Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement
Stephen Bronner has written a much-needed and never-completed sequel to Adorno and Horkheimer's classicDialectic of Enlightenment. His powerful defense of political liberty, social justice, and cosmopolitanism is the best extension of the Enlightenment legacy we have. His challenge to one-eyed rationalists, all-or-nothing romantics, and self-pitying nihilists is powerful and persuasive.(Cornel West)An important call to recover our Enlightenment roots in an agae characterized by a loss of reason and rational discourse. Recommended.(Henry L. Carrigan Jr.Library Journal)Simultaneously a scholarly study and an impassioned manifesto, this masterful book by Bronner responds to the left-wing critique of the Enlightenment.(Choice)Stephen Bronner offers a persuasive 'rehabilitation' of the Enlightenment in which he argues forcefully that despite the demolition of reason by left 'dialectical' critics, the Age of Reason remains a valuable source of progressive thinking and radical insights. An important work for students and scholars as well as for political practitioners.(Benjamin R. Barber, author ofJihad vs. McWorldandFear's Empire)Stephen Bronner's study of the Enlightenment and its reception is not only superb but timely. Bronner rescues the Enlightenment from critics of both the left and the right. In the future, anyone who wants to defend arguments about ethical reason or scientific knowledge based on local prejudices will have to deal with Bronner's decisive arguments.(Philip Green, author ofEquality and Democracy)Stephen Bronner shows how today's Left has impoverished, even poisoned itself by sliding unawares into the language and imagery of the European Counter-Enlightenment, the movement against 1776 and 1789. But he also shows us how the not-quite-lost language of the Enlightenment can be our Magic Flute, if we just have the courage to grasp it and play our own variations on its themes.(Marshall Berman, author ofAll that is Solid Melts Into Air)Reclaiming the Enlightenmentis a vigorous and thought-provoking book.(Sankar MuthuPerspectives of Politics1900-01-00)