Table Of ContentThe Intellectual Origins of Modernity
The Intellectual Origins of Modernity explores the long and winding road of
modernity from Rousseau to Foucault and its roots, which are not to be found
in a desire for enlightenment or in the idea of progress but in the Promethean
passion of Western humankind. Modernity is the Promethean passion, the
passion of humans to be their own master, to use their insight to make a
world different from the one that they found, and to liberate themselves from
their immemorial chains. This passion created the political ideologies of the
nineteenth century and made its imprint on the totalitarian regimes that arose
in their wake in the twentieth.
Underlying the Promethean passion was modernity—humankind’s project of
self-creation—and enlightenment, the existence of a constant tension between
the actual and the desirable, between reality and the ideal. Beneath the weariness,
the exhaustion, and the skepticism of post-modernist criticism is a refusal to
take Promethean horizons into account. This book attests the importance of
reason, which remains a powerful critical weapon of humankind against the
idols that have come out of modernity: totalitarianism, fundamentalism, the
golem of technology, genetic engineering, and a boundless will to power.
Without it, the new Prometheus is liable to return the fire to the gods.
David Ohana is Professor of Modern European History at the Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev, Israel. He has been affiliated with the Hebrew
University, Jerusalem, Israel, the Paris-Sorbonne, Harvard University, and
the University of California at Berkeley. He specializes in comparative national
mythologies.
Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought
Experiencing Multiple Realities
Alfred Schutz’s Sociology of the Finite Provinces of Meaning
Marius I. Benţa
Human Flourishing, Liberal Theory and the Arts
Menachem Mautner
Rethinking Liberalism for the 21st Century
The Skeptical Radicalism of Judith Shklar
Giunia Gatta
Norbert Elias and the Analysis of History and Sport
Systematizing Figurational Sociology
Joannes Van Gestel
Progressive Violence
Theorizing the War on Terror
Michael Blain and Angeline Kearns-Blain
Democracy, Dialogue, Memory
Expression and Affect Beyond Consensus
Edited by Idit Alphandary and Leszek Koczanowicz
Common Sense as a Paradigm of Thought
An Analysis of Social Interaction
Tim Delaney
The Intellectual Origins of Modernity
David Ohana
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/RSSPT
The Intellectual Origins
of Modernity
David Ohana
First published 2019
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of David Ohana to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ohana, David, author.
Title: The intellectual origins of modernity / David Ohana.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge
studies in social and political thought ; 138 | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018052284 (print) | LCCN 2019001577 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781351110518 (Master) | ISBN 9781351110501 (Adobe) |
ISBN 9781351110495 (ePub) | ISBN 9781351110488 (Mobi) |
ISBN 9780815363125 (hbk) | ISBN 9781351110518 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Civilization, Modern—Philosophy. | Political
science—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC CB358 (ebook) | LCC CB358 .O43 2019 (print) |
DDC 909.8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052284
ISBN: 978-0-8153-6312-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-11051-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Prologue 1
1 From Rousseau to Tocqueville: Janus Face of Modernity 29
2 1848: “We Are Sitting on a Volcano” 80
3 From Marx to Lenin: A Red Future 111
4 Anarchism, Nihilism, Racism 168
5 Foucault and Beyond 204
Epilogue 218
Bibliography 222
Index 234
Prologue
The Promethean Passion of Modernity
The Intellectual Origins of Modernity suggests that modernity and Enlight-
enment, far from being synonymous, are separate, different, and sometimes
even contradictory concepts. Modernity is humankind’s consciousness in the
last two to three centuries, of being able to form themselves with their own
hands. Some have sought do this in a context of freedom, and some in a con-
text of repression. The Enlightenment, on the other hand, which typified major
thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, promoted the idea of the
universality of mankind, the principle of the liberty and equality of all, and
the theory of progress whereby morality and the spirit of rational criticism
were spread through education and the dissemination of knowledge. Moder-
nity is a period marked by the Promethean desire to master the world, whereas
the Enlightenment was a normative outlook on the world. Modernity could be
enlightened, but it could also rebel against the values of the Enlightenment.
Modernity and Enlightenment have had a continuous history of friction
between them. The paths of modernity were tortuous, and its roots are not
to be found in a desire for enlightenment or progress but in the Promethean
longing of Western humankind to be their own masters, to impose their own
rationality, and consequently to mold the world in a form different from that
in which they received it. In order to carry out the project of modernity, its
representatives made use of the Enlightenment—rationality, universality, pro-
gress, and science—but solely for the purposes of the Promethean passion.
This passion motivated the political ideologies of the nineteenth century and
engendered the forms of the regimes that followed in the twentieth. These ide-
ologies and regimes were modern in that they sought to create a political and
social reality in the image of humanity. The Promethean passion of modern
humankind, which developed from a desire for independence to a desire for
unbridled power, is the hallmark of our time.
It is some small consolation that the twentieth century—the century of
mass extermination—was a short one. The century, which began late, in 1914,
ended early, in 1989. It began with a total mechanized war, the first of its kind,
which obliterated the difference between soldiers and citizens, a war without
2 Prologue
content—a “Nietzschean republic”, as one of its participants called it—and it
ended with the collapse of the last surviving totalitarian ideology of those that
sprang up between the two world wars. What were the intellectual roots of the
totalitarian nihilism, which reached its climax in the twentieth century?
