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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Jon Stewart, "A History of Nihilism in the Nineteenth Century: Confrontations with Nothingness" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Description: Nihilism - the belief that life is meaningless - is frequently associated with twentieth-century movements such as existentialism, postmodernism and Dadaism, and thought to result from the shocking experiences of the two World Wars and the Holocaust. In A History of Nihilism in the Nineteenth Century: Confrontations with Nothingness (Cambridge UP, 2023), Jon Stewart shows that nihilism's beginnings in fact go back much further to the first half of the nineteenth century. He argues that the true origin of modern nihilism was the rapid development of Enlightenment science, which established a secular worldview. This radically diminished the importance of...