Triumph and Tragedy of the Intellectuals: Evil, Enlightenment, and Death [Hardback]

Redner presents the fourth and final volume in his tetralogy. This work is more closely concerned with ideas, ideologies, ideologues, and intellectuals in general. Collectively they portray the contemporary predicament of humanity and what historically led up to it, mostly focusing on the twentieth century. Like the other volumes, this work ranges over the whole of civilization. The book works itself out as a historical process of the rise and fall of the intellectuals, their triumph and tragedy. It runs in reverse chronology--first the tragedy and then the triumph: it begins with the horrors of the twentieth century that they instigated; then it goes back to the period of the Enlightenment that gave birth to them; finally, it reaches back still further into history to show how intellectuals learned to die without the hope of immortality that both philosophy and religion had held out since the start of western civilization. Ten chapters are divided into three parts: evil and the tragedy of the intellectuals; Enlightenment and the triumph of the intellectuals; death and afterlife. Annotation ©2016 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

This fourth instalment of Harry Redner's tetralogy on the history of civilization argues that intellectuals have a brilliant past, a dubious present, and possibly no future. He contends that the philosophers of the seventeenth century laid the ground for the intellectuals of the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. They, in turn, promoted a fundamental transformation of human consciousness: they literally intellectualized the world. The outcome was the disenchantment of the world in all its cultural dimensions: in art, religion, ethics, politics, and philosophy.

In this fascinating study, Redner demonstrates how secularization took the sting out of both the dread and promise of an afterlife and intellectuals learned to die without the hope of immortality popularized by philosophy and religion. Ultimately, they produced the ideologies that generated the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, which subsequently exterminated these intellectuals through mass murder on a scale never before experienced. The book traces the sources of this fatal entanglement and goes on to examine the contemporary condition of intellectuals in America and the world.

Wherein lies the future of the intellectuals? Redner suggest that in the present state of globalization, dominated by technocrats, experts, and professionals, their fate remains uncertain.