Like it or not we are stuck with the Enlightenment. That much noted phenomenon and reactions to it comprise the greater part of our active political and intellectual heritage. Personally, I never much cared for the term. It has a grandiose and born-again evangelical tone, which strikes me as excessively self-important and fundamentally ahistorical. And yet the work of Enlightenment philosophers, Descartes, Locke, Smith, Rousseau, Hobbes, Diderot, Kant, Voltaire and others, undoubtedly constituted a significant shift in philosophical and political thought. The general view, as one historian put it, is that ‘The Enlightenment and its aftermath saw the introduction of the secular and the discarding of the divine as the source of authority in human affairs’.
The movement became associated with values such as reason, enquiry, individual freedom, toleration, equality, justice, universalism, progress, happiness and democracy, the sort of principles that, at least until fairly recently, got a widespread, if somewhat casual, thumbs up throughout the West. The impact of these concepts on life and politics since the eighteenth century and particularly for the twenty-first century is the main focus of this essay. I leave the detailed philosophical analysis to those who are more qualified.
Given the broad, not to say amorphous and even contradictory ‘principles’ of the Enlightenment, it is hardly surprising that it did not resolve into a single political cause or movement. The celebrated Enlightenment enthusiast Frederick the Great allowed complete freedom to the press and was an admirer and supporter of Voltaire, but he was also a monarch who exercised enormous powers over his subjects and a successful imperialist who significantly extended Prussian territory through military aggression. However, Frederick was not as ideologically unusual as we might think. While freedom from injustice at the hands of elites was a key Enlightenment ideal, in practice the political privileging of economic and social elites was the norm in the age of the Lumières and over the following centuries. The desire to exercise control or influence over foreign territories was also fairly common, as remains the case today.
The disparate work of Enlightenment philosophers gave rise to many political streams. Modern republicanism, liberal nationalism, socialism, communism and liberal democracy are all children of the Enlightenment. This is also true in an attenuated way of various Western imperialisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which, while not steeped in Enlightenment thinking and rhetoric, selectively adopted and worked with Enlightenment concepts. We can even see the influence of the Enlightenment in the crass and murderous principles of Nazism. In Mein Kampf, which was the basic instructional text of the Third Reich, Hitler presented his racism as demonstrable science, offering his readers supportive references to the German anthropologist Hans Friedrich Karl Gunther, an advocate of eugenics and the ‘science’ of race. This should not cause surprise. Hate and reason have long proven eminently cohabitable. Indeed some classic Enlightenment thinkers also wrote on occasion in the strain of anthropological racism. Fascism too was a child of the Enlightenment. Favouring strong government and order throughout society was very much in the Hobbesian tradition. The authoritarian, socially conservative and anti-liberal elements within Donald Trump’s alliance of supporters, particularly the cohort which is hostile to democracy, are also in the Hobbes tradition.
Interestingly, in the case of aesthetics, the results were less diffuse. Art has the advantage of being political without having to be politically specific. Among artists, the experience of Enlightenment values triggered a movement which prioritised clarity and purity in opposition to counter-reformation and ancien regime Baroque, which had celebrated decoration, drama and authority. The new aesthetic enthusiastically embraced the pure and unvarnished beauty of classical times and gave us the wonders of Neoclassical sculpture and architecture. This aesthetic was later to influence fascist and Nazi art and was also a significant influence on Soviet sculpture. Indeed, the style was an architectural presence throughout nineteenth century Europe. The mish-mash of Mar a Lago, on the other hand, has a crypto-Baroque feel to it.
