The Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope - Softcover

Aronson, Ronald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0860917754 ISBN 13: 9780860917755

Publisher: Verso Books, 1983

Synopsis

Is there reason to hope today? With this question Ronald Aronson confronts the sources of today's widely shared sense of cynicism and crisis: Auschwitz, the Stalin dictatorship, the Vietnam War and the threat of a final nuclear catastrophe.

In a series of interlinked studies based on deep historical research, Aronson explores the intentional structures and social sources of the Nazi, Stalinist and bourgeois-democratic catastrophes. In each case he asks and answers the central yet most perplexing question: why? In the process he develops a new insight into our disastrous century, which insists on the central role of morality yet rigorously traces the social logic of the unreason that dominates the world. This unusual synthesis of history, philosophy and political theory then presents sustained meditations on the dynamics of power and evil today.

Moving from the recent past to the present, Aronson uses the concept of the dialectics of disaster to illuminate the deep structure of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the technological madness of the nuclear arms race. In a moving conclusion, he returns to his opening question, pointing to the only way of recreating an authentic hope beneath the Doomsday mushroom cloud. Achieving a unique moral, intellectual and political balance in areas where hysteria and cynicism are endemic, The Dialectics of Disaster is a major contribution to our understanding of the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author

RONALD ARONSON was born in Detroit in 1938. He studied at Wayne State University, Detroit, and at UCLA, and obtained his doctorate in the History of Ideas from Brandeis University, where he was a pupil of Herbert Marcuse, in 1968. Professor of Humanities in the University Studies/Weekend College Programme at Wayne State, Aronson is author of the study, Jean- Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World (Verso, 1980). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Edition details

• Publisher: Verso Books
• Publication date: 1983
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0860917754
• ISBN 13: 9780860917755
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 342