Modernity's pretenses
Subtitle: making reality fit reason from Candide to the gulag
By: Karlis Racevskis.
Series: SUNY series in postmodern culture
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Albany
Language: eng
Number of pages: 161
Subjects: Rationalism.; Reason -- History.; Postmodernism.
Description: Modernity's Pretenses undermines modernity's authority through a cultural and historical examination of texts and thinkers from the Enlightenment to post-Stalinist Europe. Racevskis argues that modernity's elaborate designs for rationalizing the world have mainly functioned as covers and alibis (i.e., pretenses). Modernity's promise to liberate humanity from superstition, injustice, and want has been a tactic for making exploitation seem noble and for lending barbarism an aura of progress.

Racevskis examines the mechanisms and history of the pretending that mark the modern world and surveys the critical approaches that have proven most effective in dispelling the credibility of pretenses.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.