Antonio Canova was the genius of Neoclassical sculpture. Not too far behind him was the O’Connellite sculptor John Hogan. The politics of the O’Connellites and their eighteenth century forebears were based on Enlightenment concepts such as equality, democracy, universalism and toleration. Meanwhile, Ascendancy Ireland, while adopting an everyday politics of exclusion, was not attracted to ancien regime aesthetics and liberally dotted the Irish countryside and cities with Augustan-influenced buildings, rational, ordered and free of medieval defensive inelegance. The eighteenth century was, after all, the age of reason, and in Ireland it saw an enthusiasm for Neoclassical construction. Despite their profound political differences, Irish Catholics and Protestants of the period were united as children of the Enlightenment. When in the early nineteenth century Catholics were permitted to build churches, the Neoclassical was the preferred style. In Dublin today they sit alongside Neoclassical public buildings and ordered Georgian houses constructed by the ascendancy. What this early example of Enlightenment values at work in politics and society confirms is that Enlightenment principles could be adapted to varying political orientations. This continues to be the case. Supporters of Kamala Harris and JD Vance are both happy to indicate their admiration for Thomas Paine.
It is worth noting that, despite the Enlightenment’s significance and the scale of its claims, the work of the philosophes did not constitute quite as great a break with earlier thought as is sometimes implied. There are striking and persistent Christian echoes throughout the classic Enlightenment texts. Indeed, many prominent thinkers of the Enlightenment era were Christians. Classical thought and the work of more recent innovative thinkers and scientists were also very much in the mix of influences. The suggestion of a light-bulb moment latent in the term is misleading, but it also supports one of the most influential propositions bequeathed by the movement and embraced by liberal democracy, that there is little or no restriction on what is individually or politically possible at any moment in history. As Thomas Paine put it: ‘For man to be free it is sufficient that he wills it.’
This faith in the possibility of radical change and political rupture found expression across ideologies from left to right since the eighteenth century. However, since the mid-twentieth century the idea has had a negligible presence in the West, until recently that is. The current Donald Trump-led rebellion, part Christian-nationalist, part small-government, part anti-democratic, part anti-immigration, part authoritarian, part pro-female subordination, part anti-social liberalism and part anti-market regulation, aspires to a dramatic political rupture. However, given the decades of political calm, the advent of Trump’s unprecedented political ensemble has led to surprise both in the US and Europe. The idea of political rupture is found so unusual that some, despite clear evidence, wonder if the former president is entirely serious in his radicalism. They have forgotten the experience of 1775, 1789, 1798, 1830, 1848, 1861, 1871, 1916, 1917, 1922 and 1933, to mention some dates which saw rupture and attempted rupture.
Today Donald Trump finds himself at the head of a substantial social movement which seeks to end the separation of church and state in the United States and reverse the liberal social values which emerged in the 1960s and developed significantly since. It is not something Trump feels strongly about personally, but he knows several important sections of his supporters passionately want to establish a post-liberal American order by rolling back the clock to the imagined social harmonies of the 1950s, chiefly by reversing the reproductive and other freedoms won by women and reinstating their unambiguously second class status in society. His supporters, male and female, are willing to overlook his idiocies and narcissism in order to realise this objective. Some may even regard him as a useful idiot.
Women who have been historically central to political struggles over the Enlightenment based concepts of universality and human equality are key to the election. In recent US elections they have comprised a majority of voters. Biden won the female vote by 15 points in 2020 and, according to polls Kamala Harris’s margin will be greater. Trump has been angling for the women’s vote but in a way that is unlikely to win over any of those whose slogan is ‘We’re not going back’.
Writing in caps on his Truth Social platform, Trump declared:
I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE. THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE. THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY, BEAUTIFUL, AND GREAT AGAIN!
In the heyday of second wave feminism, sentiments like these were routinely denounced as ‘patronising’. The Washington Post noted two responses:
‘It’s an insane message’, former Republican congresswoman Barbara Comstock said of Trump’s recent assertions. (Comstock represented a suburban Northern Virginia district and plans to vote for Harris.) ‘Women, first of all, can take care of themselves. They need to be protected from men like him.’
