ABSTRACT
The tragedy of Enlightenment politics is that they devour the capital upon which civilization is founded. Modern politics unshackles will and appetite from the chains with which traditional civilizations had sought to bind them, thereby unleashing moral entropy and destroying the civic virtue that undergirds both society and polity. The story of modern civilization has been one of progressive demoralization in all three senses of the word: the corruption of morals, the undermining of morale, and the spreading of confusion. Modern civilization, the peculiar way of life based on the ideas of the Enlightenment, represents not a break with all past civilization, as is usually thought, but rather an intensification and amplification of most of its worst tendencies. The motto of modern civilization is thus, as Karl Marx said, that of the Old Regime: Après nous le deluge.
