A Conference on Education, Remembrance and Research. 26 - 28 January, 2000. The modern state has given up the concept of legitimacy based on transcendence in favor of the legitimacy based on the democratically expressed will of its citizens. This change has brought with it an emancipation, yet it has set the state off towards a continuous instability that, directly or by mediation, has turned into a problem.
Instability is, most certainly, THE concern of modern thought.
Hegel was right to see it as the most profound theme of philosophy, to which various solutions were found in time. The history of philosophy, from Hegel to Fukuyama, from Fichte to Habermas, from Schelling to Foucault, and from Feuerbach to Rorty, stands proof to that. In the 1920s and 1930s, a series of European states gave in to this attack and were taken over under the control of forces opposed to democracy, committed to liquidate the modern emancipation of the citizen. This liquidation turned into a physical one, of people, and a wave of barbarity engulfed the respective European democracies. The Jewish Holocaust was unmistakably the epitome of barbarity in modern Europe .