And from an already committed conservative:
Pam Baetz, a 63-year-old Republican and Trump voter, said she likes the ‘protector’ message. ‘I’m a conservative and I’m a Christian, and I believe that the woman’s role is to be protected by a man, and I believe God gave those roles, so that’s not derogatory to a woman,’ she said.
Statements like these are probably calculated to appeal to women like Pam Baetz and perhaps also to men who see women’s subordinate condition as a self-evident truth. Trump’s personal priorities, apart from getting his hands on the levers of power and disseminating hatred, would seem to be in freeing corporate America to make money in any way it sees fit. He works in parallel with a coterie of ideologues who like him advocate dismantling the administrative state. Trump has spoken of giving Elon Musk, who now describes himself as a ‘cultural Christian’, a role in cutting down the size of government. If Trump wins and attempts to implement this programme, the results are likely to be chaotic.
It seems it was the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant who first came up with the term Enlightenment. In his 1784 essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ he described the phenomenon as man’s emergence from his ‘self-imposed immaturity’. Today it is Kant’s description that is commonly taken to represent the movement’s essence.
During the era of the Lumières there was an understanding – which would become more emphasised during the nineteenth century – that human history was a record of progress through identifiable stages which would continue into the future. For Turgot and Concordet the key was scientific development, from which wider progress in society would follow. For Kant and Voltaire, who saw progress to Enlightenment as possible rather than inevitable, the key was the individual using their own questioning intelligence and reason. Hegel and Marx later proposed a teleological and linear view of progress. In the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond the idea of progress saturated left-wing and right-wing thinking. It was possibly the most potent concept to flow from the Enlightenment.
If progress is an Enlightenment myth it is one which proved itself to have teeth, just as many as the earlier absolutist Christian ones had. (Arguably, it can be read as a secular version of Christian teaching.) The concept of progress has enabled and justified many imperial adventures. ‘Spreading the blessings of civilisation’ is a term no longer in use but it is a concept which never lapsed in Western political culture. Given the reality of human diversity, it is an inherently destructive idea, but one which draws on the key Enlightenment concepts of universalism and progress. The imperial West frequently presented itself as an agent of positive progress, maintaining that it was merely assisting others who languished, perhaps terminally, in child-like immaturity. Imperial action was a moral imperative to be pursued whenever and wherever possible. In this reading, imperialism becomes less an exercise in traveling around the globe to steal, exploit, enslave and undermine, and more a progressive activity, moving things forward for the benefit of all.
In the Enlightenment tradition technological advances are understood as discoveries of nature’s laws. The human duty to progress involves discovering through scientific enquiry the secrets of nature and aligning with them. This explains the cultural impulse to approve whatever emerges from the science lab, as something which, by definition, is a positive, natural and progressive phenomenon. Progress, in this view, is seen as something which cannot be stopped. People in the past who attempted to curtail technology, such as the Ottomans, who banned printing in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, are regarded as somewhat ridiculous, flying in the face of nature and progress.
Today, however, that simplistic consensus is showing signs of weakening in the US, Europe and around the world. As the socially intrusive and intimately disruptive characteristics of the new technology have become evident, a more critical concept of progress is emerging. Calls for regulation and restriction have begun in Europe, Brazil, Australia and elsewhere. The number of school phone bans is increasing. In the US it is reported that about 76 per cent of schools prohibited their non-academic use in the 2021-2022 school year. It is one of the few measures that has bipartisan political support. When parents find their children accessing porn on their phones, they are unlikely to shrug and say ‘you can’t stop progress’.
Neither Harris nor Trump’s conservative ideologues seem disposed to allow big tech to remain unregulated. Project 2025 the 900 page blueprint for a second Trump term proposes criminalising porn including ‘transgender ideology’. Harris has been less specific. Joe Biden appointed the highly capable Lina Kahn as chair of the Federal Trade Commission to lead his antitrust programme. Bloomberg and others recently reported that major tech doners have lobbied Harris not to reappoint Kahn. Some believe will continue Biden’s policy.
