Modernity's Pretenses : Making Reality Fit Reason From Candide to the Gulag

Undermines modernity's authority through a cultural and historical examination of texts and thinkers from the Enlightenment to post-Stalinist Europe.Modernity's Pretenses undermines modernity's authority through a cultural and historical examination of texts and thinkers from the Enlightenment to post-Stalinist Europe. Racevskis argues that modernity's elaborate designs for rationalizing the world have mainly functioned as covers and alibis (i.e., pretenses). Modernity's promise to liberate humanity from superstition, injustice, and want has been a tactic for making exploitation seem noble and for lending barbarism an aura of progress. Racevskis examines the mechanisms and history of the pretending that mark the modern world and surveys the critical approaches that have proven most effective in dispelling the credibility of pretenses.Karlis Racevskis is Professor of French at The Ohio State University. He is also the author of Postmodernism and the Search for Enlightenment.