When one recalls how certain great philosophers were drawn to Nazism, at least in its early stages, and, to a much greater and lasting extent, to Stalinism, one begins to wonder whether, in modern philosophy, the ability to break with the illusions of both theology and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rationalism does not carry with it, in turn, quasi-religious faith,
a nostalgia for the image of a society which is at one with itself and which has mastered its history, for the image of an organic community.