Modern Age - Spring 2016 - 125

REVIEWS

rehabilitating the enlightenment?
Ann Hartle
The Enlightenment: History of an Idea
by Vincenzo Ferrone, trans. Elisabetta Tarantino
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015)

W

estern civilization, we are told, has entered a postEnlightenment, postmodern, and post-Christian era. The
horrors of the twentieth century-totalitarianism, the Holocaust,
two world wars-have destroyed every illusion about the ability
of autonomous human reason to transform the world into the
heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers. A postEnlightenment era must be a postmodern and post-Christian era
because the origins of the Enlightenment are to be found in the
sixteenth century: the meaning of the Enlightenment is inseparable from the meaning of modernity as such. The Protestant Reformation had destroyed the unity of Christendom, and modern
philosophy had turned from the contemplation of reality to the
Cartesian "subject," freeing philosophy from its status as handmaiden to theology.
Ferrone's book is a defense of the Enlightenment, not for the
sake of Western civilization, but for the sake of the European
Union. "The new united Europe that is on the rise," he says, "badly
needs to find again its authentic roots" in the eighteenth-century

Ann Hartle is professor of philosophy at Emory University and the author
of Montaigne and the Origins of Modern Philosophy. She is currently working
on a book on recovering civility.
moder nagejour nal .com

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Modern Age - Spring 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Spring 2016

Contents
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