Are the Enlightenment and its values still a useful guide to the United States of America and the West? Ask the question, and immediately you get caught up with several questions of definition. How much were America and the West ever actually creatures of the Enlightenment? Which Enlightenment? What is the historical reality of the Enlightenment, as opposed to its changing status as a polemical icon? The initial query does not produce a simple answer, but rather a concatenation of new questions.
These questions can lead to a remarkable number of different answers about the nature of the Enlightenment and the lessons it offers for the present day. That multiplicity leads to a corollary conclusion: it’s better to seek out a variety of answers. Academic Questions, therefore, has organized this symposium. Its distinguished contributors, jointly, will enlighten readers about the Enlightenment’s past, present, and future.
A few first words, however, will set the stage for the contributors’ discussion.
What is at issue is an intellectual and cultural movement or movements roughly coinciding in time with the eighteenth century. These movements centered on the axis leading from Paris to London to Edinburgh, with large annexes in Germany, Italy, colonial America, and other areas of Europe and the world. The movement may be characterized loosely by its emphasis on liberty and reason, with various sub-emphases on government, religion, science, and other pursuits of knowledge. Different countries, social groups, and individuals focused on significantly varying Enlightenments.
A skeptic might argue (and some have) that the Enlightenment is nothing more than a few thousand scribblers batting ideas with little purchase on the daily lives of Europeans, Americans, and the inhabitants of the world. More expansive champions and critics of the Enlightenment have taken its progeny to include the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and, for better or worse, much of the modern world—where modernity is defined tautologically as the embrace of Enlightenment values, and their corollary institutions and practices in the realms of politics, intellect, religion, society, and culture.
These discussions of the Enlightenment encompass several distinct debates.
Was the Enlightenment really a single, coherent movement—to the extent that any historical abstraction can be said to be? One response to this query is the general trend by academic historians to refer to a multiplicity of Enlightenments rather than to a singular one, the cautious plural and the indefinite article replacing the decisive singular and the definite article.1 Another is that of Gertrude Himmelfarb, who distinguished among British, French, and German Enlightenments, praising the first while viewing the latter two more critically. She recommended the British Enlightenment as the proper model for modern America—and, more narrowly, for the modern American conservative movement.2
A third is J. G. A. Pocock’s extraordinarily detailed six-volume study of Gibbon and his intellectual world in Barbarism and Religion, which elucidates in extraordinary detail how Gibbon’s work articulated the accomplishments of an intricate and extended “family of enlightenments,” including little-known members of the family tree such as the Arminian Enlightenment and the Utrecht Enlightenment.3 A fourth response is to pick one strand of the Enlightenment as the “true” En- lightenment; so Jonathan Israel’s three volumes on a Radical Enlightenment bequeathed to the eighteenth century by Spinoza.4
Did the Enlightenment even exist? J. C. D. Clark’s The Enlightenment: An Idea and its History (2024) provides a recent negative answer to that query and takes the Enlightenment as generally a ret- rospective confection. (See Paul Rahe’s review below, “Did the Enlightenment Exist? Jonathan Clark’s Provocation— and Its Problems.”) A softer version of that query, which is contained within Clark’s own work, is to ask if one can separate historical analysis of the Enlightenment from a polemical attitude toward the Enlightenment, as champion or opponent, contemporary or at a later date. Several modern writers have argued that many of the modern accounts of the Enlightenment, notably Peter Gay’s, have significantly distorted the Enlightenment’s true history to justify a modern, secularizing civic religion.5
Presuming the Enlightenment does exist as some entity subject to discussion and analysis, we then may return to the question: what should be our attitude toward it? Poems by William Blake and W. H. Auden provide parameters. Blake provided an early critical assessment:
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau; Mock on, mock on; ‘tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again.
Auden, much later, provided an excellent riposte in “Voltaire at Ferney”:
Yet, like a sentinel, he could not sleep. The night was full of wrong,
Earthquakes and executions. Soon he would be dead,
And still all over Europe stood the horrible nurses
Itching to boil their children. Only his verses
Perhaps could stop them: He must go on working: Overhead
The uncomplaining stars composed their lucid song.
The continuing debate about the Enlightenment and its inheritance generally oscillates between these poles.
