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successfully engineered in the name of modernity, and used its weapons,
for Kolakowski, as for the Budapest School authors, modernity in itselfis
neither good nor bad. For the Shoah, as we know too well, was the
tri–
umph of the atavistic racialism championed by the Nazis, and no less
dis–
turbingly the victory of the principle of instrumental rationality directly
linked to modernity. In the same vein, the historicist project, as emblem–
atically synthesized in the Marxian project, led to a hypostasis of Reason
that could be cynically manipulated by the Asian despot in the Kremlin
to
pursue his most murderous designs. Indeed, as Heller and Feher demon–
strate, we are now living in a time dominated by the sentiment of a de–
bacle of historicity. Their obituary of radical universalism is justified by
the rational conviction that postmodernity means primarily an awareness
of the cunning of history and a recognition of the pitfalls of intellectual
hubris. The arrogance of intellectual prophets like Nietzsche and Marx,
who thought they knew what universal history was about and found it
appropriate to issue guidelines for the advent of a heroic-liberated
mankind, has lost all legitimacy. As the Hungarian philosophers explain:
"The historicist project was less concerned with narrating history from the
beginning, more interested in a hypostatized 'end of history.' But these
ambitious claims ended in Auschwitz and the Gulag." Precisely because
the fascination with the end of history, conceived as a mandatory culmi–
nation of a rationally constructed
telos,
led to the barbarism of the exter–
mination camps, the postmodern political condition tends to be extremely
suspicious of all universalistic pedagogies. Our age is thus distrustful of
prophetic exhortations. We have seen enough of these constructions and
we know that they are usually cover-ups for dictatorial propensities. On
the other hand, are we supposed to relinquish all holistic vision? Is utopia
forever doomed to irrelevance? Do we have to indulge in a moral rela–
tivism no less devastating than the absolutism it tends to replace? Do we
need to accept the supremacy of various mini-discourses that dismiss as
hopelessly sterile the great axiological topic of humanism versus bar–
barism? In this respect, I agree with Kolakowski and the Hungarian
philosophers: the Enlightenment should be deconstructed not in order to
deny the value of the individual and the significance of reason, but rather
to assert these values and to detect the origins of the moral and political
catastrophes of our age.
Finally, these authors have reflected in a painful and truly sobering
way on the fallacies of historicist universalism. They have realized that
promises of immediate, in-this-world salvation through collective action
can result only in penal colonies and infinite human suffering. They have
also noticed the complicity of intellectuals in the accomplishment of
scenarios associated with the romantic delusions of total community and
