أوقات العدمية .. التفكير على طريقة ماكس فيبر

“What makes Brown's book particularly worth reading is her astonishing ability to show how the key themes of Weber's studies—including his emphasis on the distinctive characteristics of modernity...—speak to our own times.” - _Inside Higher Ed_ “It prompts us to think more carefully and creatively about the relationships between human freedom, human value, and something beyond purely human concerns, whether truth, God, or Gaia.” - _Commonwell_ “Worth reading... a timely reminder of the nihilistic air we breathe.” - _Law and Liberty_ “In an elegant and concise manner...this insightful and thought-provoking book highlights some of the objective cultural factors that contribute to social division and the decline of public life in many democracies today.” - _Critical Theology_ How did politics become an arena for arrogant demagogues? Why did the university turn into an ideological battlefield? Where did the truth go? Wendy Brown puts nihilism at the heart of these dilemmas. Nihilism, which stems from the replacement of God and tradition with science and reason, removes the basis on which values ​​are based, including the value of truth itself. It over-politicizes knowledge, makes the deep trivial, the future insignificant, and corruption normal. To search for solutions to this problem, Brown turns to Max Weber's lectures on the profession. Weber denounces the effects of nihilism on academic and political life, and proposes, as is well known, a separation between them, such that academic work is limited to the search for facts, and the political sphere to the enactment of values. Without accepting Weber's fundamental contradictions, Brown acknowledges the differences that these contradictions point to, and she outlines reform strategies for our time. Brown calls for reclaiming knowledge from the clutches of hyperpoliticization without eradicating values ​​from research or teaching, and urges the left to fulfill its commitments to critical thinking and democracy.