1. David Brooks: "That belief, championed by John Locke, or a story we tell about Locke, paved the way for human equality, pluralism, democracy, capitalism...." I like that "a story we tell about Locke."https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/opinion/renaissance-right-gop.html …
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6. What's also interesting about neo-Whig celebrations of Enlightenment is not just negative stuff that gets left out but also things like the anti-militarism of Adam Smith or the broader republican critique of luxury
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7. One way to understand the Enlightenment is to realize it predated the democratic revolutions of the 19th century & certainly the anti-imperialist revolutions of the 20th. Those revolutions borrowed from Enlightenment ideas but also radically transformed them
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8. One of the genuine great achievements of Enlightenment was critique of historical mythmaking (see Paine on Bible). It's a betrayal of that achievement to set up Enlightenment thinkers as Idols, timeless oracles of wisdom whose own historicity is avoided.
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9. Again, this is not to say there isn't great stuff in Locke. Like the epistemology or this:https://twitter.com/_HelenLindberg_/status/985658673329524741 …
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That's the good stuff. Well said.
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Most eras get tagged long after they are over.
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Did you actually read Pinker’s book “Enlightenment Now”?
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True. Much of what Locke wrote was written to support political faction & he served on board overseeing slave trade.
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What I find perhaps most valuable is Locke’s devastating surprisingly secular critique of Robert Filmer’s hegemonical defence of patriarchy as the divine right of kings (and fathers). That is an Enlightenment ideal. But all that is in The First Treatise.
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No one advocates we adopt all the positions of 17-18th century Enlightenment thinkers. Argument is that these thinkers started a movement based on reason, secularism, tolerance AND
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this movement evolved to give birth to contemporary ideas of freedom, equality, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, technological evolution, etc.
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