The Legacy of the Enlightenment in the Modern World

The Enlightenment is the source of much that defines the modern world, and the source of much that is contested about the modern world. The political institutions of liberal democracy, the moral vocabulary of human rights, the methods and ethos of modern science, the structure of public education, and the institutions of international law all bear the marks of Enlightenment thought. The great political documents of the modern era — the American Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — are all descendants of the eighteenth-century conviction that human reason could be used to design institutions that would protect liberty, promote justice, and improve the human condition. The descendants are, in some cases, more impressive than the ancestors, and in other cases less. Both relationships are part of the story.

This article examines the long legacy of the Enlightenment. It traces the influence of Enlightenment ideas on the major institutions of the modern world, considers the most important critiques of the Enlightenment that have emerged in the modern period, and reflects on the continuing significance of the Enlightenment for the challenges of the twenty-first century. The honest position is that the Enlightenment is the most ambitious and the most influential attempt in human history to construct a comprehensive account of the human condition, and that its failures are also part of its legacy. You cannot have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights without the eighteenth-century rights tradition. You cannot, in any useful way, have the Universal Declaration without the eighteenth-century philosophes who are its source. And you cannot, in any honest way, have either without acknowledging that the eighteenth-century rights tradition was, in its origins, the rights tradition of slaveholders and colonial administrators. The acknowledgment is part of the inheritance.

The Political Legacy

The political legacy of the Enlightenment is, perhaps, the most obvious and the most important. The institutions of liberal democracy — constitutional government, the protection of individual rights, the rule of law, representative assemblies, free elections, and the peaceful transfer of power — are all products of the Enlightenment and of the political revolutions it inspired. The most important caveat is that the institutions did not, in fact, flow directly from the ideas; they were the result of long political struggles in which the ideas played a role but in which the actual political work — the compromises, the dead-ends, the failed revolutions, the working constitutions — was done by people who were rarely the authors of the philosophical texts. The philosophers provided a vocabulary; the political work was done by others.

Constitutional Government

The modern idea of a written constitution, establishing the basic structure of government and enumerating the rights of citizens, is a direct descendant of Enlightenment political thought. The American Constitution of 1787, the French constitutions of 1791 and 1793, and the Norwegian Constitution of 1814 were among the first modern written constitutions. They were imitated, with variations, across Europe and Latin America in the nineteenth century, and they remain the foundation of constitutional government in much of the modern world.

The Enlightenment principle that a constitution should establish the limits of governmental power and protect the rights of citizens has become a basic feature of modern political life. The contemporary practice of judicial review, in which courts assess the constitutionality of legislation, is a direct descendant of the Enlightenment project of limited government. The fact that judicial review is, in many constitutional systems, a more powerful force than the eighteenth-century theorists anticipated is one of the more interesting features of the modern constitutional settlement; the courts have, in many cases, taken on a role that Hamilton and Madison only intermittently envisioned.

Human Rights

The language of natural rights and human rights is one of the most important legacies of the Enlightenment. The American Declaration of Independence, with its claim that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” is one of the founding documents of the modern human rights tradition. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, with its proclamation of the rights of liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression, was the other great founding document.

The twentieth century saw the extension of the human rights tradition to a global scale. The United Nations Charter of 1945 committed the member states to promote “universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, drafted by a committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, articulated a comprehensive catalogue of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights that has become a basic reference for contemporary human rights discourse. The drafting committee was an extraordinary body: Roosevelt herself, René Cassin, Peng Chun Chang, Charles Malik, Hansa Mehta, Carlos Romulo, and others. The Declaration they drafted is one of the most influential political documents of the twentieth century.

The European Convention on Human Rights of 1950, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966, and the many other international human rights instruments that have been developed in the second half of the twentieth century are all descendants of the eighteenth-century tradition of natural rights. The contemporary human rights movement is the political heir of the Enlightenment. The fact that the inheritance is contested — that the rights tradition is, in many parts of the world, under political attack — is part of the story, not an exception to it.

