Die Legitimität der Neuzeit

In this major work, Blumenberg takes issue with Karl Löwith's well-known thesis that the idea of progress is a secularized version of Christian eschatology, which promises a dramatic intervention that will consummate the history of the world from outside. Instead, Blumenberg argues, the idea of progress always implies a process at work within history, operating through an internal logic that ultimately expresses human choices and is legitimized by human self-assertion, by man's responsibility for his own fate. Hans Blumenberg is professor of philosophy at the University of Münster. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.