The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After is David Kolb’s uncompromising attempt to prise open the conceptual grammar by which modernity so often flatters and confines itself. He begins from the disquiet that “modernity” seems to demand a cruel alternative—either oppressive inheritances or an abstracted, procedural freedom—and he refuses the ultimacy of that choice. His wager is that modernity must be put in its place: located within enabling contexts that modern discourse cannot, on its own terms, fully describe. To make that wager payable, Kolb recruits two non-liberal diagnosticians, Hegel and Heidegger, and stages not just their separate critiques of the present but their confrontation with one another, each serving as the other’s decisive counter-reader. The result is neither nostalgia nor apologia; it is a lucidly argued, philosophical dismantling of the illusion that there is one Modern Age (or one Postmodern Age) to which our lives must conform.
Kolb’s opening move is to clear the ground of the most persuasive sociological self-image of the modern: Max Weber’s portrait of the distanced chooser inhabiting formally rational institutions. Rationalization—in thought and in action—separates procedure from substantive ends, proposes efficiency and consistency as master norms, and yields the celebrated yet desiccating ideal of the empty self whose dignity lies in the power to select and maximize any ends whatever. Kolb’s reconstruction of Weber is exacting and fair, showing how the ironies of freedom and disenchantment arise from the same structural gains, and how the famous “iron cage” fuses formal process with bureaucratic uniformity. But he also draws out Weber’s own dichotomies—structure versus will, form versus content—and shows how they silently predetermine a pessimistic horizon in which the only escapes are charismatic irruptions or private redemptions. By diagnosing the dichotomies themselves as modern artifacts, Kolb begins to loosen their grip.
Hegel then enters not as the architect of a suffocating totality but as the anatomist of modern civil society and the logician of its categories. In Hegel’s analysis, civil society institutionalizes a purified structure of mutual recognition that renders persons free precisely by abstracting their identity from inherited roles: to be a person is to be capable of property, contract, and choice, irrespective of privilege or status. This is liberation—but it is also a distillation that doubles the separations Weber had mapped: a formally universal order indifferent to particular contents, and an individual identity now experienced as the emptiness of a chooser faced with indefinitely many goods. Kolb’s exposition is especially strong where Hegel is often caricatured: the forms of recognition are not psychological epiphenomena but the very media through which selves become selves; they are not abandoned in modernity but become historically thinner, more formal, and thus more corrosive of inherited substantive measures.
From here Kolb follows Hegel back into the Logic, arguing that Hegel’s political diagnostics are inseparable from a reworking of the oppositions that organize modern self-description: universal/particular/individual; form/content; immediacy/mediation. The “absolute form” of spirit’s movement is not a baroque add-on to an otherwise astute social theory but the condition under which modern dichotomies can be both honored and overcome. Kolb’s Hegel shows how modern formalism is not refuted from the outside but sublated from within: the very patterns of argument that produce formal universality are made to reveal the objective content implicit in their own activity, preparing the transition from civil society’s procedural freedom to the state’s more demanding unity of freedom and custom. Whatever one finally thinks of Hegel’s resolution, Kolb’s reading restores its philosophical necessity: the passages from market to polity are not policy proposals but category-movements.
Heidegger becomes, in Kolb’s arrangement, Hegel’s most searching critic—and Hegel, reciprocally, becomes the court of appeal against Heidegger’s own transcendental residues. Kolb renders Heidegger’s modernity as a homelessness of beings under das Gestell, which he evocatively translates as universal imposition, and he treats Ereignis not as an occult source but, with David Krell’s rendering, as the propriative event—the opening that appropriates humans and things into determinate constellations of presence and absence. Against the modern impulse to mastery, Heidegger counsels a thinking that lets this opening be experienced as withdrawal, a dwelling that resists reduction to manipulation. Kolb distills this into a mode of deconstructive living: neither flight to the Black Forest nor apocalyptic refusal, but a cultured inhabitation that keeps the clearing open within the very domains that level and enfranchise us. His Heidegger section is exemplary for its care with language—tracking how an “open space” is sensed amid universal imposition without letting Ereignis harden into a prior formal field.
Yet Kolb will not let Heidegger have the last word. He shows how Heidegger’s reading of Hegel as complicit with the metaphysics of subjectivity overshoots the mark, precisely because it cannot register the internal self-undoing of the logical categories that Hegel orchestrates. Conversely, if Hegel could read Heidegger, he would charge that the latter’s effort to put modernity “in its place” reintroduces, under historical auspices, a Kantian grammar of form and content, essential and inessential, and a privileged viewpoint that knows better than everyday understanding. Kolb presses this point with philosophical finesse: to the extent that universal imposition functions as a deep a priori of the age, the modern world is made more unified than it is, and post-metaphysical thinking threatens to become another master discourse. In response, he proposes neither a Hegelian closure nor a Heideggerian destiny, but a modest transcendental deflation in which contingency, multiplicity, and cross-pressure do the work that “grounds” had been asked to do.
Out of this double critique emerges Kolb’s positive vision, muted and exacting rather than programmatic. He argues for the possibility of a life that is free yet rooted—a life whose freedom is not the vacuity of choice among arbitrary ends, but the cultivated capacity to inhabit shared contexts without fantasizing their total unity or our sovereignty over them. The payoff is ethical and political: instead of oscillating between procedural liberalism and restorationist longings, one learns to take “objective content” where it is already threading through modern practices, to renew institutions from within their internal tensions rather than in the name of an impossible outside. This is why, for Kolb, even the best contemporary talk of “postmodernity” must be handled with tongs. Lyotard’s dismantling of grand narratives is instructive; but insofar as it still pictures modernity as a largely unified project of mastery, it threatens to reenact the very simplifications it resists and to fetishize an avant-gardism that must always outstrip “the language of the tribe.” Kolb’s counsel is more patient: cultivate the multiplicities already at work inside science, art, law, economy, and the everyday, and refuse the presupposition that history is parceled into singular Ages with single essences.
That patience does not blunt the book’s edge. On the contrary, Kolb’s description of modernity’s self-image—of the formally rational self, the technocratic state, the market’s procedural universality—binds together Weber’s sharpest insights while showing how their inherited oppositions conceal alternatives. His Hegel closes the distance between political philosophy and logic without collapsing one into the other; his Heidegger holds open the clearing without installing a new transcendental tribunal. Together they disclose how much of our late-modern rhetoric of choice presupposes what cannot be chosen, and how many of our appeals to “tradition” are themselves modern exercises in self-invention. The upshot is neither reconciliation nor revolt; it is sobriety: to live as moderns without taking modernity’s categories as final, to accept finitude without pretending it is the last word, to let multiplicity constrain us without making it a new metaphysics.
Kolb’s prose is unshowy and exact; his argumentation, scrupulous in its attributions; his ambitions, humane. He gives readers one of the most pointed English accounts of Hegel’s logic in service of a worldly problem, and one of the most fair-minded renderings of Heidegger’s later thinking in service of living otherwise in the world we actually have. Above all he offers an image of intellectual integrity fit for the present: thinking that does not seek a vantage outside modernity, dwelling that resists both nihilistic drift and restorative zeal, and critique that neither abdicates its standards to pluralism nor denies the plurality of standards by fiat. In a field often divided between the guardians of order and the celebrants of rupture, The Critique of Pure Modernity makes a more difficult demand: that we practice freedom as acknowledgment, and acknowledgment as the art of finding measure where form and content, universal and particular, have long been torn apart.
Simon Gros 
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