Abstract

Human societies, according to Donskis, are organized by “value-and-idea systems” that are works of creative imagination validated by their adequacy to the reality with respect to which they orient us. These patterns of culture provide the conditions for our personal and collective identities. The modern Western cultural pattern celebrates analytic reason and individuality, rejecting the holistic/hierarchic values of both its Christian and pagan predecessor cultures. The absence of these cohesive traditional values, however, troubles our imagination. It exposes our vulnerability and undermines our sense of identity as persons in community. This dark side of modernity is the breeding ground for hatred. Donskis’s book is an exploration of the forms this hatred has taken in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western culture, and of what we should do to abate its continuing virulence.