Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb's 1994 classic, On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society.
From an Amazon reviewer:
"The purpose of a college education is to teach you how to think". Regardless of your current opinions, this book is going to make you think. If you are not afraid to check your values and judgements, read the book.
P.xi "Historians who think it the highest calling of their profession to resurrect the 'daily life of ordinary people' can find little evidence in the daily life of ordinary Germans of the overwhelming fact of life-and of death-for millions of Jews; those who look for the 'long-term' processes and impersonal 'structures' in history tend to explain this 'short-term event' in such a way as to explain it away; and those seeking to 'deconstruct' the history of the Holocaust as they deconstruct all of history come perilously close to the 'revisionists' who deny the reality of the Holocaust. And so with philosophers and literary critics for whom there is no reality but only language, no philosophy but only a play of mind, no morality but only rhetoric and aesthetics."
P.6 "The beasts of modernism have mutated into the beasts of postmodernism-relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity. And since then, generations of intelligent students under the guidance of their enlightened professors have looked into the abyss, have contemplated those beasts, and have said, 'How interesting how exciting.' Today, students in some of the most distinguished departments of literature are all too often reading books about how to read books. Literary theory has replaced literature itself as the fashionable subject of study. Structuralism and deconstruction, gender theory and the new historicism, reader-response and speech-act theory-these are more hotly debated than the content and style of particular novels or poems."
P.17 "This is the intention behind some of the most fashionable schools of history: that which explains everything in terms of race, class, and gender; that which focuses entirely upon the daily lives of ordinary people; that which structuralizes history, displacing individuals, events, and ideas by impersonal structures, forces, and institutions. The effect in each case is to mute the drama of history, to void it of moral content, to mitigate evil and belittle greatness. Looking into the most fearsome abysses of modern times, these historians see not beasts but faceless bureaucrats, not corpses but statistics."
There is a whole chapter on Marx and his writings. Also a chapter on the significance in the long story of history of nationalism and post modernism.
