Does the Enlightenment Still Matter Today?

By Stephen Eric Bronner

Enlightenment thinking has traditionally been associated with progressive movements as surely as the counter-enlightenment, with those of a more reactionary sort. This has not always been the case but, historically, it has occurred with sufficient regularity to consider that claim as what John Dewey would have called a “warranted assertion.” The Enlightenment and its cherished (if still unrealized) ideals of personal freedom were predicated on the liberal rule of law, an open society and what I have called the cosmopolitan sensibility.[1] Early political champions of this international intellectual movement of the 17^th and 18th centuries targeted the arbitrary exercises of institutional power, unearned privileges, religious intolerance, prejudice and torture. These artificial impediments to liberty were not only seen as contributing to hatred and war but also to stunting the intellectual growth and psychological maturity of the individual. Thus, an important element of the enlightenment legacy becomes immediately apparent: whatever the importance of historical “progress” as a regulative ideal, which consciously or unconsciously underpins any attempt to create a more livable and just world, the category only assumes concreteness when applied to individual freedom or, better, the expansion of cultural and intellectual opportunities available to him or her.

Without the belief that individuals can take responsibility for their lives, without reference to God or some other all-knowing authority, any meaningful form of education or practical understanding of democracy becomes impossible. Without that premise, indeed, elites will smugly take their superiority and their privileges for granted. What has become so evident in the culture wars of our time is that defending enlightenment values is actually a defense of the proposition that everyday people are capable of learning and, most crucially, learning about the “other” and insisting that all citizens have the right to do so. Inquiry of this sort and the exercise of what is today called “difference” or identity is subsequently dependent on the institutional legitimacy accorded universal assumptions underpinning the liberal rule of law and civil rights as they developed during the great democratic revolutions of the 18^th and 19^thcenturies.

Enlightenment political ideals are mostly Western if not in their origin then in their institutional practice. They were embraced by liberal social movements, republican protests, and socialist labor movements concerned with political liberty and economic justice while committed to the scientific “disenchantment of the world” – and progress. Still, many of among the greatest advocates of these ideals were anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, and bourgeois: Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Newton, Kant, Rousseau, or Voltaire. Others were less prejudiced: Spinoza, Montesquieu, Lessing, or Lichtenberg. None of them were ignorant of other cultures or ivory tower intellectuals shielded from public life. But, still, they tended to define the citizen, humanity, and the liberal rule of law in terms consonant with the interests of white male property-holders. In short, influenced by the prejudices of their time and speaking philosophically, they tended to identify the universal with the particular and this misguided effort has become the source for most (post) modern criticisms of the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, just as Marx’s critical method can call into question the political perversions and atrocities undertaken in his name, the critical and universal elements embedded in enlightenment philosophy and the liberal rule of law called those empirical and historical prejudices into question –as well as the exploitative elements of capitalism and imperialism with which the Enlightenment was originally intertwined.

Absolutism, dogmatism, and exploitation became the principle targets of the enlightenment legacy. That is still its legacy both in the Western democracies and the Middle East. These thinkers knew that humanity has many ways to pray, for example, and their primacy political commitment was to the ideals of reciprocity and diversity. Religious institutions identifying their private interests with those of the public good thereby came under attack. The issue for most philosophers was not the abolition of religion but enabling the peaceful co-existence of multiple religions. In this way, Kant could carve out a place for religion “within the bounds of reason” and Voltaire could praise the country in which many religions flourished. Such religious relativism, however, probably insulted orthodox defenders of a faith even more than rank atheism that at least took their absolutist claims seriously. Herein lies the source, I think, of the contempt accorded liberalism and also democratic forms of socialism by the defenders of orthodoxy.

Enlightenment political thinking is irreducible to any specific agenda or fixed system of thought. It is best defined as a certain critical spirit with positive aims. As such, it impacted upon many institutions and their ideological outlooks including religion itself. Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Lichtenberg became its advocates among Jews, still mostly stuck in provincial ghettoes, while concerns with natural rights and tempering dogma led many clergymen to break with their caste. The Abbe Sieyes who wrote “The Third Estate” (among the great revolutionary pamphlets of the French Revolution) is a case in point as are, later, those religious figures among the abolitionists and, still later, those who would play such an important role in the civil rights movement or, like the liberation theologians in Latin America, call for an end to authoritarian rule and the radical redistribution of wealth. This subterranean tendency seeking to realize enlightenment political values existed among Christians and Jews and there is no reason to think that it is missing in Islam especially when considering those imams who supported the Arab Spring.

