"The Terms of Cultural Criticism" enters into lively debate with three highly influential schools of thought, reflecting on ways in which Enlightenment precepts, rather than being fundamentally mistaken, have historically miscarried. Though seldom examined together, the Frankfurt School, existentialism, and post-structuralism have clear commonalities, as well as considerable differences. All three address the apparent collapse of European tradition, and they have all posed formidable challenges to such legacies of the Enlightenment as political liberalism, instrumental reason, and self-positing subjectivity. Each intellectual current is surveyed with a view to its adequacy, since each emerged, writes Wolin, "from the ruins of 20th-century historical experience in order to offer intellectual guidance for a Western cultural context that has seemingly lost its raison d'etre". Wolin argues that the blurring of the distinction between "science" and "reason" - tracing the misdeeds of the former back to the sins of the latter - is one of the most fatal intellectual tendencies of our age.