The intellectual tradition that questions the assumptions and consequences of modern Western civilization: its faith in progress, its egalitarianism, its scientific rationalism, its dissolution of religious and customary foundations. It is less a political position than a diagnostic stance, which is why it has been occupied by figures with almost nothing else in common.
Nietzsche is its most influential modern source. His account of the death of God, his genealogy of moral values and his portrait of the last man framed modernity as a civilizational crisis rather than an achievement, and set the terms later critics worked within. Around him stands a loose company: Rousseau, who argued before the industrial age that civilization corrupts; the Romantics, who set organic community against mechanism; Spengler and later Heidegger, who read technology as a way of disclosing the world that leaves room for nothing else; Weber, who described the same loss sociologically as disenchantment.
The tradition splits sharply on what follows from the diagnosis. Reactionary critics conclude that the pre-modern order should be restored or approximated. Traditionalist conservatives and communitarians seek to conserve whatever modernity has not yet dissolved. Critical theorists and postmodernists accept the critique of Enlightenment reason while rejecting any return, pushing instead toward an emancipation modernity promised and did not deliver. The shared premise is that something was lost; there is no agreement about what, or whether it could be recovered.
Its critics argue that the tradition systematically discounts what modernity delivered — the collapse in child mortality, the extension of literacy and legal personhood, the abolition of chattel slavery — and that nostalgia for organic community tends to omit who that community excluded and on what terms. The strongest work in the tradition takes the objection seriously and asks whether the gains and the losses have the same source.