German philosophy, famed for its high-minded Idealism, was plunged into crisis when Germany became an urban and industrial society in the late nineteenth-century. The key figure was Immanuel Kant: seen for a century as the philosophical father of the nation, Kant seemed to lack crucial answers for violent and impersonal modern times.

This book shows that the social and intellectual crisis that overturned Germany’s traditions - a sense of profound spiritual confusion over where modern society was headed - was the same as allowed Hitler to come to power. It also describes how German philosophers actively struggled to create a new kind of philosophy, in order to understand social incoherence and technology’s diminishing of the individual.