Avihu Zakai – författare

Avihu Zakai analyzes Jonathan Edwards''s redemptive mode of historical thought in the context of the Enlightenment. As theologian and philosopher, Edwards has long been a towering figure in American intellectual history. Nevertheless, and despite Edwards''s intense engagement with the nature of time and the meaning of history, there has been no serious attempt to explore his philosophy of history. Offering the first such exploration, Zakai considers Edwards''s historical thought as a reaction, in part, to the varieties of Enlightenment historical narratives and their growing disregard for theistic considerations. Zakai analyzes the ideological origins of Edwards''s insistence that the process of history depends solely on God''s redemptive activity in time as manifested in a series of revivals throughout history, reading this doctrine as an answer to the threat posed to the Christian theological teleology of history by the early modern emergence of a secular conception of history and the modern legitimation of historical time. In response to the Enlightenment refashioning of secular, historical time and its growing emphasis on human agency, Edwards strove to re-establish God''s preeminence within the order of time. Against the de-Christianization of history and removal of divine power from the historical process, he sought to re-enthrone God as the author and lord of history--and thus to re-enchant the historical world. Placing Edwards''s historical thought in its broadest context, this book will be welcomed by those who study early modern history, American history, or religious culture and experience in America.

This book examines works of four German-Jewish scholars who, in their places of exile, sought to probe the pathology of the Nazi mind: Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941), Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), and Erich Neumann’s Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949). While scholars have examined these authors’ individual legacies, no comparative analysis of their shared concerns has yet been undertaken, nor have the content and form of their psychological inquiries into Nazism been seriously and systematically analyzed. Yet, the sense of urgency in their works calls for attention. They all took up their pens to counter Nazi barbarism, believing, like the English jurist and judge Sir William Blackstone, who wrote in 1753 - scribere est agere ("to write is to act").