Breaking with the Enlightenment: The Twilight of History and the Rediscovery of Utopia Book

The twentieth century marks the grand culmination of modernism, set in motion by the material and metaphysical forces unleashed by the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. A searing account of the myth and reality of modernism, this text offers a critique of the ideologies, and the metaphysical underpinnings, of both capitalism and socialism, viewing both as embodiments of the same vein of European materialism, while pointing to the radically contrasting values of both these Eurocentred visions of society. Taking the position that human societies are primarily cultural, not material constructs, this work passionately argues for a keen re-evaluation of the wisdom inherent in the pre-capitalist, and often extra-European cultural heritage of humanity in order to determine what lessons might be learned for a human emancipation unmarked by the materialist paradigms of the accumulation of wealth and power. In this new millennium wholly given over to the capitalist path, this is more than just an argument in the rationalist mode, Kanth feels that it is perhaps the only sane resolve that stands between us and the complete extinction of human civility in a still habitable planet.Read More