Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement

Extract

Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement, Stephen Eric Bronner, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. xiii, 181.

I am very sympathetic to the project that Stephen Eric Bronner undertakes in this book. As someone inspired by the progressive potential of the Enlightenment, I find myself constantly on the defensive in a world deeply suspicious of the dead white men of eighteenth-century Europe. So I welcome a vigorous and uncompromising defence of those men and the ideals and values they stood for. For those of us who already see ourselves as working to further that tradition, this book is an inspiring call to keep up the good work. But for those who have been hesitant in their enthusiasm for the Enlightenment, this book will be more like a red flag waved in their face, confirming many of their suspicions of Western rationalism. Theorists of recognition, identity, post-colonialism, post-modernism, republicanism, communitarianism, post-secularism and multiple-modernities, are just some of the people who will not find this book very congenial. Ultimately, Bronner's uncompromising defence of the Enlightenment is less successful than it might have been.