The "disenchantment" of the world --
Historical self-assertion --
Modes of rationalization --
Selfhood and subjectivity --
The theory of the novel and the autonomy of art --
The theory of the novel --
Epic and novel --
The autonomy of art --
Secularization and modernization --
Representation and secularization --
Secularization stories: norms and ideals --
The rationalization of religion --
The subject and the State --
Questions of legitimation --
Reorientation in ethics --
Legitimation and representation --
Subjective desire --
Belief and desire --
Subjective desire and social change --
Social norms: recognition and transformation --
Possibilities of postmodernism --
History, theory, postmodernity --
Aesthetic liberalism.

The question of modernity has provoked a vigorous debate in the work of thinkers from Hegel to Habermas. Our own self-styled postmodern age has seen no end to this debate, which now receives a major and wide-ranging intervention from the theorist and critic Anthony J. Cascardi. Offering an historical account of the origins and transformations of the rational subject or self as it is represented in Descartes, Cervantes, Pascal, Hobbes and the Don Juan myth, he carries his argument across the fields of epistemology, literature, political science, religion and psychology. The modern subject proves to be positioned within conflicting discourses, in a culture characterised by its 'detotalised totality'. Max Weber's concept of 'world disenchantment' enables Cascardi to make a searching critique of modernity's sense of its absoluteness, divorced from an archaic, 'enchanted' world. He advocates in its place a more fruitful relationship between historical analysis and theoretical speculation, offering constructive new alternatives to current orthodoxy regarding subjectivity and modernity