With this study of the paradoxical and truncated manner in which the German Right incorporated the Enlightenment, I wish to accentuate the positive contributions the Enlightenment has made to modern life. Germany's scientific and technological advances occurred without the benefit of a vital tradition of political liberalism. Nevertheless, many observers concluded that Hitler's evil had its origins in an excess of reason, a view that lies behind much of contemporary cultural pessimism. But Enlightenment reason meant more and other than the means–ends rationality of bureaucratic terror. It is not the Enlightenment but its inadequate and partial incorporation into German society that should be condemned – and understood.

This study is also meant as a reminder that ideas matter, and more specifically, that simplistic explanations of the causes and consequences of technological change can have and have had dangerous political consequences. During a period in which the Western democracies are facing the challenges of the third industrial revolution of computers and telecommunications, a study of the German response to the second industrial revolution has some contemporary significance. Today many intellectuals in West Germany and the West generally are less enthusiastic about the prospects offered by technological changes than the reactionary modernists were. But the mistrust of reason and the inclination to endow technology with qualities it does not possess, while remaining largely ignorant of its inherent technical features, continues to bedevil relations between technology and the soul.

As I worked on this book I could not help noticing the similarity between reactionary modernism and the technologically and financially well-endowed fanaticisms of the Third World.