The Legitimacy of the Modern Age

In this major work, Blumenberg takes issue with Karl Löwith's well-known thesis thatthe idea of progress is a secularized version of Christian eschatology, which promises a dramaticintervention 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 internallogic that ultimately expresses human choices and is legitimized by human self-assertion, by man'sresponsibility for his own fate.Hans Blumenberg is professor of philosophy at the University ofMünster. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age is included in the series Studies in Contemporary GermanSocial Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.