Looking at the matter through a slightly different lens, the pseudo-universalism propagated by many philosophes, which neglected women or people of color or the poor, came under attack most vehemently from social movements that highlighted the more robust critical and genuinely universal impulses of the Enlightenment. It became for them a matter of employing critique predicated on the need to introduce” generalizable interests” (Habermas) against those who would identify universal claims (like citizenship or equality under the law) with particular groups. Immanent criticism of the way in which universal claims and generalizable interests were denied became fundamental to the contestation of discriminatory laws by figures like Dr. Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. It was no different with the most progressive intellectuals representing republican and anti-imperialist movements in China, Iran, Latin America, and elsewhere.[2] Indeed, the same line of reasoning was strikingly apparent in the battle for a republic and the liberal rule of law during the Arab Spring.

Enlightenment political thinkers initially identified liberty with political rights such as freedom of religion and assembly, speech, and arbitrary imprisonment. Only explicit legal prohibitions universally applied, they believed, should constrain individual action. Indeed, the logic of thinkers like John Locke or Adam Smith was transparent. The new liberal state should be kept weak so that “civil society” might be made strong. An “invisible hand” would regulate supply and demand and, ultimately, foster equality. Capitalism would enhance the public good as a “watchman state” set the rules in which private associations could compete and flourish. It was after all in civil society — the economy, the family, educational institutions, and the myriad associations of everyday life — that individuals became who and what they are. But it soon became apparent that the “invisible hand” wasn’t working: inequality was thriving, minorities were suffering from rank discrimination, and elites were unwilling to endanger their profits by attacking economic exploitation and oppressive economic conditions. If capitalist elites control investment, and working people and the poor constitute the majority, it should not come as a surprise that attacks on the welfare state are usually accompanied by attacks on civil liberties and even the right to vote which, in Europe, has translated into transnational organizations attempting to introduce economic austerity programs by infringing upon national sovereignty as in the case of Greece. Indeed, quite obviously, economic exploitation inhibits the options available to develop the maturity and intellectual capacities of the individual and this makes capitalism fair game for critique.

Commitment to the liberal republic became intertwined with the conflict between workers seeking to maximize their wages and improve their daily lives as against capitalists wishing to maximize their profits and control their employees. Various experiments with tempering the whip of the market were undertaken in the first part of the twentieth century: social democrats demanded what today might be called “welfare rights;” communists called for prioritizing “people over profits;” workers’ councils sought to fulfill the dream of participatory democracy with full economic equality; and, finally, postcolonial states attempted to follow their own economic course for communitarian social or religious purposes. These experiments mostly withered on the vine: social democracy lost its allure and its once revolutionary character; communism is utterly discredited; the workers’ council has not kept pace with an increasingly complex globalized economy in theory or practice; and disillusionment reigns in the counter-revolutionary aftermath of the Arab Spring.

Enlightenment political thought is open to perversion like any other. Following 9/11, American reactionaries used it to justify an interventionist their agenda in Afghanistan, Iraq and other nations in the Middle East. Imperialist motives abroad became hidden by reference to liberal principles as surely as attempts to protect white, male, and class privileges at home. “Color blind” arguments and legislation were used to perpetuate institutional racism and shrink the welfare state; religious intolerance was defended in terms of civil liberties; breaking international law was justified in terms of spreading human rights; anti-intellectualism and chauvinism were justified in the name of tolerance; and the list could go on. The conservative manipulation of the enlightenment tradition was palpable.

Much of the intellectual and radical post ’68 left tended toward versions of anarchism, communitarianism, often narrow identity politics and post-structuralism. Enlightenment, science, reflection, and universals (though interestingly enough not “dialectics”) tended to become dirty words. Their advocates stood accused of everything from supporting racism and sexism to helping bring about colonialism and virtually every catastrophe from the terror of the French revolution to Stalin and Auschwitz.[3] The profound impact of the counter-enlightenment on authoritarian movements and its appeal to their pre-modern mass base was ignored. After all, no one any longer reads counter-enlightenment philosophers like Hamann or de Maistre or the majority of their colleagues.

