Description: What is it that makes humankind capable of genocide? What can we do to create a world without large scale crimes against humanity?

In their classic work the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno provided a history, and an indictment, of the ascendance of Enlightenment reason. They said the spread of logic and science paved the way for democracy, but also for fascism and intolerance -- the kind of coldly rational citizenship that leads to genocide.

Reason and Horror seeks to find an outlook that can spare the work the horrors of extermination politics, using the writings of Horkheimer, Adorno, and others. What is it that people must not only think, but also feel, to make themselves incapable of genocide? To find the answer, Morton Schoolman develops a fascinating and entirely new interpretation of the work of Horkheimer and Adorno. In recasting their views on diversity and individuality before and after the Holocaust, along with the work of Nietzsche and even Whitman and de Tocqueville, he argues that the sensibility the Critical Theorists argued for is actually nurtured in a democracy. In the end, Schoolman's stunning and controversial answer is not that people must develop a rational sense of justice or even a logical respect for human dignity, but that people must also change the way they feel, and cultivate an aesthetic sensibility.

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