Representative Government

The idea that government should be based on the consent of the governed, and that citizens should have a say in the decisions that affect their lives, is a central feature of Enlightenment political thought. The development of representative institutions — parliaments, congresses, city councils, and the various forms of elected assembly — is a direct consequence of this idea.

The American Revolution established the first modern republic on a national scale. The French Revolution proclaimed the principle of popular sovereignty. The nineteenth-century revolutions in Europe and Latin America spread the principle of representative government across the Western world. The twentieth century saw the gradual extension of the right to vote to previously excluded groups — workers, women, racial and ethnic minorities — and the development of democratic institutions in countries throughout the world.

The contemporary spread of democracy is a continuation of the Enlightenment project. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the democratization of Latin America, the political reforms in East Asia, and the various democratic transitions of the past generation are all, in different ways, descendants of the eighteenth-century conviction that government should be based on the consent of the governed. The fact that the contemporary moment is, in many parts of the world, a moment of democratic backsliding is also part of the story; the achievements of the twentieth century are now, in many cases, under threat, and the threats come from political forces that have a much more ambivalent relationship to the Enlightenment tradition than the Cold War anti-Communist tradition had.

The Scientific Legacy

The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment transformed not only what human beings thought they could know, but also the institutional structures within which knowledge was produced and disseminated. The modern research university, the scientific journal, the laboratory, the research institute, and the various international scientific organizations are all descendants of the Enlightenment. The fact that the modern research enterprise has, in many cases, departed from the Enlightenment’s conception of itself is part of the story; the research university, in its late twentieth-century form, is a much more bureaucratic institution than the founders of the modern research university, the German reformers of the early nineteenth century, would have recognized.

The Research University

The German university tradition, which developed in the eighteenth century, became the model for the modern research university. The combination of teaching and research, the seminar as a pedagogical method, the laboratory as a research environment, the professorship as a research position, and the doctorate as a research degree — all of these features of the modern university were developed in the German Enlightenment.

The American research university, which developed in the later nineteenth century, was directly influenced by the German model. Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876 as the first American research university, was explicitly modeled on the German example, and many of its early professors had studied in Germany. Daniel Coit Gilman, the first president of Johns Hopkins, had spent two years in Berlin in the 1870s and returned to the United States with a clear sense of what the German university was and how it might be reproduced. The American research university has, in turn, become a model for universities throughout the world.

The contemporary research university, in its many forms across the globe, is a direct descendant of the Enlightenment project of organizing knowledge systematically and of training successive generations of researchers, scholars, and professionals. The Humboldtian ideal of the unity of teaching and research is, in the twenty-first century, under stress from the bureaucratic pressures of mass higher education, but it is still the institutional ideal.

The Scientific Method

The methods of modern science — hypothesis formation, controlled experiment, statistical analysis, peer review, the systematic organization of knowledge — are all products of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. The success of these methods in producing reliable knowledge about the natural world is one of the great achievements of modern civilization.

The institutional infrastructure of modern science — the research laboratory, the scientific journal, the research institute, the international scientific community — is a direct descendant of the Royal Society and the other Enlightenment-era scientific institutions. The contemporary scientific enterprise, with its many specialized disciplines, its international collaborations, and its engagement with practical and political concerns, is the realization of the Enlightenment project of a “republic of science.” The republic of science, in its modern form, is a much larger and more complex institution than the founders of the Royal Society could have imagined, and its relations with the state, with the economy, and with the wider culture are much more complicated. But the institutional lineage is direct.

Technology and Progress

The Enlightenment belief in the possibility of progress through the application of science to the improvement of the human condition has been vindicated, even as it has raised new problems and new dilemmas. The technological achievements of the modern age — the steam engine, the railway, the telegraph, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, the computer, the internet, the smartphone, and the many other innovations that have transformed daily life — are all descendants of the Enlightenment conviction that systematic reason could be used to improve the human condition.

At the same time, the dark side of this technological development — the destruction of the environment, the development of weapons of mass destruction, the surveillance state, the inequality produced by technological change, the new forms of manipulation made possible by digital technologies — has raised new questions about the relationship between science, technology, and the human good.

