I am very sympathetic to the project that Stephen Eric Bronner undertakes in this book. As someone inspired by the progressive potential of the Enlightenment, I find myself constantly on the defensive in a world deeply suspicious of the dead white men of eighteenth-century Europe. So I welcome a vigorous and uncompromising defence of those men and the ideals and values they stood for. For those of us who already see ourselves as working to further that tradition, this book is an inspiring call to keep up the good work. But for those who have been hesitant in their enthusiasm for the Enlightenment, this book will be more like a red flag waved in their face, confirming many of their suspicions of Western rationalism. Theorists of recognition, identity, post-colonialism, post-modernism, republicanism, communitarianism, post-secularism and multiple-modernities, are just some of the people who will not find this book very congenial. Ultimately, Bronner's uncompromising defence of the Enlightenment is less successful than it might have been.

The central claim of the book is that the Enlightenment is the foundation of progressive politics. This claim has both a historical and normative component and in each case there is a weak and stronger version of the claim. Historically, Bronner could either be saying that the Enlightenment is a source of progressive politics, even though the historical figures themselves might have had less than progressive political views. Or he could be making the stronger claim that the eighteenth-century Enlightenment figures themselves articulated a progressive politics that we should reclaim. Bronner often appears to be making the second claim. He makes, for example, the historically startling claim that Enlightenment thinkers “spoke for the lowly and the insulted, the exploited and the oppressed” (167). We could argue about how many eighteenth-century reformers could be described in this way. Kant is a prime example of someone who can offer one of the most compelling and influential articulations of the equal dignity of all humanity while at the same time excluding women and labourers from full citizenship and denying anyone, ever, under any circumstances, the right or even the moral permission to resist authority, including tyrannical authority. But this is not my main objection. Bronner is not simply saying we can retrieve things of value from the Enlightenment for our purposes, he is saying that their purposes are our purposes. While I agree that the men of letters of the eighteenth century, especially Les Philosophes (Scottish Enlightenment interestingly enough is not very visible in this book), were a progressive force, to depict them as being only a source of all things politically good, while presenting the counter-Enlightenment as the source of all that is bad, is an exaggeration. Nowhere does one see the slightest acknowledgment that, for example, the expansion of individual autonomy, while “progressive,” might have entailed loss and contributed to cultural pathologies associated with individualism.

The same problem crops up when we move from the historical to the normative. Bronner does not simply say that the Enlightenment is a foundation of progressive politics; he argues that it is “the foundation for any kind of progressive politics.” It is an exclusionary claim that makes it seem traitorous to the cause of justice and freedom to entertain the possibility that the Enlightenment might have brought some unwanted baggage along with its defence of the autonomous individual and its attack on the exercise of arbitrary power. Any appeal to emotion, intuition, tradition, religion or identity play into the hands of the counter-Enlightenment. I find this partisan defence of the Enlightenment not only intellectually unpersuasive (a Habermasian view that sees the Enlightenment as Janus-faced appears more plausible, but Habermas is strangely absent in this book), but also self-defeating. As Bronner himself notes, the role of the engaged intellectual within the Enlightenment is built on the notion that persuasion and not coercion is the friend of autonomy and legitimacy. But this book makes no effort to persuade; it makes no effort to allay the fears of traditionalists, the religiously minded, or the inheritors of colonial injustice that their suspicions of the Enlightenment are unfounded. Instead, we are told that tradition stifles autonomy, religious belief always views toleration with suspicion, and questioning the legacy of enlightenment rationalism leads to barbarism.

While sympathetic to the project, and finding myself nodding in agreement at many of the parts that are reclaimed, I did not find this book helpful with the original problem: how to defend the Enlightenment to those who have been the losers in the march of rationalized modernity.