Includes bibliographical references (p. [163]-188) and index.

On looking into the abyss -- Of heros, villans, and valets -- From Marx to Hegel -- Liberty : "one very simple principle"? -- The dark and the bloody crossroads where nationalism and religion meet -- Where have all the footnotes gone? -- Postmodernist history.

In these perceptive essays, the highly regarded historian Gertrude Himmelfarb critically examines the cultural and ideological fashions of contemporary America. She analyzes the intellectual arrogance and spiritual impoverishment at the heart of such current academic movements in history, literature, and philosophy as structuralism, deconstructionism, and postmodernism - and shows how they have led to the belittling of one of the great tragedies of all time, the Holocaust. And she demonstrates the intimate, pervasive relationship between what is taught in our universities and what happens in society. She describes how the very idea of the "abyss" is made trivial and banal; how the role of the hero in history is being usurped by the writer of history; how with the end of the Cold War the greatest threat to liberalism is liberalism itself, how the link between nationalism and religion has been dangerously ignored; and how the relativization of history leads to its de-moralization and de-humanization. Provocative and incisive, Gertrude Himmelfarb's writings force us to examine our ideas about the troubling issues that concern our society and culture today.