The contemporary debates about the ethics of artificial intelligence, the regulation of biotechnology, the response to climate change, and the management of the digital revolution draw on the central arguments of the Enlightenment engagement with the relationship between reason, science, and the human condition. The fact that the Enlightenment tradition is, in many of these debates, divided against itself is also part of the story; some Enlightenment traditions support the regulatory project, others are suspicious of it, and the disagreement is, in many respects, a continuation of the late-eighteenth-century argument about the proper relationship between reason and politics.

The Cultural and Educational Legacy

The Enlightenment also had a profound impact on the cultural and educational institutions of the modern world. The modern public school, the public library, the museum, the symphony orchestra, the public theater, the daily newspaper, the public lecture, and the many other cultural institutions that define modern life draw on the central arguments of the Enlightenment project of democratizing knowledge and culture. The project of democratization is, of course, in tension with the actual achievement of the institutions, which have, in many cases, become less accessible than the Enlightenment founders intended. The public museum of the twenty-first century is, in many cases, less accessible to the working class than the private galleries of the eighteenth century. That is a real failure, and it is part of the legacy.

Public Education

The Enlightenment commitment to public education was one of its most enduring legacies. The idea that education should be provided by the state, should be available to all citizens regardless of their social class, and should be designed to produce informed and responsible citizens is a direct descendant of Enlightenment thought.

The American public school system, with its commitment to free universal education, is a product of the Enlightenment. The French system of public education, established in the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, became a model for the European nation-states. The German system of state-supported research universities, which developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, became a model for the rest of the world. The contemporary systems of public education, with all their variations, are all descendants of the Enlightenment commitment to universal education.

The Enlightenment also had a profound impact on the content of education. The traditional curriculum, based on the classical languages, the scholastic philosophy, and the theological traditions of medieval Christendom, was challenged by the new emphasis on modern languages, modern history, natural science, and the new philosophy. The great educational reformers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — Rousseau in Émile, Pestalozzi in Switzerland, Froebel in Germany, Horace Mann in the United States, and many others — drew on Enlightenment principles in their attempts to reform the schools. The fact that the reform has, in the twenty-first century, stalled or reversed in many parts of the world is one of the more worrying features of the contemporary scene; the standard of public education in many of the United States, for example, is, on most measures, lower than it was in 1965.

The Public Sphere

The Enlightenment witnessed the development of what Jürgen Habermas, in the twentieth century, called “the public sphere” — a space of rational discussion about matters of public concern, distinct from both the state and the market. The coffeehouses, the salons, the Masonic lodges, the learned societies, the periodical press, the public lectures, and the various other forums in which Enlightenment ideas were discussed and debated are all ancestors of the modern public sphere. Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962) is the founding text of the modern discussion; the book argues that the bourgeois public sphere of the eighteenth century has, in the twentieth, been transformed and partly destroyed by the welfare state and the culture industry. The argument is contested, but it has set the terms of the discussion.

The contemporary public sphere — with its newspapers, magazines, radio and television broadcasts, internet forums, social media platforms, and other venues for public discussion — is a continuation of the Enlightenment project. The contemporary debates about the role of the public sphere, the quality of public discussion, the regulation of media, and the dangers of misinformation are all, in different ways, descendants of the Enlightenment engagement with the conditions of public reason. The fact that the contemporary public sphere is, in many respects, in worse shape than the eighteenth-century one — that the spread of misinformation, the manipulation of public opinion by algorithms, and the decline of the local newspaper are real features of the present moment — is part of the inheritance, and part of the problem.

Museums, Libraries, and Cultural Institutions

The modern museum, the public library, the national archive, the symphony orchestra, the public theater, and the many other cultural institutions that define modern life draw on the central arguments of the Enlightenment. The great European museums — the British Museum (1759), the Louvre (1793, as a public museum), the Uffizi (1769, as a public museum), the Prado (1819), the Hermitage (1764), the National Gallery (1824) — all had their origins in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, and they were products of the Enlightenment commitment to making knowledge and culture accessible to a wider public.

