H.-R. Patapievici

Truly erudite book on how, from the "heights" of Greek thinking, Europe has slowly changed direction to develop what we now call the "modern" project - and how the problems of our "postmodern" times are actually the consequences of this very modernity.

Patapievici claims that we haven't actually find a way to exit modernism and that "postmodernism" is simply the shape of modernism after a century of intense modernization - which is an understandable way to put it. The more than questionable part is when Patapievici claims that the only way to get rid of the modernist nihilism is to go back to the "Christian God", in spite of admitting earlier in the book that the Christian concept of chronology was fundamental to the modernist thinking in general and marxism in particular. That is such an obviously ridiculous idea that no wonder it would have been easily rejected in some Western European country (mind you, the "right-wing" thinkers of the Humanitas publishing house have quasi-monopoly over the younger intellectuals of the still underdeveloped "new left"). The pace of modernism can't really be slowed down anymore, but that vague possibility at least renders Patapievici in line with the more lucid Italian thinker Vattimo.

However, "The Recent Man" remains one of the few Romanian books of history of thinking (and not only) that are actually ambitious and relatively well-written, in spite of the parts that you may fully accept without question or reject just as easily (simply due to his ideology). Nevertheless, you might want to go through the bibliography - a lot of food for thought...… (lisätietoja)