Louis A. Ruprecht’s Afterwords takes aim at one of modern intellectual culture’s favourite habits: declaring modernity a catastrophe and then fantasising about whatever supposedly came before it.

Moving through Nietzsche, Aristotle, Alasdair MacIntyre, Christianity, secularisation and postmodernism, Ruprecht examines the recurring story in which antiquity, the polis, Christendom, belief or coherent tradition are imagined as lost worlds from which the present has catastrophically declined. 

Ruprecht explores why narratives of decadence are so persuasive, and looks deep into the philosophical and theological assumptions required to make them work. The chapters move from Hellenism and Nietzsche through the political animal, virtue ethics, Christendom, fundamentalism and secularisation before arriving at a “postmortem on postmodernity.” It sits nicely at the intersection of intellectual history, philosophy of religion and classical reception: a book about what happens when the past becomes less an object of study than an alibi for dissatisfaction with the present. 

State University of New York Press, 1996. Paperback. 260 pages. ISBN 9780791429341. Very good condition overall, with light shelf wear and minor rubbing/creasing to covers. Inscribed and signed by the author on the half-title, with a substantial presentation inscription to “Trevor.” Internally otherwise clean and sound.