The contemporary cultural institutions of the modern state — national museums, public libraries, public broadcasting organizations, cultural ministries, and the various other agencies through which the state supports and organizes cultural life — are all descendants of the Enlightenment project of democratizing culture. The fact that the institutions have, in many cases, been captured by the cultural and political classes they were meant to democratize is part of the story; the public museum of the twenty-first century is often less accessible to the working class than the royal collection that preceded it. The critique is real. The institutions are still worth defending.

The Critiques of the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment has been criticized from many directions, both in its own time and in the centuries since. The most important critiques have been those of the German Romantics, the conservative counter-revolutionaries, the Marxists, the feminists, the postcolonial critics, and the postmodernists. Each of these critiques has identified real limitations of the Enlightenment project, and each has contributed to a more nuanced and complex understanding of the modern world. None of the critiques, taken by itself, is sufficient; each of them, taken together, is part of a serious account of the inheritance.

The Romantic Critique

The German Romantic movement, which developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was in part a reaction against what its adherents saw as the cold abstraction of Enlightenment rationalism. The Romantics emphasized the importance of history, language, culture, feeling, and the irrational dimensions of human life. They argued that the Enlightenment had overestimated the power of reason and underestimated the role of tradition, imagination, and community.

The most sophisticated of the Romantic critics was Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who argued that human beings were fundamentally historical and cultural beings, and that the Enlightenment attempt to abstract from these particularities in favor of a universal reason was a kind of violence against the richness of human life. Herder’s critique of Enlightenment universalism, combined with his appreciation of cultural diversity, has had a profound influence on modern anthropology, history, and political theory. Isaiah Berlin’s late work, in particular, took Herder as the starting point for a long argument about the relationship between value pluralism and political theory. Berlin’s Vico and Herder (1976) is the most important single study in English.

The Romantic critique of the Enlightenment was not simply a rejection. Many of the Romantics, including Herder himself, were deeply indebted to Enlightenment thought, and they often used Enlightenment arguments to defend their positions. The tension between Enlightenment and Romanticism has been a central feature of modern intellectual life, and it continues to shape contemporary debates about the proper relationship between reason and tradition, universalism and particularism, individuality and community.

The Conservative Critique

The conservative critique of the Enlightenment, developed by Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, and others in response to the French Revolution, attacked the abstract universalism of the Enlightenment and defended a politics rooted in tradition, custom, prescription, and the accumulated wisdom of past generations. The conservatives argued that the revolutionary attempt to rebuild society from first principles was a dangerous fantasy, and that the proper political life was one that respected the inherited institutions and practices of a particular community. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is the founding text of modern Anglo-American conservatism; it is also a much more careful book than the standard reading makes it appear.

The conservative critique was intellectually serious, and it has had a lasting influence on modern political thought. The contemporary conservatism of thinkers such as Roger Scruton, Michael Oakeshott, and the various communitarian philosophers is a descendant of the Burkean tradition. The conservative emphasis on tradition, prescription, and the importance of inherited institutions has been an important counterweight to the more abstract rationalism of the Enlightenment tradition. The fact that the conservative tradition has, in the twenty-first century, been partly captured by political forces that have little to do with the careful Burkean argument is part of the story, not a refutation of the original critique.

The Marxist Critique

The Marxist critique of the Enlightenment, developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focused on the class character of Enlightenment thought and the way in which the supposedly universal language of rights and freedom served to mask the realities of class exploitation. Karl Marx wrote that the “so-called rights of man” were nothing more than the rights of the bourgeois, and that the universalism of the Enlightenment served to disguise the particular interests of the propertied classes. The most famous statement is in On the Jewish Question (1843), where Marx argues that the rights of man, in their political form, are the rights of the egoistic individual, separated from the community, and that the so-called universal man is, in fact, the bourgeois man.

The Marxist critique has been an important feature of modern political thought, and it has raised important questions about the relationship between formal rights and substantive equality, between political liberty and economic power, and between the universal language of rights and the particular interests of social classes. The contemporary engagement with questions of economic inequality, social justice, and the relationship between capitalism and democracy is, in important respects, a continuation of the Marxist tradition, even when it does not accept the more dogmatic elements of Marxist thought. The fact that the Marxist tradition produced, in the twentieth century, regimes that were monstrous extensions of the Enlightenment’s bureaucratic tendencies is, of course, also part of the legacy, and the part that most needs critical engagement.

