Reason and Horror: Critical Theory, Democracy and Aesthetic Individuality

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Morton Schoolman
Routledge, 2001 - 348pages

What is it that makes humankind capable of genocide? What can we do to create a world without large-scale crimes against humanity? In "Reason and Horror, " Schoolman labors to find an antidote to the relentlessly destructive and seemingly irreversible path of violence on which the history of enlightenment placed modernity. Offering a fascinating new interpretation of Horkheimer and Adorno's monumental study, "Dialectic of Enlightenment," their classic written during the Nazi Holocaust, Schoolman reconstructs their arguments about individuality before the Holocaust, and then develops their ideas through the great works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Walt Whitman, and Alexis De Tocqueville. Schoolman shows that it is "democracy" that fosters the aesthetic qualities Horkheimer and Adorno believed necessary to oppose the enlightenment rationality responsible for genocide. Schoolman's stunning and controversial solution to avoiding crimes against humanity is that its nations must foster a democratic way of life, because the aesthetic form of individuality able to stem the violence of genocidal extermination can flourish only under democracy.