The Question of Enlightenment - Theory and Practice in Eighteenth ...

The Question of Enlightenment 39
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For the Gulag, see Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1990) pp. 124-133, 135-
138. For a discussion of the “affiliation” between Enlightenment ideals of universality and Nazi genocide see Berel
Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) pp. 165-206. For a review
of other works purporting to find linkages between the Enlightenment and modern totalitarianism, see see Graeme
Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments : From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2006).
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William Ophuls, Requiem for Modern Politics: The Tragedy of the Enlightenment and the Challenge of the
New Millennium (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997).
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James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: The Free Press, 1993) pp. 244-250.
Leszek Kolakowski, “The Idolatry of Politics,” Atlantic Community Quarterly 24 (Fall 1986) 223), that its
belief that human beings are “entirely society-made” leaves us “conceptually defenseless in the fate of totalitarian
doctrines, ideologies, and institutions” (224), and that its “erosion of historical consciousness” leads to a (227).
Kolakowski is reprising, in part, an argument that had been made in Lester G. Crocker, An Age of Crisis: Man and
World in Eighteenth Century French Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959). For a critique of Crocker’s
argument, see Peter Gay, “An Age of Crisis: A Critical View,” The Journal of Modern History 33:2 (1961) 174-177
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For the former charge, see Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: John Murray, 1990)
pp. 33-34, 39-40, 51-52, 183. For the latter, see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984) pp. 31-37).
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On racism, see Richard H. Popkin, “The Philosophical Bases of Modern Racism” and “Hume’s Racism”
reprinted in The High Road to Pyrrhonism (San Diego: Austin Hill Press, 1980) pp. 79-102 and 267-276 and Cornel
West, Prophesy Deliverance! (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982) pp. 61-65 For a discussion of feminist
critiques of the Enlightenment, see Robin May Schott, “The Gender of Enlightenment,” in Schmidt, What is
Enlightenment, Sandra Harding, “The Instability of the Analytical Categories of Feminist Theory,” Signs 11:4
(1986) pp. 645-664 esp. p. 655-657 and Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory,”
Signs 12:4 (1987) pp. 621-643. For a discussion of the issue of “the Other,” see Manfred Frank, “Two Centuries of