The Feminist Critique

The feminist critique of the Enlightenment, developed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and continued into the twentieth and twenty-first, has shown that the supposedly universal language of rights frequently excluded women and that the Enlightenment project of equal rights was, in practice, often a project of male rights. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was the first major feminist engagement with the Enlightenment, and it has been followed by a long tradition of feminist thought that has challenged the male-centered character of the Enlightenment tradition. The work of Olympe de Gouges, who published the Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne in 1791, just two years after the Déclaration des droits de l’homme, is the most direct and most political version of the feminist critique from the period of the French Revolution; Gouges was guillotined in 1793, one of the many victims of the Terror.

The feminist critique has had a profound influence on contemporary thought. The contemporary recognition of women’s rights as human rights, the development of feminist legal theory, the critique of the male-centered character of much of the philosophical canon, and the various efforts to recover the work of neglected women thinkers draw on the central arguments of the feminist engagement with the Enlightenment. The fact that the contemporary moment is, in many parts of the world, one of feminist political mobilization, and that the mobilization often uses the language of the eighteenth-century rights tradition against the male-centered forms it was developed in, is part of the inheritance.

The Postcolonial Critique

The postcolonial critique, developed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has shown that the supposedly universal language of the Enlightenment often operated in practice as a cover for European domination of the non-European world. The argument has been developed by writers such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Achille Mbembe, and Walter Mignolo, who have shown that the Enlightenment traditions of reason, science, and progress were often deployed in the service of colonialism, imperialism, and the exploitation of non-European peoples.

The critique has three main strands. The first strand, associated with the work of Said, has shown how the European study of the non-European world was, in significant part, a study of the European self. Orientalism (1978) demonstrated that the European study of the Middle East and of Asia was, in large measure, a projection of European fantasies, fears, and ambitions onto the non-European world. The critique has been enormously influential in the humanities and the social sciences, and it has become a basic framework for the contemporary study of the European colonial encounter. Whether Said’s argument is, in all of its particulars, correct is a question that the next generation of historians will have to answer; the framing is, in any case, the dominant framing in the field.

The second strand, associated with the work of Fanon, has shown how the European colonial encounter was, in significant part, a system of violence — physical, psychological, and structural. The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (1952) developed an account of the colonial situation that placed the experience of the colonized at the center of the analysis, and that showed how the European colonial enterprise was, in significant part, an enterprise of dehumanization. The critique has been enormously influential in the contemporary thought of the postcolonial world, and it is the source of the contemporary emphasis on the recovery of the voices of the colonized.

The third strand, associated with the work of Mignolo and the Latin American decolonial school, has developed a more radical critique. The argument is that the European colonial enterprise was not a contingent historical event but a structural feature of the modern world-system, and that the proper response is not a more consistent universalism but a fundamental rethinking of the categories of European thought. The decolonial critique is, in significant part, a critique of the very idea of “the Enlightenment,” and it is the most radical of the contemporary critiques of the European tradition.

The postcolonial critique has been an important contribution to contemporary thought, and it has helped to produce a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between European modernity and the non-European world. The contemporary engagement with questions of global justice, the legacy of colonialism, the rights of indigenous peoples, and the relationship between Western and non-Western traditions of thought is a continuation of the postcolonial engagement with the Enlightenment. For a detailed examination of the Enlightenment’s entanglement with race, slavery, and the colonial enterprise, see Enlightenment and Empire.

The Enlightenment and Race

The relationship between the Enlightenment and the modern concept of race is, in significant part, a relationship of complicity. The eighteenth-century attempts to classify the human species — by Linnaeus, by Buffon, by Blumenbach, by Kant — produced the modern racial categories, and the categories were used, in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, to justify the European colonial enterprise and the institution of chattel slavery. The complicity is one of the most serious charges against the Enlightenment, and it is the source of the contemporary debate about the legacy of the Enlightenment.