Writing in the Financial Times Rana Foroohar argued:
[W]hile Harris has been sympathetic to Silicon Valley, I suspect the regulatory efforts will continue if she wins, in part because of her concern about civil liberties and discrimination. Big Tech’s business model has allowed individuals to be spliced, diced and discriminated against in myriad ways. That’s now starting to change.
At the heart of Enlightenment hubris lies the implicit belief that human omniscience is possible, and that ignorance is not the primary human condition. Marx, in romantic mode, gave the idea of omniscience one of its most powerful expressions when in his doctoral dissertation he wrote that man’s self-consciousness was ‘the highest divinity’. Later he maintained that he had discovered the natural laws of human history. Until fairly recently, a great many people believed he had done just that. Some still do.
In the Enlightenment era many who were influenced by the new thinking, including some of the philosophes such as Voltaire, realised that neither omniscience nor full knowledge of the human condition was imminent. For them, it was clear that Diderot’s multi volume encyclopaedia did not contain the answers to all questions. It is hardly surprising that there was no mass wave of atheism. People generally continued to believe in God, but the deity was changing. God was undergoing a subtle re-design and was shrinking in status. This followed from the elevation of reason in human affairs.
Kant was not an atheist, but neither was he a man shaped by blind faith. He looked at the Bible with scepticism and criticised, as an obscenity, God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son. Kant was a Theist in tune with the new mood of rational religion. He – and he was not the first to tread this path – held that God’s existence could be proved through reason. It was an approach that turned Genesis on its head. Instead of God creating man, man armed with the magic of reason, created God.
Having proved God’s existence through reason, power and control naturally passed from God to man. Thereafter, it was a relatively easy matter to place the deity and his earthly representatives on a side shelf, away from the main action of everyday political and social life.
One of the crucial elements in Donald Trump’s coalition of support is pastor-led evangelical America. This group overlaps with the nostalgic anti-liberal element which tends to blame the ‘folly’ of women’s liberation for society’s ills. (Sexism was significant presence in much of the Lumières’ writing, as was an incipient anti-sexism.) For evangelicals a side shelf is no place for God and they object to anyone imagining it is OK to remove God from the centre. They are religious absolutists who believe certain texts in Jewish mythology are the literal words of God. They want the state to recognise this. Prior to the 1990s, Christian fundamentalist communities largely stayed out of politics. In 1964 they were not politically available to the ultra-conservative republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who actively disliked them and who won 38.5% of the popular vote. The politicisation of evangelicals has significantly affected the balance of power in American politics.
Evangelicals will be well-marshalled, and a high electoral turnout can be expected from this community. Their wish is to end to the separation of church and state in America. In more specific terms, the previously ignored evangelicals hope to impose their views on matters such as sex education and the reproductive rights of women on social liberals, and generally reverse the dilution of religious commitment. If Trump is elected, or somehow manages to seize office, and attempts are made to implement such policies, it is unlikely that social liberals, a massive demographic, will simply accept this as the will of the majority and play along, quietly planning for 2028.
There is a certain historical irony relating to the turning away from ardent religion in the eighteenth century in Europe in that it was arguably caused by religious fervour. The filtering down of new sophisticated ideas to ordinary people is probably overstated as an influence on popular attitudes. Both the Reformation and the Counter-reformation asked people to think about religion a great deal, probably more than was compatible with everyday living. The Counter-reformation promoted popular piety, devotion to the Virgin and various saints and, very much, the glory of a decidedly hierarchical and centralised church. Massive funds were invested in retrofitting Gothic and Romanesque churches to reflect the new priorities. Anyone who has spent time in Europe’s Baroque churches will recall a religious aesthetic somewhat hysterical and devoid of spiritual content.