These volleying verses illuminate how “Enlightenment,” like “Puritanism,” has served as a polemical term as much as a descriptive one. For the more forthright opponents of the Enlightenment, it is atheism, the atomized Lockean individual, the Smithian free market, Godless anomie, and the Revolution and the Terror as the inevitable concomitants. For its supporters, it is liberty, the rights of man, the lamp of reason—the light of man, fighting against bigotry and tyranny, the age-old alliance of throne and altar. In the wake of the French Revolution, the political commitments of Left and Right have been read back into the attitudes toward the Enlightenment. Conservatives (political, religious, intellectual) have tended to be more suspicious of the Enlightenment; radicals more enthusiastic.
There are complications, of course. In Anglo-America, support for the Enlightenment and its principles traditionally have included a conservative component, not least because the Anglo-American Enlightenment was less radical than its French and German brothers. (See Yuval Levin’s essay below, “The Lesser-Known Case for the Liberal Society”.) Yet generally attitudes toward the Enlightenment have varied along a left-right political gradient.
That generalization has been weakening in recent generations. Many radical academics and their followers have abandoned their allegiance to the Enlightenment and taken up the flag of Foucaultian power-worship. The steady (perceived) decline of reason and liberty in the West, together with the rise of various political, economic, and social ills in societies long thought to be the beneficiaries of Enlightenment principles, has led a growing number of figures on the right to argue that those principles are either mistaken in themselves or no longer relevant or beneficial for America and the West. “Post-liberalism” takes as one of its lodestars the contention that the Enlightenment and its values are intimately related to the decay of the modern West.6 The continuing defenders of the Enlighten- ment, left and right, take the West’s decay (if they accept the existence of that decay) to be the consequence of a departure from Enlightenment values, not their fulfilment.
These two views are starkly ideal-typed: many people fall somewhere between these two alternatives. One can critique large aspects of the Enlightenment, say that substantial parts of its heritage have gone wrong, without seeking to overthrow it entirely.7 Much of the interest of the current debate about the value of the Enlightenment lies in the nuanced judgments about what part of its heritage should be salvaged and what abandoned.
Our symposium aims to provide material for more such nuanced judgments, as Americans—Westerners, all mankind—continue to debate whether, and in what way, the Enlightenment and its values still serve us as a useful guide.
Paul Rahe sets the stage for our symposium by reviewing the méchant J.C.D. Clark’s The Enlightenment: An Idea and its History, which proposes that the Enlightenment as some sort of coherent movement, rather than a general mood, was mostly a retrospective creation of later writers, “frequently deployed in support of a ‘civil religion’ of sorts.” Rahe takes Clark to overreach— not least because he underplays the seventeenth century foundations of the Enlightenment, above all the work of Bacon, Descartes, and Newton that preceded Locke. Indeed, Rahe proposes Francis Bacon’s thought as the keystone of Enlightenment thought, that man is by nature a craftsman and all else fol- lows.
Our other contributors, having read Rahe’s review, then consider the continuing relevance of the Enlightenment for America and the West. Their essays particularly focus on the linked queries: What part of the Enlightenment, if any, do you think America and the West most need to defend? Why? How can this be done?
Yuval Levin argues for the enduring power and relevance of the Anglo-American conservative tradition, which amalgamates the best of the enduring traditions of the West with the best of Enlightenment thought. He contrasts this tradition, exemplified by Edmund Burke, with two competing tradi- tions. On the one hand, the radical heirs of the Enlightenment, including much of the modern political left, take the Enlightenment to be a radical new order, whose virtue lies in parting ways with, and overturning, the prior traditions of the West. On the other hand, a continuing strain of traditionalist thought holds that the Enlightenment is indeed alien and poisonous to the Western civilizational complex and therefore that it and its works must be uprooted to preserve the West. Levin champions the continuing benefit and need for the Anglo-American via media that upholds the Enlightenment within the broader ideals of the West, a fusion that emphasizes universal rights and equal dignity for all men—but emphatically because man is imago dei.
Richard Samuelson highlights the argument between ideals articulated by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson about the possible scope of Enlightenment. Adams emphasized the constants God had imposed on human nature; man could not create himself anew, and Adams emphasized these constants’ en- during power in his conceptions of natural aristocracy, man’s power to know the universe, the limits of progress, and the inevitability of periodic war. Jefferson, by contrast, deduced aspirationally from his vision of what man should be a more fluid and expansive vision of man—man greatly capable of knowing the (material) universe, progress a great possibility, war, at worst, a relatively minor hindrance, the natural aristocracy at the service of a capable democracy. Adams and Jefferson powerfully articulated two sides in the debate that constituted the American Enlighten- ment, and they have bequeathed that debate to their American posterity as we continue to debate how best to put into practice the ideals of the Enlightenment.
