Stephen Eric Bronner reclaims what he takes to be the genuine spirit of Enlightenment thought from a variety of contemporaneous and historical critics on the Left and Right, but first and foremost from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (DE) (1947). Bronner contends that many criticisms of Enlightenment thought today can be traced to what he characterizes as Horkheimer and Adorno's brilliant but ultimately inaccurate and misleading analysis. The losses involved are not only scholarly but political, Bronner argues, for progressive activists and intellectuals today can benefit from the ethical orientations and philosophical temperaments that informed Enlightenment thinkers. Reclaiming the Enlightenment is also a response to historians of political thought who have too often, in Bronner's opinion, missed the forest for the trees. While the recent historiography of Enlightenment thought has deepened and broadened our understanding of particular figures, themes, and regional variants of eighteenth-century political philosophy, he contends that the contemporary emphasis on multiple Enlightenments can have the effect of obscuring what he takes to be the fundamental ethos of Enlightenment thought.

While Horkheimer and Adorno intended to produce a positive sequel to the negative critique of DE, Bronner argues that it is unsurprising that they did not do so. Given their searing criticism, he seeks to demonstrate that it would have been impossible for them to have reclaimed many theoretical and political resources from Enlightenment thought. Thus, Bronner attempts himself to “rescue”—to use Horkheimer and Adorno's own term from the title of their stillborn sequel, Rettung der Aufklärung—a positive political vision that strives to be both an accurate reflection of many eighteenth-century writings and a model for resisting authoritarian and oppressive institutions, practices, and ideas today. Eschewing what he takes to be Horkheimer and Adorno's largely metaphysical and aesthetic analysis, Bronner argues that only a more concrete social and political analysis of Enlightenment ideas and their influence upon later thinkers and movements can come to terms with the genuine spirit of Enlightenment thought.

For Bronner, the central political commitment of Enlightenment thought is to resist and to curb the arbitrary exercise of institutional power. Hence, particular strands of liberal, socialist, and democratic movements and thought that have sought to do so, in his view, are the offspring—often avowedly—of the Enlightenment ethos. In making such claims, he argues in some detail that the core spirit of Enlightenment thought is anti-Eurocentric and deeply critical of European prejudices and injustices; nonessentialist and, instead, open to revision and self-critique; skeptical and thus often critical of supposedly absolute and final truths; and progressive on a critical understanding of “progress” that rejects closure. It is, moreover, said to be directly political and thus in favor of reforming and using state power, among other means, to address the needs of the oppressed and the vulnerable, yet also highly critical of state power as itself often oppressive; scientific in the sense of perpetually questioning authority and tradition in a spirit of experimentation and innovation; and rationalistic on an understanding of “reason” as a recursively critical capacity that Enlightenment thinkers, in varying and complex ways, deliberately conjoined with sentiment, compassion, and rhetoric. All singular conceptions of Enlightenment thought necessarily foreground particular ideas, but some fail the test of being supportable by a broad range of actual Enlightenment arguments. Given the enormous volume of passages in eighteenth-century letters, pamphlets, proclamations, and books that could be straightforwardly drawn upon to justify Bronner's conception, his distinctive rendering of the spirit of Enlightenment thought is perfectly plausible.

Bronner seems primarily interested in offering such a portrait of Enlightenment thought in order to contrast it with its self-described enemies and to highlight the oppositional struggles of Enlightenment thinkers and Enlightenment-inspired political activity in the eighteenth century and later. He aims, along these lines, to demonstrate multiple connections among, on the one hand, Counter-Enlightenment writings and ideologies and, on the other, often right-wing, reactionary, and authoritarian political movements in debates ranging from those surrounding the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 to the Dreyfus Affair, and struggles between partisans of the Left and Right in twentieth-century interwar Europe. One of the author's central claims along these lines is that despite the occasional prejudices and hypocrisies of some of the defenders of enlightened ideas, it was primarily their opponents who fundamentally—and, all too often, violently—denied what he characterizes as the very heart of the Enlightenment intellectual disposition: recognizing the dignity of the other. For Bronner, Enlightenment political theories were fighting doctrines, ones that are worth revising and carrying forward today, not because of their grand successes but rather due to their “protest character” and emancipatory promise (p. 14). He argues that Counter-Enlightenment ideologies historically were fundamentally affirmative doctrines, some of which justified the kinds of practices and prejudices that Horkheimer and Adorno mistakenly connected to the very logic of enlightened ideas, whereas Enlightenment sensibilities are ultimately critical in spirit—philosophies of resistance for a never-ending struggle against domination and injustice.

Bronner is careful to note that there have been many episodes of self-critical, cosmopolitan, and humanistic thinking by which institutional power was subjected to critique and in light of which the weak, vulnerable, subaltern, and exploited were defended by others or defended themselves. Enlightenment political thought in Europe from 1650 to 1800 at its best offers one key epoch, he argues, of such sensibilities, but there are many others, including Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Indian, sub-Saharan African, and multiple indigenous traditions that are beginning, he notes, to be given the intensive study that they deserve. In this sense, although he does not characterize his argument in this fashion, he too may well advocate the notion that there exist family resemblances among a plurality of Enlightenments, in this case across multiple centuries and continents. It is precisely in keeping with the recursively critical spirit of such enlightened ideas, he argues, to reconfigure Enlightenment thought today in ways that are attuned to contemporary challenges, yet also in keeping with its core sensibilities.

Bronner paints with a broad brush. In a short study that covers vast themes, his mode of argumentation is necessarily compressed, and he often offers elegant assertions and brief provocative arguments that are given support largely by way of citations of some of the relevant primary and secondary literature. In responding to one-dimensional polemics, he occasionally counters with unsubtle characterizations of his opponents and some polemics of his own. Nonetheless, it is impressive for such a concise study to operate on three levels simultaneously: to treat historic political ideas as they may have been understood at the time, while also attempting both to trace their influences on later ideas, practices, and institutions and to indicate their ongoing usefulness as models or analogies for political theorizing today. Moreover, given that this book is not directed toward scholars of the Enlightenment period, but rather constitutes a kind of public intellectual plea toward those who, in Bronner's opinion, have turned their backs on the productive resources of this era, its generalizations about Enlightenment thought—most of which would need to be extensively amended and qualified in a specialist's study—are not unduly problematic for a work of this genre. Reclaiming the Enlightenment is a vigorous and thought-provoking book that works well both as a critical commentary upon the specific claims of Horkheimer and Adorno's DE and as a gloss on some of what Enlightenment thought can offer to progressive political thinkers and activists today.