Some ideas are too successful for their own good. They take flight from their original context and are capacious to a dangerous degree. The Enlightenment, Richard Whatmore contends in this book, is just such an idea. Well yes, since it appears to describe a state of mind rather than, say, a single, big thought (like “free trade”). We might think of another state-of-mind idea that also entails a very contested set of beliefs — “woke”.
No wonder, then, that the Enlightenment comes in for its own particular battering, depending on your politics. For many on the Right, its focus on liberty, equality, progress, and toleration make it the ancestor of a particular kind of smug liberalism. The kind that got slapped in the face by the twin shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump in 2016. On the Left, the Enlightenment is seen, in the words of John Gray, a regular contributor to the New Statesman, as the embodiment of “Western cultural imperialism as the project of universal civilization”.
