Ronald Schleifer offers a powerful reassessment of the politics and culture of modernism. His study analyzes the transition from the Enlightenment to post-Enlightenment ways of understanding in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He argues that this transition expresses itself centrally in an altered conception of temporality. Addressing a variety of disciplines, this study examines the period's remarkable breaks with the past in literature, music, and the arts more generally, and engages with the work of writers and thinkers as varied as George Eliot, Walter Benjamin, Einstein and Russell.