At the frontiers of metaphysics : time and history in T.S. Eliot and Walter Benjamin

Politically, at least, a rapprochement between the conservative modernism of T.S. Eliot and the Messianic Marxism of Walter Benjamin would seem remote. While Eliot's attachment to the ideals of Charles Maurras's Action française and contested expression of anti-Semitism - in such works as 'Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a cigar' (1919) and After Strange Gods (1934) - have tainted his critique of modern liberalism and secular progress, Benjamin's anti-fascist credentials are unquestionable. Not only does opposition to fascism provide a recurrent motif of Benjamin's writing, but the German-Jewish intellectual also suffered an untimely death in 1940 (while attempting to cross the Pyrenees in an escape from Hitler's push into France).