Prompt: Throughout this course, we have considered modernity as related to the impulse to improve human society through the application of reason. We have looked at plans and attempts to create new societies and new kinds of human beings from the Enlightenment through the Soviet Union and we have also studied the circumstances which led to the destruction of whole groups of people.
Discuss this theme, i.e. the interplay of improvement/reform with destruction using works we read this semester with reference to at least three of the following topics/periods: the Englightenment, the French Revolution, “Utopian Socialism,” Marxism, Imperialism, the Russian Revolution, Fascism, and the Holocaust. Speculate about the relationship between the impulse to improve and the legacy of destruction in modern European history.
