Modern Age - Spring 2016 - 126

MODERN AGE

SPRING 2016

Enlightenment. To make this defense, he must argue against
the view that sees in the Enlightenment the cause of the French
Revolution with its Reign of Terror, the horror that foreshadowed
the unspeakable atrocities of our own day. Because philosophers such as Hegel, Horkheimer, and Adorno argue that there is
indeed a necessary connection between the Enlightenment and
the Terror, Ferrone must argue for the separation of the historical understanding from the philosophical understanding of the
Enlightenment. Somehow, by giving a historical account, with all
the complexities, contingencies, and discontinuities of the eighteenth century, the inevitability of the connection between the
Enlightenment and the Terror, he believes, will begin to fade from
sight, and the Enlightenment can be seen as a relatively innocuous "cultural revolution," a kind of reformation of the Old Regime.
But, contrary to Ferrone, it is impossible to separate the historical from the philosophical precisely in the case of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is an "idea." (The subtitle of the book
is History of an Idea.) In fact, it is a new idea. What is an idea? An
idea in the modern sense is not the way in which the mind is conformed to reality, the way in which the mind is "measured" by
what actually is, or the adequation of the intellect to being. On the
contrary, an idea is a production of the mind itself. The Enlightenment is a new idea of how things ought to be. As Ferrone insists,
philosophers of the Enlightenment wanted to "change our reality" and "to change the world through ideas." The Enlightenment
is the project of making the world conform to its own idea, to the
"dreams" of the philosophers.
The philosophers, then, on account of their "moral superiority," constituted a "new elite," a "new aristocracy," replacing all
traditional elites. This new intellectual elite was "determined to
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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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