ABSTRACT
In the late modern period in which we live, the Enlightenment project is affirmed chiefly for fear of the consequences of abandoning it. Except in the United States, where it has the status of a civil religion, it carries little positive conviction. Yet much professional philosophy is devoted to anxious apologies for the Enlightenment’s central enterprises, such as the rational reconstruction of morality, and the assertion by science of authority over all other forms of knowledge. Further, enfeebled though it has become in most of the Western cultures in which it originated, the Enlightenment project continues to inform many areas of thought and discourse aside from the increasingly culturally marginal activity of academic philosophy. In the rhetoric, and even in some measure in the practice of international
relations, for example, conceptions – such as doctrines of universal human rights – whose provenance is manifestly that of the Enlightenment enjoy an anachronistic authority which derives partly, in all likelihood, from the manifest absence of any coherent alternative. Ours are enlightenment cultures not from conviction but by default.
