Wasn’t Rousseau a part of the Enlightenment? Shouldn’t Marx be counted as an Enlightenment thinker? The Enlightenment thinkers were not all scientific humanists: some were men of faith, and some were racists. There were many Enlightenments, not just one. Instead I’ll use the controversies to reflect on the Enlightenment project and its enemies in the current moment. (A list of reviews and commentaries may be found at the foot of this essay.) I’ll resist the temptation to correct errors, settle scores, or relitigate cases I made in the book.

This month’s publication of the paperback edition of EN in the US and UK is an occasion for me to weigh in on the controversies that have flared up in the year since the book appeared. They have proclaimed, with barely concealed schadenfreude, that the Enlightenment is an idea whose time has passed, soon to be killed off by authoritarian populism, social media, or artificial intelligence. They have insisted that human progress can only be an illusion of cherry-picked data. Far from embracing the beleaguered ideals of the Enlightenment, critics have blamed it for racism, imperialism, existential threats, and epidemics of loneliness, depression, and suicide. But in the words of a colleague, “You’ve made people’s heads explode!” Many people who have written to me about my 2018 book Enlightenment Now say they’ve been taken aback by the irate attacks from critics on both the right and the left.

You wouldn’t think that a defense of reason, science, and humanism would be particularly controversial in an era in which those ideals would seem to need all the help they can get.

Enlightenment now book