Tackles a question as old as Plato and still pressing today: what is reason, and what roles does and should it have in human endeavour? Applying the tools of intellectual history, Martin Jay examines the overlapping, but not fully compatible, meanings that have accrued to the term "reason” over two millennia, homing in on moments of crisis, critique, and defense of reason.

Martin Jay is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His many books include The Dialectical Imagination, Marxism and Totality, and The Virtues of Mendacity.