the enlightenment legacy mark knights

							               The Enlightenment Legacy         Mark Knights

• Why is it important for modernists to understand the Enlightenment?

• What was its legacy and why is that legacy a controversial one?

• ‘Isms’

• Is the Enlightenment a useful term, does it have a coherence, a common
  set of values? Is it useful as a set of ideas/ideals?

   Legacies:

   1) Liberalism (toleration of opinion and of religions; separation of
      church and state; consensual government; free speech; free market
      (social progress through the market; consumerism; capitalism);
      natural rights (right to resist tyranny in self-defence, natural equality
      and liberty, sexual liberty).
   2) Socialism (Rousseau; Utilitarianism; Henri Comte de Saint-Simon
      (1760-1825), Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
   3) Scientific and medical mentalities
   4) Internationalism [Saint-Pierre, Project for Settling an Everlasting
      Peace (1712)]
      Questioning or even rejecting the Enlightenment:
   5) Conservatism [Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution
      (1790), Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821)]
   6) Romanticism [Burke's Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and
      Beautiful (1757); Rousseau, The Confessions (completed 1770, pub.
      1781)]
   7) Colonialism
   8) Racism
   9) Sexism
   10) Fascism and Absolutism
      Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
      [1944, 1947]
   11) Post-modern challenge

   Is the Enlightenment useful, both as a term and as a ‘project’?