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The Vanity of Reason.
J.W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 271 pp., $29.95.
John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 401 PP., $30. WESTERN civilization was founded on the idea that reason might save us from the passions and show us the way to a just society. The idea that man was a rational animal thus hovered between description and aspiration. Christianity brought great changes in the assumptions of classical rationalism, and in time a new kind of reason, that of instrumental rationality, came to dominate European thought. Philosophers such as Hobbes argued that even this...See the full content of this document
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