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2005 Spitz Prize Winner

Desolation and Enlightenment
by Ira Katznelson

Ira Katznelson, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge afer Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003

Ira Katznelson's Desolation and Enlightenment makes an historically informed and rich contribution to post-war liberal-democratic theory. Katznelson shows that a certain stream of postwar American political theory and social science constituted a new restatement of the basic premises of liberal democracy. Their project was necessary, Katznelson argues, in the light of the twentieth century developments which fatally undermined the progressive view of history and reason underlying traditional liberal-democratic theory. Katznelson both explicates the thought of a variety of American political thinkers in the mid-twentieth century (most notably, Hannah Arendt and social scientists rethinking the state), and he wisely illuminates and constructs a reconfiguration that liberalism had to undergo to confront the realities of a genocidal age.