ABSTRACT
The Enlightenment affirmed the fundamental unity of all humanity, and sought to use that unity to vanquish the traditional view in which differences and otherness were central. Enlightenment understanding sought not merely to mute otherness but actively to suppress and eventually to extinguish it wherever it appeared and in whatever guise it happened to adopt. The Enlightenment's systematic suppression of differences and otherness was encouraged by a desire to replace the chains of autocratic rule with a democratization of political life, made possible by rendering all people equal because they were fundamentally the same. The Enlightenment was not merely blind to traditional identifiers, but actively sought to undermine these bases of identification so that the self-contained individual could be cast as the only worthy player on the world's stage. The suppression of the other was required for this new character to emerge and remain dominant.
