Customer Reviews

Enemies of Hope: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism

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I can't tell you in this space how good this book is. It reviews all forms of counter-enlightenment zealotry individually: the postmodernists, the romantics, the zoologists of humanity, the cognitive machine theories of humanity, and so on. Tallis is a very sensitive man who has gone to a great deal of effort to understand the arguments of the opponents of rationalism and science. He has good credentials too, since he is an MD who has published an awful lot of articles in his field, gerontology. He is British, to boot, so he writes well and with wit. I know of no other complete review of the counter-enlightenment goofs under a single cover. In addition, Tallis is careful to extract the Scottish from the French enlightenment, where the French is the strand with the excessive moral zeal that wanted to perfect all nations into models of the French, which is the chief thorn making the counter-enlightenment crowd angry. If you take the social activism element out of the enlightenment, you are left with only the scientific element, and the charge that the enlightenment was an attempt at cultural hegemony is ludicrous. The final chapter is a defense of the enlightenment that is careful, strenuous and clear eyed. This book is excellent reading, and a very nice contribution to the central debate of our times.

Enemies of Hope is an engaging, energetic critique of the postmodernist worldview. Tallis shows there are important grains of truth in postmodernism, but the conclusions postmodernist thinkers draw from these truths are wildly exaggerated. Tallis clarified many issued for me. He ends the book with a convincing presentation of how enlightenment ideals should be recast to take into account the valid concerns of postmodernism. An outstanding work.