Enlightenment Controversies

The Enlightenment and its legacy have long been highly contested: Did it provide the foundations for modern plural democracies, including concepts for the key challenge of dealing with deep disagreements and fundamental conflicts – or is it to blame for Eurocentrism, racism and imperialism, for excessive, uncritical rationality, instrumental reason and the exploitation of nature, and for various forms of totalitarianism? In readings of about a dozen texts – mainly British, but also French and German – from the 1710s to the 1790s, this book shows that the major objections later voiced against the Enlightenment were already raised in remarkably subtle ways in discussions within the Enlightenment. Moreover, much of this Enlightenment self-critique took place in literary rather than in strictly philosophical texts, though the distinction is less clear than it might seem. The ‘literary self-enlightenment of the Enlightenment’ frequently does not spell out its assessments: These writings require readers to weigh arguments and to judge for themselves. The book thus asserts the importance of the Enlightenment for the present – an Enlightenment, to be sure, which performs its own self-enlightenment in an autocritique that is at heart a literary one.