Pocket Guide to Postmodernism

Chapter 2. The CounterEnlightenment Attack on Reason “Institutionalizing confidence in the power of reason is the most outstanding achievement of the Enlightenment.”

— Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault In this chapter we will briefly examine a turbulent period of the Enlightenment era, broadly covering the 17th through to the 19th century. As with all movements, and especially with the Enlightenment, the ideas promoted, even if successful, cannot be likened to smelting a bar of pure iron. Intellectual movements are better likened to a quilt, stitched together by individuals who work often with little communication. It is often only later in history that intellectual historians, having sufficient hindsight, define the era and pick out those they deem to be contributors. Certainly not all contributions strengthen the quilt nor blend with the others. This can be plainly seen in the Enlightenment project, whose main origins come from the quite different perspectives of Germany and Britain.

The British Enlightenment had three main figures: Bacon, Newton, and Locke. Bacon for his empiricism and scientific method; Newton for his science, especially in physics; and Locke for his philosophical work on reason, empiricism, and liberal politics. Selected from and absorbed by other intellectual centers in France and Germany, each of these thinkers had international appeal. The greatest crosscultural hurdle at the time was religion, which dominates and defines what is called pre-modernism. Enlightenment