of Unreason" constitutes a major contribution to contemporary intellectual history. Wolin's study dissects various political implications and current repercussions of the ideas and modes of thinking of Joseph de Maistre, Johann Gottfried Herder, Arthur de Gobineau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Carl Gustav Jung, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jaques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard. In two "political excursuses," he indicates how the ideas of these and other - partly, highly respected - thinkers who, in one way or another attacked some basic Western values like rationalism and human rights, have via the "Conservative Revolution," and German and French so-called "New Right" gained influence on extremely right-wing parties as well as on mainstream politics. Wolin's usage of the term "fascism" in the book's title, to be sure, could be seen as misleading in so far as only some of the protagonists of his fascinating story were full-blown fascists. Still, his study is a valuable addition not only to the history of ideas, but also to comparative fascist studies in that it presents many illuminating cases illustrating why and how ideas have consequences, in general, and in which way anti-rational and anti-democratic thought can be utilized by fascist movements to justify dictatorship, ethnic cleansing and violence, in particular. The book is thus a valuable addition not only within the fields of cultural studies and history of science, but could also be of use in seminars on extremist politics. It forcefully debunks the idea that the ideational sources of ultra-nationalism and fundamentalism in both the inter- and post-war Europe are solely to be found among marginal scholars and publicists. Wolin's study is eye-opening in that illustrates how some major trends in 20th century mainstream humanities have played the role of, and are, partly, still functioning as, catalysts for the spread and acceptance of radically ascriptive views of human beings, and extremely right-wing ideologies.

Do not compare wolin to Neocon.

An extremely well reasoned warning to intellectuals with neoconservative persuasions. Fascism is a political movement which elicits responses which should not be limited to dispassionate disapprobation ( I believe that fascism when it is exhibited should be spoken out against even if this means 'getting personal'). There are many philosophers who think Heidegger's philosophy has no hint of his own fascistic political leanings and beliefs in it (or that somehow one can separate the two). I cannot see how one would be able to fool one's self in this regard (and this is coming from someone who use to read his books rather closely). There are others who like to follow his line of blaming enlightenment humanism for fascism (Derrida), much the same as now neoconservatives blame their violent and destructive ideology on their opposite number, I don't subscribe to these views or this rhetoric. When one is faced with rhetoric (and one can only call it this because there is no argument there, as Gadamer would have us think, only 'rhetoric') that promotes a truly odious political belief one must and should speak out in any way one can, even if one is accused of getting 'personal' and is not doing 'justice' to this ideology. And Wittgenstein's brilliant writings are in no way equivalent to Nietzeche's Heiddegger's, Schmitt's or Gadamer's particular form of nihilism. At the very least Schmitt, Gadamer and Heiddegger (although the case of Gadamer is more ambiguous) added to the undermining of legitimate argument that then lead to the debacle during the weimar period. It is useful to read philosophy while also reading history (Richard Wolin's writings are very sobering in this regard!) in order to avoid repeating the mistakes that philosophy has fallen in to in the past, especially when this has lead to the deaths of millions of our fellow human beings. One can intrepret a text in many ways but one cannot wish away reality. In our rush to contextualize our experiences we should not forget that the arguments that philosophers make do not exist in a vaccum (nor can they be contextualized into one i.e. contextualized into a particularity from which there is no possibility of translation, even agreeing to disagree is a form of 'agreement' which is necessary in order to avoid adjudicating differences through brute violence, and or indifference), and that what has been said in the past whether that be in America or Europe create modes of thought which do not respect the borders we think contextualizes them, intolerance and anti-semitism does not cease to be such just because it is said artfully, or has a 'tradition' (as Gadamer would say), I think we know how that 'tradition' ended. Many postmodern and some neopragmatist philosophers conveniently forget that fascism can be conjured up through a weakening of what we moderns refer to as rationality (and what many of those same neopragmatist and post-modern philosophers term 'rational totalitariansim') to the p

Absolutely Entrancing

The Irish Times November 6, 2004 Weekend; Book Reviews; Pg. 13 Absolutely entrancing John Banville Political philosophy: An attack on European right-wing and 'left fascist' thinkers and their American followers is a kind of philosophical Nuremberg trials. In Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus there is a character called Breisacher, a Jew, whom Mann describes as a private scholar and polyhistor and "a racial and intellectual type in high, one might almost say reckless development". Although Nietzsche's name is not mentioned - the life and personality of the novel's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkuhn, are in large part based on those of the philosopher - Breisacher is the quintessential Nietzschean. His specialty is the philosophy of culture, "but his views were anti-cultural, in so far as he gave out to see in the whole history of culture nothing but a process of decline". He sets J.S. Bach as the central figure in the "progressivist barbarism" that caused the deterioration of music from "the great and only true art of counterpoint" into the "effeminizing and falsification" of the "harmonic romanticism of modulation", a process in which even Palestrina had already played a "shameful part". When he turns to the Bible and the history of his own race, Breisacher is even more extreme, seeing King David and his successor Solomon - "an aesthete unnerved by erotic excesses" - and "the prophets drivelling about dear God in heaven" as "the already debased representatives of an exploded late theology, which no longer had any idea of the old and genuine Hebraic actuality of Jahve, the Elohim of the people". For Breisacher, the history of the modern world, and by "modern" he means the period from the pre-Socratics onward, is the history of an inevitable degeneration from the true and authentic primitive into weakness, softness and falsity. Breisacher is a member of the circle surrounding the creepy Sextus Kridwiss, a collector of primitive art; other savants attending the Kridwiss evenings are Dr Egon Unruhe, a "philosophic palaeozoologist" who works on verifying the essential truths of the ancient Germanic sagas, in which "a sophisticated humanity had long since ceased to believe"; Professor Georg Vogler, a literary historian who has written a much-admired history of German literature from the point of view of racial origins; and the poet Daniel zur Hohe - Mann is always wickedly witty in the matter of names - a high-strung young man whose "dreams dealt with a world subjected by sanguinary campaigns to the pure spirit" and whose only published poetic work, The Proclamations, ends with the line: "Soldiers! I deliver to you to plunder - the World!" Mann knew his proto-fascists from the inside, having been one himself, as he showed in his anti-democratic, anti-modern Meditations of an Unpolitical Man (1918). When the phenomenon of Hitler and Nazism demonstrated to him in no uncertain terms how wrong-headed he had been, and how, as Richard Wol