Preface and Acknowledgments

Abstract

of Reason Produces Monsters is the most famous image in this series of etchings. “In sleep, the body is dark,” Walter Benjamin explained to Gershom Scholem, “a spectral medium, in the middle of which life and death are located.”1 Goya portrays how, in sleep, demons can haunt reason. This is a book about reason and four decades of its sleep, with cruel and hideous monsters on the loose. It also is an injunctive book about history, social science, and liberal guardianship I offer in critical homage to the generation of my teachers who, in a climate of anxiety, sought to rouse reason and secure its wakefulness.