Kant’s contributions to the early literature on race are the most discussed case. The pre-Critical Of the Different Races of Man (1775) and the related essay Determination of the Concept of a Human Race (1785) tried to provide a philosophical foundation for the new racial classifications; the late Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798) is more cautious. The fact that Kant was, in the 1770s, working on the same problems as the Göttingen anatomist Blumenbach, and that the two of them were developing complementary accounts of human racial difference, is part of the texture of the period. The fact that Kant later changed his mind about some of the practical implications of his position is also part of the story, though it does not undo the early writings.

The complicity is, however, only one side of the relationship. The other side is the use of the Enlightenment’s universalist principles — the principles of equal human dignity, of natural rights, of the basic equality of all human beings — by the opponents of slavery and by the opponents of the colonial enterprise. The abolitionist movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drew on the Enlightenment tradition. The Haitian Revolution was, in significant part, a fulfillment of the universalist claims of the French Revolution. The civil rights movement of the twentieth century drew on the Enlightenment tradition. The contemporary human rights movement draws on the Enlightenment tradition.

The contemporary debate about the Enlightenment and race is, in significant part, a debate about which side of the relationship is the more characteristic of the tradition. The defenders of the Enlightenment argue that the universalist principles are the basic commitments, and that the racist and colonialist statements of some of the Enlightenment thinkers are the betrayals of the basic commitments. The critics argue that the racist and colonialist statements are the more characteristic, and that the universalist principles were, in significant part, an ideological cover for the European colonial enterprise. The debate is, in significant part, a debate about how to read the history of the eighteenth century, and it has important implications for the contemporary practice of politics.

The contemporary reader who is serious about the Enlightenment will be familiar with both sides of the debate, and will recognize that the tradition is rich and complex. The proper response to the betrayal of the universalist principles is not to reject the tradition, but to develop a more consistent universalism, in which the basic commitments are taken seriously and the betrayals are rejected. The contemporary engagement with the Enlightenment is, in short, an engagement with the universalist principles, in their most demanding form. The fact that the universalist principles have, in many cases, been used against the people they were nominally meant to protect is a real and serious problem, and one that the tradition itself has to bear the burden of.

The Postmodern Critique

The postmodern critique, developed in the late twentieth century by writers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and others, has questioned the Enlightenment commitment to universal reason, to grand narratives of progress, and to the possibility of objective knowledge. The postmodern critics have argued that the Enlightenment project was based on a series of questionable assumptions about the nature of reason, the structure of knowledge, and the relationship between knowledge and power.

The postmodern critique has been controversial, and it has been accused of leading to a kind of intellectual nihilism. But it has also raised important questions about the relationship between knowledge and power, the role of language and discourse in the construction of reality, and the limitations of the Enlightenment project. The contemporary engagement with questions of epistemology, of the social construction of knowledge, and of the relationship between reason and power is, in important respects, a continuation of the postmodern engagement with the Enlightenment. The most serious versions of the postmodern critique — Foucault’s middle-period work on the history of sexuality, for example, or Derrida’s early work on the metaphysics of presence — are also the most serious internal critiques of the Enlightenment that have emerged from the post-Enlightenment tradition.

The Continuing Significance of the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is not a closed chapter of history. Its ideas, its institutions, and its commitments remain central to the political, intellectual, and cultural life of the modern world. The challenges of the twenty-first century — climate change, the digital revolution, global inequality, the rise of new powers, the crisis of democratic institutions — have only increased the importance of the Enlightenment inheritance. The fact that the inheritance is contested, and that the contest is itself part of the inheritance, is also part of the story.

The Enlightenment and Contemporary Challenges

The contemporary challenges facing the human community are descendants of the challenges that the Enlightenment sought to address. Climate change is a problem that can only be addressed through the kind of systematic, scientific, and international cooperation that the Enlightenment project envisioned. The digital revolution raises questions about privacy, autonomy, and the relationship between technology and the human good that the Enlightenment philosophers were among the first to address. Global inequality raises questions about the relationship between formal rights and substantive equality that have been at the center of political philosophy since the eighteenth century.

