SOURCE: "Ernst Cassirer: Political Myths and Primitive Realities," in Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History: Cassirer, Eliade, Levi-Strauss, and Malinowski, The Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1987, pp. 13-41.

In the following essay, Strenski contends that Cassirer's work on myth was an attempt to alert intellectuals to the dangers of irrationalism in Weimar Germany.

Why Did Cassirer Care About Myth?

Most people have never given more than passing thought to myth. Thus it is strange when in the course of the history of thought we find great outpourings of learned writing on this subject, and on the second-order subject of the philosophy or theoretical study of myth. Now we have a doubly knotted problem: why did a second group of people care about the way the first group had cared about myth in the first place? To collect and edit myths is strange-enough behaviour. How much more unusual to study...