Among the European Reformationists, the signature Protestant concern was salvation. Apart from being inimical to the social dimension of life, this acute personal focus, along with the vague yet demanding means by which eternal happiness could be secured, was a trigger for destabilising personal anxiety. Bunyan’s allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, which addressed the very question of securing individual salvation, is a bizarre document. It offers those who would be saved a path through life, marked by an unrelenting neurotic obsessiveness that left little room for the ordinary business of living: skittles, love, beer and work.
Apart from the disruption of everyday life, the new religious fervours of the Reformation era fuelled wars of religion across Europe which saw perhaps eight million deaths. Indeed, in some parts of Germany populations are said to have declined by fifty per cent. The victims, of course, were mostly ordinary people. When Protestant and Catholic elites concluded the that these wars were unwinnable and, discovering the practical utility of tolerance, signed the Treaty of Westphalia, it was no doubt a great relief to ordinary people. Thus the weakening intensity of religion in the eighteenth century can be read as a relief from both the unrealistic intensity demanded by religious zealots and the wars their absolutist zeal triggered. In this sense the eighteenth century dilution of religious fervour responded to what today we might call a pent-up demand. The Lumières, it could be said, were pushing an open door.
Individualism, the acknowledgement and assertion of individual rights, is strongly associated with the Enlightenment through the work of writers such as Locke, Kant and Rousseau, in his particular way. But in the texts of the philosophes, individual rights were seen as qualified, not absolute. The Enlightenment-shaped West has seen two great experiments around this idea, the Soviet experiment and that of liberal democracy. Arguably, both have proved deficient, one undervaluing the significance of individual freedom and the other overvaluing it. The Soviet experiment in its time attracted high levels of support in the West, particularly among intellectuals. Today this support has largely contracted to corners of the academic world.
Vassily Grossman, in his exceptional novel Stalingrad, strove hard to celebrate Soviet achievements while depicting credible individuals happily subservient to state interests. His efforts, in this respect, were ultimately unconvincing, not least because by the time of publication too much was known about the high degree of oppression in Russia. Notwithstanding the positive depiction of the state, the book was denounced. At the time, 1952, Stalin was embarking on a state-led antisemitic campaign and Grossman, as a Jew, was a target. Some believe Stalin’s death the following year probably saved Grossman’s life. In his next novel Life and Fate, written in 1959 and published under Gorbachev’s glasnost in the 1980s, Grossman drops the pro-soviet stance and takes the side of the ordinary Russians fighting both the invading and the local totalitarianism. The Soviet experiment in subordinating the individual, and at an unprecedented level of intimacy, to the interests of the state was, it seems safe to say, incompatible with the condition of human existence and contributed to the decline and collapse of the experiment five decades after its great productive achievements and its central role in the defeat of Nazism.
For Kant, the individual had a personal responsibility to use his intelligence independently of others. The maxim of Enlightenment, he said, was to have the courage to use your own understanding. In America, the world’s strongest liberal democracy, this became enhanced freedom for capital, a freedom which facilitated vast wealth creation. While America enjoys riches and military might at a level previously unknown in the world, social and community interests have tended to lose out.
There have been political efforts in the past to assert the importance of the social dimension, but they were always defeated. Historian Heather Cox Richardson notes:
In 1867 Republican Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio spoke of “the terrible distinction between the man that labors and him that does not.” and was reported to have said “Property is not equally divided … a more equal distribution of capital must be worked out.” The New York Times claimed that Wade was a demagogue. Every hard worker could succeed in America, it wrote. “Laborers here can make themselves sharers in the property of the country,—can become capitalists themselves,—just as nine in ten of all the capitalists in the country have done so before them,—by industry, frugality, and intelligent enterprise.”
This is the view that prevailed. The idea that the entire population could become successful capitalists if only they made the effort is patently absurd, but it is at the heart of the American mythology to which US citizens have been constantly exposed. The first Obama campaign was possibly its last successful outing in US politics. Things have changed since. Now the disaffected, rust belt blue collar workers, and many others, apparently deeply troubled by anxieties around a ‘too rapidly’ changing world, no longer find that the American dream offers a credible framework in which to understand their lives.
