This study expands on an argument the author made in an earlier book (Edward Said: Criticism and Society, Verso, 2002). It is an interdisciplinary work incorporating aspects of intellectual and socio-political history, sociology, political theory and the policy sciences, and cultural (particularly post-colonial) critique, but its primary objective is to lay bare the largely subterranean connections between modern (i.e. Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment) philosophy, or rationality in its culturally privileged sense, on the one hand, and world-wide imperialism, racism, and genocide, on the other. The major thinkers engaged to one degree or another in the study include the following: Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Husserl, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas. Much of the discussion involving these philosophers takes the form of radical interpretation (or intervention)