Aroond the blogs
Of course, all this legal kerfufflery has rather obscured the real issue raised by the whole Guido/Bloggerheads contretemps, which is to say: who did what when in Angola in the 1980s? An astonishing piece of offtopic thread diversion here.
In similar vein, in the comments at Baggage Reclaim, me and a couple of the Little Atoms progressive humanist tendency are sorting out this messy business about the Enlightenment. I think we were about 40% of the way there when real life intervened; I'll make sure to give you all the heads up if and when we finally get it dusted.
You wondered if any fascist had ever denounced the Enlightenment in so many words. Well, there's a quote of Goebbels, who said after the Nazi seizure of power that "the year 1789 has now been eradicated from history". Is that close enough?
ReplyDeleteThe Nazi objection had nothing to do with a belief that the Enlightenment stood for egalitarianism (which does seem like an odd value to attribute to the enlightenment); they complained about the idea that there was a shared faculty of reason rather than a specifically German form of understanding that no other culture could share. But really the objection was not to a unified enlightenment package but to political liberalism, which separated civil society from the state and put an atomized society based on rational consent and dispute over competing political aims in place of an "organic" unified nation.
One of my commenters is disputing the intellectual history a bit. I suppose Chris Bertram would probably have something to say about this.
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ReplyDeleteI have had correspondence from a couple of mates to the general theme of "this stuff about Rousseau is all over the place". Chris Brooke sent me an essay arguing that there was a core of Enlightenment belivers who did believe in something reasonably like modern liberal democracy (but not in its forcible export) but they got sidelined early on by the creation of the modern nation state.
ReplyDeleteThanks for linking to this discussion DD, I found it one of the most illum inating I'd read for quite a while. I hadn't read the Orwell piece and it is brilliant.
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