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I don’t have any disputes with Simon Schama’s sardonic piece in today’s paper apart from his rather cursory take on the Enlightenment. It confirms a misgiving I had on watching the episode from his History of Britain which deals with British responses to the French Revolution. The Jacobins, says Schama, “hadn’t read the Rough Guide to Revolution,” didn’t have our twentieth century hindsight that all revolutions either install a new tyranny or like Cronus devour their own children. An antidote to Schama’s seemingly Frankfurterisch take on the Enlightenment is to be found in a recent essay by Stephen Bronner. Now the only dispute I have with Bronner is the left-liberal politics he draws from his analysis. I suppose no one can be all right all of the time.

Comments

[John S. Ransom]

Thanks for pointing me to the Bronner piece. On first read through, I thought it suffered from a facile treatment of Adorno and Horkheimer's *Dialectic of Enlightenment*. The first mistake is to treat this work as representing the whole of their output. In fact, both authors were seriously engaged in practical activity that helped them deepen their thinking. I am thinking of their work on the authoritarian personality, but not only that: how many people are aware that Adorno wrote a book that analyzed newspaper horoscopes? If everyone already knows that, it doesn't show up in their treatment. Thus when Bronner writes that Adorno and Horkheimer's _Dialectic of Enlightenment_ "initiated a radical change in critical theory, but [that] its metaphysical subjectivism surrendered any systematic concern with social movements and political institutions," it makes me wonder how carefully the author has read the subjects of his attack; it makes me suspicious that the Frankfurt School is being set up, once again, as a convenient straw man.

He writes a little later: "For their parts, however, Horkheimer and Adorno believed that resistance against the incursions of the culture industry justified the extremely difficult, if not often opaque, writing style for which they would become famous—or, better, infamous. Their esoteric and academic style is a far cry from that of Enlightenment intellectuals who debated first principles in public..." But again, this is just one side of their work. Nor is it true, however, that Dialectic of Enlightenment is so godawful impossible to understand. Even _Negative Dialectics_ can be penetrated with a little preparation, and many of the topics discussed there fully deserve their supposedly opaque treatment. Bronner doesn't seem aware of, or for 'tactical' reasons has chosen to ignore, important features of the work of the Frankfurt School. Nor does he extend, as intellectual fairness would seem to require, the same kind of criticism towards, say, Kant, who is plenty difficult to read, thank you very much. Things get worse when the obligatory but empty slap against postmodernism is included.

[YH]

Bronner’s piece *is* perhaps a little simplistic in places, but I think it’s spot on in others. He’s actually quite close to the argument Habermas makes against 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' in 'The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity', but there’s more detail on Enlightenment thinkers themselves here. Personally I think Habermas and Bronner have won that particular argument – the concept of ‘Enlightenment’ in 'DoE' *is* too catch-all and monolithic to capture the nuances of 18th C intellectual history. I don’t think it undermines the whole book to say so. I tend to see that book as very much a product of the dark times (1943-7) in which it was written. Gillian Rose, defending the book against its detractors, used to talk of its conscious ‘hyperbole’. I agree with that, but don’t feel a great need to defend it word for word. Much of the chapter on ‘The Culture Industry’ still stands up today, though I take Patrick Mullins’ point that ‘Hollywood’ is perhaps as monolithic a concept as ‘Enlightenment’. It lacks nuance and counter-argument. And for Bronner to take issue with DoE doesn’t besmirch Adorno’s or the Frankfurt School’s other works, works which you rightly praise, John.

You’re right that Bronner makes the age-old dig at Adorno’s obscure style. I agree this often reflects more on the reader than it does on Adorno: Popper’s infamous attempt to translate a paragraph of Adorno into ‘plain English’ merely shows up a certain philistinism in his own philosophy. Style became political in Adorno’s hands, and, as you rightly note, relates closely to its reified subject matter.

I think it’s undeniable that 'DoE' “surrendered any systematic concern with social movements and political institutions”, if the word 'systematic' is stressed. Even within the tradition that Adorno and Horkheimer moved the contrast between 'DoE' and say Lukacs’ 'History and Class Consciousness' or Marcuse’s 'One-Dimensional Man' is quite glaring. Though I’ve argued elsewhere that Adorno’s politics is more subtle than most people realise and that there *is* an engagement with social movements and political institutions in his work, albeit an oblique one.

Finally, if postmodernism (whatever it is) follows the monolithic view of Enlightenment then I have no problem with its being slapped down. There are hints of this in Lyotard’s 'The Postmodern Condition', but I guess that’s another story, and Matt may want to jump in here to Lyotard’s defence.

[Matt]

A debate over the Enlightenment; by all means, let's have it! The specific defense of Lyotard may have to wait, but Matt appreciates the offer. Those are some very provocative and useful articles...

Would it be too much to ask, as always, that the good "postmodernists" not get lumped in always with the bad? That their alleged "assault" on these values might actually be seen more correctly as in the service of these values, if they are to continue to mean anything at all...

"Don't blame the messenger" would probably be one way to start such a necessary defense. It might also argue that Lyotard was indulging in polemic, to some (perhaps lamentable) degree, relying on the escape clause that in the end the counter-monoliths are not to be trusted either, but then that hardly renders the critique superfluous, nor the ideal (however decentered) in whose service it still labors. It might end by showing rather definitively how Derrida, for one, was very much on the side of the Enlightenment all along (though not of course blindly). As indeed your title suggests.

[Matt]

Still, this part from the Bronner essay does especially stand out:

"The Enlightenment was always a movement of protest against the exercise of arbitrary power, the force of custom and ingrained prejudices, and the justification of social misery. Its spirit was the expression of a bourgeois class on the rise against the hegemonic feudal values of the established society and its political ideals are still subordinate to those of traditionalism and authoritarianism in most of the world. There should be no mistake: though the philosophes were responding primarily to the world associated with “throne and altar,” the ideals of these thinkers remain relevant for even for nations without a feudal past like the United States. Western nations still carry the scars of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and class inequality.

Enlightenment thinkers evidenced anticipatory insights, speculations, and contradictory views on an extraordinary variety of issues. The less systematic the thinker, it is possible to assume, the more perverse the ways in which his or her ideas could be appropriated. Enlightenment thinkers, however, were rarely endorsed or embraced by conservative or fascist political movements: it is hard to imagine a bust of Locke or Voltaire sitting on the desk of Mussolini. The philosophes had their most profound impact on the Left: Locke and Kant influenced all manner of liberals, socialists, and anarchists. Beccaria, Holbach, and Adam Smith were deeply committed to moral development and social reform. Thomas Paine is among the founders of modern internationalism. There is hardly a genuinely democratic regime that is not indebted to Montesquieu. Enlightenment philosophers would inspire generations of those languishing under the weight of despotism and dogma. The extent to which their political contribution is forgotten is the extent to which the contemporary left will constantly find itself intellectually reinventing the wheel."

(Not sure how well GB would match up against GR (were this all a giant chess game)--GR who I've only just begun to read--but of course in Philosophy in a Time of Terror Habermas and Derrida address these general questions, and I have to say, Derrida comes across quite a bit more forcefully in the end.)

[Matt]

As on the 'side' of the Enlightenment, or what remains of it, as living legacy and project uncompleted, you understand.