Bernie Sanders tells us the majority of the working-class support Trump. If so, it may be because they, and a significant section of the middle class, are tired of living in a culture that blames them for their lack of prosperity. It seems they are in rebellion against a culture which shows them scant respect and which effectively treats them as ‘losers’.
Joe Biden seemed committed to supporting the blue-collar worker as a good in itself and, presumably, as a means of drawing that element of Trump’s support back to the Democratic Party fold. Kamala Harris is not striking the same note. Accepting the Democratic party nomination Harris said:
So, on behalf of the people, on behalf of every American, regardless of party, race, gender or the language your grandmother speaks, on behalf of my mother and everyone who has ever set out on their own unlikely journey on behalf of Americans, like the people I grew up with, people who work hard, chase their dreams and look out for one another, on behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on Earth, I accept your nomination for president of the United States of America.
Beyond this somewhat old fashioned American dream rhetoric, and indeed chauvinism- a key element in the myth- there is very little to assuage the concerns of the disaffected. This is presumably why a figure like Bernie Sanders has been slow to give Harris his unqualified support. He seeks a society with institutional supports for non-capitalists and something more than a society where people ‘look out for one another’. On the other hand it seems that Harris hopes to draw back the disaffected through her choice of the ‘ordinary guy’ and decidedly unprosperous Tim Walz as her running mate. In such a close race this could prove decisive, but it can also be read as evidence that the Democrats have no real answer to the chasm in US culture and society, other than a claim that there really is no problem and that Harris’s ‘big tent’ can accommodate all.
Those who support Trump are not in a political continuum with Ronald Reagan. His radical economics actually triggered the rapidly changing world that has unsettled many, and also the phenomenal growth in economic inequality, which has had the same effect. Reagan, wanting small government, declared that government was the problem rather than the solution for people’s problems. JD Vance, on the other hand, wants strong authoritarian government and said, ‘It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.’ Trump supporters see authoritarianism as a means of changing things through government action and are indifferent to the democratic method. As Peter Thiel, one of Vance’s financial patrons said: ‘Democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted.’ All sections of the Trump alliance are unfazed by the dilution and rigging of democratic infrastructure by Republican apparatchiks at state level and their agents in the law industry.
The result of Reagan’s silent rupture is that the strange and inadequate Donald Trump, who would once have been laughed out of court and dismissed as a clown, found he was attracting massive support with his venomous anti-establishment rantings.
The most stark evidence for the decline in influence and economic status of the traditional working class, which since Reagan came to include large swathes of the traditional middle class, is in the well-established fact, reported once again by Time magazine, that in recent decades $50 trillion has been transferred from the poor to the rich in the United States.
Harris, however, has a number of important advantages in the November election. The most important is that Donald Trump is clearly unfit for office. Being president of the world’s largest economy and military is a job that many would baulk at giving to a lying narcissist. Many conservatives, who might otherwise support a rupture with social liberalism, will under the circumstances not vote for him. A parallel process applies to women and the black community, all to Harris’s benefit. Progressives too, who might be critical of Harris but who are attached to democratic rights will rally to her cause. Similarly, conservatives who are deeply concerned by the dangers of climate change will hardly vote for a candidate who says it is all a hoax. Yet, despite Harris’s many advantages, at the time of writing, analysts are saying the result is too close to call and some have raised the spectre of a population of secret Trump supporters.
It is clear that hardcore Trump supporters are simply unmoved by the things that are important to Harris’s supporters. If she fails, and the present writer hopes she does not, it will be because she has run an ideologically defensive campaign and failed to offer a vision that would resonate with a significant element of her electoral opponents.