The crises of contemporary democracy — the rise of authoritarian populism, the erosion of public trust in institutions, the manipulation of public opinion through digital technologies, the increasing polarization of political life — are also, in important respects, descendants of the challenges that the Enlightenment tried to address. The Enlightenment commitment to public reason, to the protection of individual rights, to the rule of law, and to the free exchange of ideas remains a basic resource for thinking about how to respond to these crises. The fact that the resources are not, by themselves, sufficient is part of the problem; the fact that no one has come up with better resources is part of the inheritance.

The Enlightenment and Diversity

The contemporary world is more diverse, more interconnected, and more pluralistic than the world in which the Enlightenment thinkers lived. The recognition of the legitimacy of cultural, religious, ethnic, and ideological diversity has been one of the most important developments of the modern period, and it has required a substantial rethinking of some of the universalist claims of the Enlightenment tradition.

The contemporary heirs of the Enlightenment do not, in general, defend the simple universalism of the eighteenth-century philosophers. They recognize that the Enlightenment universalism was often blind to the realities of cultural difference, that it was sometimes used to justify European domination of the non-European world, and that it often excluded women, religious minorities, and other groups from its vision of universal humanity. But they also recognize that the basic Enlightenment commitment to the equal moral worth of all human beings remains a basic moral and political commitment, and that the project of building a just and free world community is one that can only be carried forward in critical engagement with the Enlightenment tradition. The fact that the universalism is harder to maintain than it was in the eighteenth century is part of the story; the fact that it is still worth maintaining is also part of the story.

The Enlightenment and Hope

The Enlightenment was, above all, a project of hope. The thinkers of the eighteenth century believed that the human condition could be improved, that ignorance and superstition could be overcome, that injustice could be remedied, and that the future could be made better than the past. This hope has been disappointed, and the history of the past two centuries has given ample reason for skepticism about the possibility of progress. The twentieth century, in particular, is the great disconfirmation of the Enlightenment hope: the two world wars, the totalitarianisms of left and right, the Holocaust, the Gulag, the bomb, the slow ecological destruction of the planet.

But the Enlightenment hope has also been vindicated. The abolition of slavery, the extension of the rights of citizenship, the development of constitutional government, the achievements of modern science and medicine, the reduction of extreme poverty, the spread of education, the development of international law — all of these are real achievements that would not have been possible without the Enlightenment commitment to the possibility of progress. The contemporary world, with all its dangers and disappointments, is a better place than the world of the eighteenth century for more of its inhabitants than at any previous time in human history. The hope that the human condition can be improved, that the future can be made better than the past, and that the work of building a just and free human community is a project worth pursuing — this hope is the inheritance of the Enlightenment. To carry it forward, in a critical and self-aware way, is the task of the contemporary heirs of the eighteenth century.

Conclusion

The Enlightenment is not a finished project. It is an ongoing conversation, a set of commitments, a tradition of thought and practice that has been developed, contested, and transformed over the past three centuries. Its achievements have been enormous: the development of modern science, the establishment of constitutional government, the recognition of human rights, the spread of education, the development of international law, the technological transformation of daily life. Its failures have also been real: the persistence of inequality, the destruction of the environment, the development of weapons of mass destruction, the dark side of the technological transformation that the Enlightenment made possible.

To be an heir of the Enlightenment in the twenty-first century is to engage critically with both the achievements and the failures of the tradition. It is to recognize the basic commitments of the Enlightenment — to reason, to science, to human rights, to the equal moral worth of all human beings — while also recognizing the limitations and blind spots of the original movement. It is to engage seriously with the critiques that have been developed in the centuries since, while also recognizing the genuine achievements of the tradition. The honest position is that the work is unfinished, and that the only way to make progress with the work is to keep the conversation going.

The Enlightenment is not the only tradition of modern thought, and it is not the final word on the questions it addressed. But it remains the most ambitious and the most influential attempt in human history to construct a comprehensive account of the human condition, of the possibilities of human progress, and of the institutional conditions of a just and free society. To engage with it is to engage with the central questions of modern civilization, and to take up the unfinished business of building a world that lives up to its highest ideals — and to recognize, at the same time, that the highest ideals are, in many respects, the ideals of slaveholders and colonial administrators, and that the question of whether the ideals can be redeemed is, in the end, the question of the present.