Elizabeth Weiss examines the effect on anthropology on the abandonment of Enlightenment ideals. Weiss emphasizes that anthropology as a discipline is rooted in Enlightenment ideals: it studies mankind’s varying nature and beliefs as the product of natural causes rather than divine ones, taking as ax- ioms that mankind has one origin and that its diverse physical and cultural characteristics may be explained by biology and environment. Yet anthropologists’ current and worsening abandonment of Enlightenment values, largely by way of irrational deference to “In- digenous” beliefs, has led to a crippling array of deformations of anthropology. These include new taboos against examining human remains, endorsement of the supernatural nature of cultural artifacts, endorsement of polygenesis (separate origins for different portions of mankind), and rejection of biological anthropology—indeed, of all physical anthropology. Anthropology’s abandonment of the Enlightenment is leading it to a new Dark Age of superstition.
Eric Kaufmann contrasts what he takes to be the core principles of the Enlightenment, individual liberty and reason, with the principles of an ever-strengthening Shadow Enlightenment, egalitarianism and humanitarianism. These latter principles, derived in part from Biblical ideals, advanced human well-being so long as they generally worked in harmony with the Enlightenment’s core principles. In the last century, however, progressives’ moral intuitions increasingly have led them to champion political initiatives that forward these principles at the expense of liberty and reason—hence, among other consequences, affirmative action, support for illegal immigration, multiculturalism, the therapeutic illiberalism of cancel culture, and a general predisposition to hysterical hyper-egalitarianism. America and the West must tame the Shadow Enlightenment if the original Enlightenment of liberty and reason is to survive.
Nathan Pinkoski emphasizes the irrepressible conflict between the religious and the secular conceptions of the Enlightenment. He takes the religious conception of the Enlightenment, where natural law and revelation align, to have underpinned the American Founding: so the Declaration of Independence’s famous phrase, “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The secular Enlightenment was a later invention. What he calls “Year-zero liberalism” is engaged in brutal attempts to uproot the older dispensation, proceeding from banishing religious arguments from the public sphere to the current campaign to legalize and normalize assisted suicide and euthanasia. Pinkoski argues that America and the West now face a stark choice between embracing the older, religious Enlightenment or accepting the moral revolution championed by the advocates of secular Enlightenment.
Madeleine Armstrong looks to the challenge that Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses to the perpetuation of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment, above all in the work of Immanuel Kant, was a process of intellectual discipline and development, rather than a series of ideological conclusions. This educative process required those who sought enlightenment to exercise their reason as a fundamental part of their humanity. AI allows students (broadly defined) to outsource cognitive labor; it therefore allows them to remain mentally immature, unenlightened, all their lives. We must rethink how to dedicate ourselves to strengthening human intelligence, if AI is not to tempt us to abandon enlightenment for the lotus of permanent childhood.
The seven members of our symposium have done yeoman work in providing readers with thoughtful and innovative considerations of the Enlightenment, its legacy, and how it should inform our actions in the political realm.
David Randall is director of research at the National Association of Scholars, 13 W 36th St, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10018; randall@ nas.org. His most recent books are The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero’s Sermo to the Grand Siècle’s Conversation (2018) and The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought (2019). Randall last appeared in AQ in the winter 2025 with “Is Western Civilization Even Read?,” a review of The West: The History of an Idea, by George Varouxakis.
1 E.g., Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
2 Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Moderni- ty: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York: Knopf, 2004).
3 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999-2015).
4 Jonathan I. Israel: Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
5 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1966-69); Annelien de Dijn, “The Politics of Enlight- enment: From Peter Gay to Jonathan Israel,” The Historical Journal 55, 3 (2012): 785–805; Nathan Pinkoski, “The Concept of the Enlightenment,” Modern Age (2026), https://modernagejournal.com/the-concept-of-the-enlightenment/254157/.
6 Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
7 E.g., David Randall, The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought: (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
Photo by Anicet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier – histoire-image.org, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36897967