Critique and crisis

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This book established Reinhart Kosellek's reputation as the most important German intellectual historian of the postwar period. The first English translation of Kosellek's tour de force demonstrates a chronological breadth, a philosophical depth, and an originality, which are hardly equalled in any scholarly domain. It is a history of the Enlightenment in miniature, fundamental to our understanding of that period and its consequences. Like de Tocqueville, Kosellek views Enlightenment intellectuals as an uprooted, unrealistic group of onlookers who sowed the seeds of the modern political tensions that first flowered in the French Revolution. He argues that it was the split that developed between state and society during the Enlightenment that fostered the emergence of this intellectual elite divorced from the realities of politics.