Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. By Ira Katznelson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 208p. $29.00 cloth, $17.50 paper.

This eloquent volume, which originated as Columbia University's Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures in 1997–98, has a dual mission. The first is personal. It is a “critical homage” to the post–World War II scholars who were Ira Katznelson's teachers. Practicing their craft “in the midst of a moment stamped by the greatest shocks and stresses the Enlightenment tradition had ever faced,” these scholars produced a powerful revision of American Enlightenment liberalism that Katznelson believes could serve as a guidepost for today (p. 157). Confronting the “twentieth-century compound of total war, totalitarianism, and holocaust,” they would neither simply reaffirm the faith in reason and science as secular grounds of moral progress nor simply repudiate ideals of autonomy and freedom as “mere fantasy or, worse, the main source of radical evil” (pp. 33, 39). They “sought instead to renew and protect the Enlightenment's heritage by appropriating and transforming social science, history, and the study of public policy” so as to provide illumination in the face of desolation (p. xiii). Katznelson's principal aim is to show how the work of this group might make possible a subtle intervention into “today's fervent but thin controversies about social inquiry and the status of Enlightenment” (p. xv).