J.W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)
John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
Western civilization was founded on the idea that reason might save us from the passions and show us the way to a just society. The idea that man was a rational animal thus hovered between description and aspiration. Christianity brought great changes in the assumptions of classical rationalism, and in time a new kind of reason, that of instrumental rationality, came to dominate European thought. Philosophers such as Hobbes argued that even this thinner version of reason could generate a peaceful and commodious life. In Hegel, the old classical reason turned into the animating genius of history, leading to the famously ambivalent formula: the real is the rational. But more recently, reason has fallen on hard times. Two books with reason in their titles exhibit its self-destructive side and might help us to understand this fall.
