The Vanity of Reason.

• Author: Minogue, Kenneth
• Position: Review

J.W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 271 pp., $29.95.

John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 401 PP., $30.

WESTERN civilization was founded on the idea that reason might save us from the passions and show us the way to a just society. The idea that man was a rational animal thus hovered between description and aspiration. Christianity brought great changes in the assumptions of classical rationalism, and in time a new kind of reason, that of instrumental rationality, came to dominate European thought. Philosophers such as Hobbes argued that even this thinner version of reason could generate a peaceful and commodious life. In Hegel, the old classical reason turned into the animating genius of history, leading to the famously ambivalent formula: the real is the rational. But more recently, reason has fallen on hard times. Two books with reason in their titles exhibit its self-destructive side and might help us to understand this fall.

In J.W. Burrow's The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914, a dense and brilliant account of the movement of ideas, the year 1848 features as a watershed in which discontent with the current condition of Europe fused with hopes that salvation was at hand. Contemporaries, he observes, "began to see themselves under the sign of continuous intellectual history." Less than a century later, reason, even truth, had fallen out of fashion. "Which reason? Whose truth?", demanded the dimmer kind of skeptic. Everything believed to be representational, bourgeois, true, pious, respectable, progressive or Western was under attack. The philosophers of suspicion--Marx, Nietzsche and Freud--had triumphed. Burrow deals with these men, but they are merely part of a wider panorama. Some scenes from this panorama will be familiar to the reader; others will be a revelation. The key figure in this development was, of course, Nietzsche, but (as Burrow clearly shows) it was the Zeitgeist what done it. Cognitive chaos is the way we live now, and as Burrow remarks at the end of his history, "Post-modernism in literature, for all the volubility expended on it, looks more like a gloss on Modernism than its historical grave digger. Modernism is our tradition." The allegiances of tradition did not immediately collapse. The necessities imposed by two world wars and the threat of communism kept many virtues in being. Only today do we harvest the full fruits of reason's collapse.

What Burrow brings clearly to light is a world in which reason escaped from the philosopher's cell to prowl the streets. Philosophy had always been regarded by the custodians of social cohesion as a dangerous occupation. In Islam it virtually had been strangled soon after birth...