Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
In praise of progress, August 4, 2009
In this short but dense book, Stephen Eric Bronner sets out to defend the Enlightenment in general and enlightened values in particular. According to him, the oft-heard equation of Enlightenment with Totalitarianism is ill founded and all to frequently amounts to nothing more than a caricature. Taking Adorno and Horkheimer as starting point, he carries his critique of this strand of thought to Foucault and Zygmunt Bauman among others. To view the Enlightenment as inherently leading to Auschwitz is to put things on its head. This runs contrary to many of its central ideals, like tolerance, civil liberties and freedom of speech. If any movement is to blame, it would be its opposite - the Counter-Enlightenment. "Where the Enlightenment valued liberty, discursive persuasion, and the critical exercise of reason, the Counter-Enlightenment stood for obedience, coercive authority, and tradition "(67). Rather than seeking absolute truth and striving for an ultimate Utopia for all humankind, the Enlightenment was in favour of social reform and stood up for the oppressed and disenfranchised. "Is it really that difficult," exclaims Bronner, "to discern the debt to the Enlightenment of those democrats and socialists...who defended the Weimar Republic as against the debt of the Counter-Enlightenment of those who sought to bring it down like Ernst Jünger, Oswald Spengler, and the gang surrounding Hitler?" (112-113).
With clarity and rigor, Bronner inquires into the two historically opposed lines of thought. To him the demarcation lines are quite clear. Despite "fashionable" attempts to blur the differences between left and right, between liberalism and conservatism, Bronner sticks firmly to his philosophical and political tradition. He also has a clear and distinct style of writing, but some knowledge of critical theory is obviously needed and the umpteenth time the word "reification" turns up, one could get lost in a bit of philosophical jargon.
Nevertheless, Reclaiming the Enlightenment is, in my view, a welcome book as counterweight to the seemingly popular simplification of the Enlightenment legacy. Stephen Eric Bronner is one of its most articulate apologists - Susan Neiman also springs to mind - and deserves to be widely read.
Just one small quip: In his fervour to defend the Enlightenment, he even lays its inspirational influence on the doorstep of homeopathy - a foggy practice if ever there was one.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reclaiming the Enlightenment from Adorno/Horkheimer, June 14, 2010
We have been so inundated with 'postmodern' diatribe against the Enlightenment that it is refreshing, and very illuminating, to find someone taking up the cudgels against this antimodern propaganda whose principal beneficiaries have been the religious right (in fact, the term 'postmodern' was used by Toynbee to ply his denigration of modernity quite before the leftist cult on this even began). The book by Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of the Enlightenment, deserved, and gets here, a respectful challenge, leaving one to wonder what actually fueled the fashion over that flawed analysis.
The author deftly navigates through the complexities of the Enlightenment, and, importantly, the so-called Counter-Enlightenment, careful to note that the latter has no real dialectical relationship to the former, an important point if it might seem that rationality had spawned irrationality (in the muddle over dialectic left behind by Hegel).
I think Adorno and Horkheimer missed the point that rather than a 'dialectic of the Enlightenment' we might suffer a loss of the balance indicated by that rich spectrum of cultural innovations. A later decline from the Enlightenment is very much what those authors seem to be attacking, not the Enlightenment itself. The onset of positivism and the grip of scientism in the gelling of the dread Iron Cage was not the fault of the brilliant innovators of the Enlightenment. Indeed, the work of that quintessential 'philosopher' Kant seems almost to prophesy and attempt to forestall the decline of culture from the enigmatic peak period we call the 'Enlightenment'.
I think that the Enlightenment remains a puzzle until we see its place in the larger framework of modernity as a whole, and modernity in context of the evolution of civilization. The suspicious similarity to the Axial era lingers in one's mind, and the 'Greek Enlightenment' is mysteriously echoed and amplified in the modern case.
Once we consider this larger framework we can properly defend its role as a peak which we might wish to transcend to progress, but from which we might instead decline.
John Landon
World History And The Eonic Effect
World History and the Eonic Effect
discusses the issue of the Enlightenment and its place in world history
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
7 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Moral clarity from the left, March 29, 2006
This review is from: Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (Hardcover)
Refreshingly frank on the need to expunge the latent Heideggerianism/cultural pessimism from the Frankfurt School, Bronner dispenses with all notions of pressing the counter-enlightenment into service for progressive ends. Instead, he gets us to square up to the exacting *but politically sober* demands of the Enlightenment. It's only two cheers, then, for modernity (but one that doesn't end up at Auschwitz ...) But, its three cheers, most certainly, for the moral clarity Bronner engenders, not least in expunging the aristocratic-romantic-Teutonic strains from Critical Theory's past.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
