“By exalting the limitless power of instrumental rationality, the Enlightenment cultivated an ideology in which nothing lay beyond the power of human apprehension, domination, and administration. The “administered world” of Nazism, then, represented the realization, not the abandonment, of the Enlightenment: the ‘Enlightenment is totalitarian.’”
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is Professor of History at University of Madison-Wisconsin. Her research centres on the intellectual and cultural history of the United States, including the transatlantic flow of intellectual and cultural movements. She is the author of American Nietzsche and The Ideas that Made America and she has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history.
“A leading scholar of American intellectual history” – LA Review of Books