2005 Winner

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 a historically informed and rich contribution to post-war liberal-democratic theory. Katznelson shows tha ta certain stream of postwar American political theory and social science constituted a new restatement of hte basic premises of liberal democracy. Their project was necessary, Katznelson argues, in the light of hte twentieth century developments which fatally undermined the progressive view of history andreason underlying traditoinal liberal-democratic theory. Katznelson both explicates the thoguht 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.