And this only makes sense. Their bigotry, integral nationalism, religious dogmatism, celebration of tradition, subordination to authority, and reliance on intuition was far more radical than anything expressed by their enlightenment counterparts. Counter-enlightenment thinkers provide a worldview that is important for judging just how radical the philosophies were: so, for example, it takes some knowledge of forgotten academic painters of the time to understand just how remarkable are the works of Van Gogh or Cezanne. Forgetting about distinctions between conflicting traditions of theory and practice leaves even the most perceptive critics wandering about in what Hegel termed “the night in which all cows are black. It betrays an unwillingness to acknowledge the connection between theory and practice as well as the material impact of ideas on movements. This combination offers some insight into why the Enlightenment’s critical political heritage has been, if not exactly nullified, then taken for granted.

Terms like “republic,” “rights,” and the rule off law are tossed about so regularly that they often seem bereft of meaning. Communist states called themselves republics and that remains the case with China, Iran and North Korea; such states now interpret the “right” to national self-determination, yet another notion that arose amid the great bourgeois revolutions, as a justification for insulating their prejudices and authoritarianism from external criticism or international law. Elsewhere enlightenment ideals of political liberty justify rollback of the welfare state and programs promoting economic equality and social justice. Not what constitutions say, which is always open to interpretations by conflicting interests, but enforcement of what Montesquieu termed “the spirit of the laws” is what marks the liberal republic and democracy in action.

Inhibiting the arbitrary exercise institutional power (whether economic, political, or ideological) fueled the Arab Spring and the other progressive mass movements of our age. It ultimately determines just how “liberal” the liberal rule of law really is and whether social rights are actually in play. Little wonder that the modern counter-enlightenment is based in the political attempt to undermine the liberal rule of law and block the extension of social rights that are so important for exploited and disenfranchised minorities. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, enlightenment political ideals have been thrown on the defensive once again. But then they never were never ideologically hegemonic. The enlightenment spirit is still one of protest. It may have grown a bit rickety with age but it is as emancipatory now as it was in earlier times. That is why Enlightenment still provides such appeal for those who have struggled – and who are still struggling — for liberty in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Notes

[1] For a broader discussion, see Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) 133ff.

[2] For an interesting work that explores how thoughts about dealing with Islam influenced important politicians in the early American Republic founders and shaped its understanding of tolerance, see Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders (New York: Vintage, 2013); On the global reach of the Enlightenment see, Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Ali Mirsepassi, Political Islam, Iran, and the Enlightenment: Philosophies of Hope and Despair (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 157ff

[3] Note the classic study first published in 1947 by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and trans. Edmunc Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2007). Also Zygmunt Baumann, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).

This article is based on an excerpt from Stephen Eric Bronner’s forthcoming book The Bitter Taste of Hope; Ideas, Ideologies, and Interests in the Age of Obama from SUNY Press.

Did you appreciate this publication? Please consider donating.

Bio
Latest Posts

Stephen Eric Bronner

STEPHEN ERIC BRONNER was born in 1949. He received his B.A. from the City College of New York and his Ph.D. from the University of California: Berkeley. The Senior Editor of Logos, an interdisciplinary internet journal, a member of more than a dozen other editorial boards, he is also Chair of the Executive Committee of US Academics for Peace and an advisor to Conscience International. He has taken part in missions of civic diplomacy in Darfur, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and elsewhere. Blood in the Sand: Imperial Fantasies, Rightwing Ambitions, and the Erosion of American Democracy and Peace Out of Reach: Middle Eastern Travels and the Search for Reconciliation (University Press of Kentucky) reflect this interest. Professor Bronner’s works have been translated into a dozen languages. They include: Socialism Unbound: Principles, Practices, Prospects (Columbia University Press), Camus: Portrait of a Moralist (University of Chicago Press), Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press), and Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists (Routledge). Particularly concerned with issues of bigotry and tolerance, his Reclaiming the Enlightenment (Columbia University Press) and A Rumor about the Jews (Oxford University Press) have become standard works. His most recent work is The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists (Yale University Press). Stephen Eric Bronner is the Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers University. He is also Director of Global Relations and on the Executive Committee of the UNESCO Chair for Genocide Prevention at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights. Professor Bronner is the recipient of many awards including the 2011 MEPeace Prize from the Middle East Political Network based in Jerusalem.