A collection of essays on the political life of twentieth-century ideas circulating German and French thought, critical theory, postmodernism and intellectual history.

Wolin tackles how emancipatory language can become entangled with reactionary politics, ranging works across Walter Benjamin, Heidegger and his French reception, the culture wars, modernism, postmodernism and the intellectual inheritance of the 1960s.  His essays test the anti-Enlightenment currents running through parts of twentieth-century European thought, including the attraction to myth, experience and aesthetic disjoint as alternatives to reason. The Benjamin material is especially useful, as he's here read not as a straightforward Marxist nor mystical eccentric, but as someone attempting to appropriate dangerous intellectual materials without simply submitting to them.

Published in the mid-1990s, some of its immediate battles belong unmistakably to that period, but this is partly what makes the collection interesting now. It documents a moment when arguments about Heidegger, postmodernism, multiculturalism and the political responsibilities of intellectuals were still extremely live — many of which, inconveniently, never actually went away.

University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1995. Paperback edition in the Critical Perspectives on Modern Culture series. ISBN 978-0-87023-990-8. Light general shelf wear and rubbing to covers, with minor edge and corner wear. Internally clean and firmly bound. Very good condition.