Judging the Enlightenment: Legacies and Debates

More than two centuries later, the Enlightenment remains fiercely debated. Admirers credit it with ideas central to modern life: scientific inquiry, religious toleration, freedom of expression, constitutional government, human rights and the belief that suffering can be reduced through reason and reform. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), however, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argued that reason used as a tool of control could turn into new forms of domination. Michel Foucault, in a 1984 essay also titled 'What Is Enlightenment?

', urged critical questioning rather than simple loyalty to Enlightenment ideals, and postcolonial and feminist scholars highlight its exclusions of women, enslaved people and colonized peoples. Others, such as Jürgen Habermas, call modernity an 'unfinished project' whose ideals can be used to correct its failures. Historian Jonathan Israel distinguishes a 'radical' Enlightenment of democracy and equality from a 'moderate' one. Weighing these views is itself an exercise in the critical thinking the Enlightenment championed.