Kant would not be impressed by the effect vast corporate power has on the lives of individual Americans. He believed in personal freedom but also that it be qualified by the requirements of the common good and indeed that this was necessary in order to preserve genuine freedom for the individual. He supported ‘Freedom (independence from being constrained by another’s choice), insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law’. In this sense he was in the earlier Hobbesian and Lockian social contract tradition. He did not believe that the state should take responsibility for citizens’ happiness but that it should prevent individuals acting in a manner which generates unhappiness for others. Siphoning 50 trillion dollars from the poor would seem to fall under this heading. A movement to reform US democracy would be very much in the Enlightenment and Kantian tradition.
Joe Humphreys, writing recently on Immanuel Kant, quoted the expert Lilian Alweiss, who described his thinking:
[W]e do not only have a duty to respect our own agency, but we also have a corresponding duty not to undermine the agency of others. When we use others simply as a means to our own ends, we do precisely that: we undermine their agency.
One of the lessons of political instability in the US is that European Union countries, long in a semi-satellite arrangement with the US, would be advised to exercise their own agency and take responsibility for their own future in economics, defence and society. The US focus on China is another reason. It can no longer be relied on to play mother hen to Europe.
Kant lived all his life in Königsberg, a Prussian city which in 1946 became Kaliningrad, a fortified outpost of Russia power on the Baltic coast. From this position at the centre of Europe and looking back at the discord and violence of the Wars of Religion, Kant advocated a democratic and republican league or union of democratic states, as a means of achieving peace and harmony. The EU is exactly such a league.
The economic power struggle between the US and China presents the EU with a dilemma. What is to be done to avoid being crushed by the political elephants of the US and China?
The EU has been in relative economic decline for decades and currently its future looks grim. Mario Draghi, who must now be regarded as one of its heroes, has recently shown in great detail what must be done to rescue it from endless decline, and how it is to be done. More union, more planning and more investment is the answer in short. It is too early to say whether Draghi’s plan has prospects.
The Germans, whose economy is the strongest in Europe, continue to disappoint. Having failed to think strategically about their own economy, they show every sign of failing to think strategically about the EU. Already in Berlin the focus is on the idea of common borrowing – far from the core issue in Draghi’s plan – which is denounced as unacceptable, as if everyone in Europe was lusting after diminishing German wealth. (The Germans are mentioned here because they are crucial.)
They would do well to remember the fate of their lands during the Wars of Religion, and also how the divided and weak German principalities of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were effectively playthings in international power politics. Kant, from his home in Königsberg, was acutely aware of German history and it lies behind his vision of a supportive union of democratic republican states.
As I said at the outset, we are stuck with the Enlightenment. Anything we might do in the twenty-first century will necessarily be in the Enlightenment tradition. For some, including the present writer, the key political question today is whether something new and substantial is possible within that tradition.
If, for example, we wish to understand what political possibilities may exist today to halt gross social disorders, the extinction danger we face through the possibility of nuclear war, the actuality of the collapsing natural world and the dangers involved in launching autonomous and other technologies which will operate outside social control, we may ask what sort of political reappraisal is possible and which of the many Enlightenment threads it would champion and which it would it identify as operating culturally and politically against the human interest.
It is not easy to answer that question. But if such a politics were to develop, it would surely involve abandoning the toxic understanding of progress which developed over recent centuries. It would also require an understanding of personal freedom which appreciated that virtually all personal endeavour is dependent on society, whose interests should predominate. Finally, a more nuanced and critical understanding of the powers of reason would be desirable. A more modest approach to our powers would involve healthy scepticism towards overarching explanations of life and an acceptance that ignorance remains our dominant condition and that we are but one of many life forms. Justice, equality, tolerance, enquiry, democracy and other Enlightenment values might actually amount to something in such an environment.
Whether a new politics is possible I cannot say, but if one does not emerge it is possible that one of the existential threats we face will see us off the stage. It is therefore worth taking an interest and perhaps even rising from the metaphorical couch.
1/10/2024
Maurice Earls is joint editor of the Dublin Review of Books.