The Intellectual Origins of Modernity investigates the question: what hap-
pened to modern human, the Prometheus who created his own world, when he
became his own ruler? What happened to Prometheus unbound? Is not modern
humankind, freed from all restraint, liable to create a new Golem? Does not
the inner logic of unlimited rationality and unbridled freedom finally engender
enslavement to oneself, a human-monster like Frankenstein? The myth of Pro-
metheus is like a thread running through Western culture, a central axis along
which one may perceive the changes that take place in mankind.
The human experience in the twentieth century was bound up with the meta-
morphoses of modernity from a desire for liberty to a will to power, from
Promethean humanism to Prometheus released from his chains. We are faced
with the Promethean paradox: from the classical world to modern times, Pro-
metheus was a symbol of humanism. How did he become a Caesar in the
twentieth century? An explanation of the matter requires a distinction between
modernity and enlightenment, two concepts that have been confused to the
point of becoming identical. How was it that modernity rose against Enlight-
enment in the twentieth century? In the light of this, it would seem that Pro-
metheus’s fate was a degeneration. He abandoned his humanity for hubris and
herein resembled other myths in Western thought: the Golem, Faust, the sor-
cerer’s apprentice, and Frankenstein. Examples of Prometheus unbound are
science that changed in the modern age from a contemplation of nature to
a will to power, technology that became an instrumental rationality without
rational content, and the attempt to create a new human through totalitarian
ideologies or genetic engineering.
This dual aspect of modernity lies at the heart of the Promethean passion.
Our power has increased in the modern age, but the results of our actions come
toward us like a hostile and alien force, an independent force not subject to our
influence. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville, two French polit-
ical thinkers, were the first to criticize the supposed identity of modernity and
enlightenment.1 Hence Rousseau’s proposal to condition modern education in
his book Émile; hence the possibility envisaged by De Tocqueville in his works
on modern democracy in France and America that democratic despotism could
be a consequence of radical liberty. Rousseau and De Tocqueville perceived
the ambivalence of progress, the contradictory tendencies of modernity, and
the paradox of freedom in modern times. The failed revolutions of 1848
were the starting point of an attempt to translate social aspirations into politi-
cal terms. The fears of the liberal conservative De Tocqueville of a Promethean
socialism that would give birth to a new man were at the same time the hopes
of revolutionaries like Karl Marx and Auguste Blanqui. The year 1848 was a
parting of the ways in which the prophecies concerning revolutionary social-
ism saw it as a new servitude or the hope of society. From the mid-1800s to the
Prologue 3
turn of the century, the optimistic revolutionary mentality changed to a sense
of decadence, a feeling that the modern world was heading toward destruction.
In The Intellectual Origins of Modernity, the universal and particular aspects
of one modern ideology, Marxism, are studied in the revolutionary approach of
Marx and in Vladimir Lenin’s view of nationalism. Marx examined the history
of political revolution from the 1789 revolution onward during a hundred years
of French history. According to Marx, this political revolution, a revolution of
the bourgeoisie, was supposed to pave the way for a class revolution, the revo-
lution of the proletariat. The Revolution of 1789, the Revolution of 1848, the
Louis Napoleon regime, and the Paris Commune of 1871 were examined by
him in the light of future revolutions that could only take place in modern soci-
oeconomic conditions. Marx said that the modern economy “rivets the laborer
to capital more firmly that the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock”.2
But the modern worker created a history of liberty over and above the envis-
aged outcome. The seventy years of Bolshevik history—a distorted mutation
of Marxist ideology—showed that, in the Soviet Union, Prometheus rebelled
against Caesar. Lenin, Marx’s Russian disciple, wished to carry out a universal
class revolution in a single country at the height of the First World War. Rapid
modernization, which required the subordination of means to ends and adapt-
ing the social situation to the ideology, enslaved a whole nation to a party for
seventy years. But parallel with the organized collective revolutionary path of
the party and nation, there sprang up on the revolutionary left an individual
revolutionism that sought to hasten redemption through explosives. From the
anarchistic propaganda-through-action at the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury to the nihilistic conclusion that the world cannot be repaired but only
destroyed, the way was not a long one. Was the logic that led from Bakunin to
Nechayev the same mode of thought that led from Sartre to Fanon and also to
Beider–Meinhoff? And apart from those who despaired of achieving utopia in
the modern world, there were thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse,
and Hannah Arendt, who condemned the metamorphoses of the Promethean
utopia in the twentieth century as distortion, repression, and banality.
Metamorphoses of the Myth of Prometheus
According to David Hume, the task of the historian of ideas is to trace the
history of the human consciousness. Voltaire added that it is more important
to know how people thought in times gone by than to know how they acted.
The myth of Prometheus is an inseparable part of modern thought. The criti-
cal modern reader takes a distance from the naive beliefs that gave birth to
myth so that only its symbolic meaning remains. In modern times, mythical
texts are not regarded as sacred or objective but are viewed as contributing
to humanity’s self-knowledge. The hermeneutist Paul Ricœur said that there
is no need to disprove myths, to reject myth as such because of its primitive
character—in fact, de-mythicize it—but one must decipher the symbolism it
contains. Hermeneutics, which is a midrashic and innovative deciphering of
