If you’re looking for a sport that commands even more international enthusiasm than football, you might try Enlightenment-bashing. Though we live in a world increasingly forged by new bits of technology, its dominant rhetoric is anti-modern. Few who use that rhetoric know that the attacks are as old as the Enlightenment itself. Edmund Burke blamed it for the French Revolution. Karl Marx argued that the Enlightenment furthered the demands of a few clever sons of the bourgeoisie to privileges enjoyed by the aristocracy, thus bringing about not universal liberation but new and subtle forms of domination from which the world has yet to recover. Here Marx was not completely wrong. Never quite as universal as it claimed to be, the Enlightenment did not realise its own ideals. That’s what ideals are all about: they always promise more than mortals who are bound in space and time can deliver. Marx, and those convinced by him, could have strengthened the Enlightenment by showing that, through its tools of self-criticism, it had the power to right its own wrongs. Instead, those who should have extended the Enlightenment have been regularly engaged in extinguishing it.

Left and right critiques of the Enlightenment have differed in tone, but their images of the Enlightenment are remarkably similar, and similarly distorted. Postwar German thinkers were the most explosive. The cosmopolitan refugee Theodor Adorno could not have been more different from the pontificating village Nazi Martin Heidegger. Though they loathed each other profoundly, and disagreed about everything else, both claimed that fascism was the result of the Enlightenment. In short, if you seek to unite contemporary thinkers across nearly every spectrum, you’d do well to invoke the spectre of the Enlightenment monster: a beast filled with icy contempt for the instincts and driven by a blind, dumb optimism or a totalitarian lust for domination. The monster is relentlessly cheerful, stupendously gullible, and inevitably naive. If not quite the mad scientist in the cellar, the Enlightenment is the sorcerer‘s apprentice, a callow fool who releases forces that overpower us all. These claims are supported by nothing more than shreds of historical evidence, always torn from their contexts. The patchwork creature that results is the rationalist whom the Enlightenment condemned from experience, the fanatic about whom it was sceptical, the optimist it loved to ridicule. This is not a question of nuance: the Enlightenment wasn’t simply more complicated than contemporary caricatures suggest, it was often diametrically opposed to them. Yet the caricatures have persisted despite the masses of work 20th-century historians undertook to undermine them. Nor need you be a scholar to find evidence that the Enlightenment was not the monster we’ve been told about. Forget about the archives; buy a paperback copy of Voltaire’s Candide to remind yourself that these critiques of the Enlightenment came from the heart of the Enlightenment itself. The idea that life is not as good, and the world not as simple, as we’d like to believe, just might have been news to Candide himself, but it was hardly a surprise for his creator. Criticisms of Candide’s sort of worldview – ‘All for the best in this best of all possible worlds’ – was Voltaire‘s whole point, part of the Enlightenment effort to look at the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, in order to assess our possibilities within it. Yet writers like Isaiah Berlin or John Gray proceed as if the historians had laboured in vain.

The Enlightenment has come to stand for modernity – both for those traditionalists whose response to modernity is nostalgia towards what came before it, and those postmodernists whose response is ironic distance towards everything else. There are many troubling things about modernity, but it makes no sense to address them by creating an Enlightenment phantom far scarier than anything that ever really existed. For some time now, I’ve tried to strip the Enlightenment of the clichés that surround it: that it held human nature to be perfect and human progress to be inevitable; that reason is unlimited and science is infallible; that faith is a worn-out answer to the questions of the past; and that technology is the solution to all the problems of the future. In fact, no era was more aware of the existence of evil; no era took more care in probing human limits and bounds. The Enlightenment took aim not at reverence, but at idolatry and superstition; it never believed progress was inevitable, only that it is possible. You can find some 18th-century quote that expresses the crudest version of these claims; you can find second-rate quotes about anything. But in approaching questions as important as what is right and what is wrong with modernity, we should turn to its best examples.

Looking at the work of Immanuel Kant, for example, should give the lie to the claim that the Enlightenment was Eurocentric. It was the first modern movement to attack Eurocentrism and racism, often at considerable risk. Enlightenment texts were banned, and their authors sent into unemployment and exile, for insisting that European culture and politics be considered from the points of view of Persians or Chinese. However different its authors were, they all threatened established authority in the name of universal principles that are available to anyone, whether Christian or Confucian, Persian or French. It is therefore simply mystifying that every condescending or racist remark that comes from an Enlightenment pen is gleefully quoted today, while Kant’s attack on colonialism is overlooked. (It’s one of the contemporary practices he condemns as evil: check out the ‘third definitive article’ of his Perpetual Peace, where he describes the Chinese and Japanese as wise for refusing entry to colonial Europeans.) Anyone who praises China and Japan for keeping out predatory Europeans cannot fairly be accused of blindly imposing Western ways on the rest of the world. Enlightenment thinkers were men of their time, educated by men of earlier ones, and their struggle to free themselves of prejudice and preconception could never be final. But it is fatal to forget that those thinkers were not only the first to condemn Eurocentrism and racism; they also laid the theoretical foundation for the universalism upon which all struggles against racism must stand. It’s also common to attack the Enlightenment for its elevation of human reason, approaching it with the sort of uncritical adulation earlier ages had for God. Yet the very first sentence of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a statement about reason’s limits. Enlightenment thinkers never held reason to be unlimited; they just refused to let church and state be the ones to set the limits on what we can think. They could not have imagined that the market might take over the functions once reserved for church and state, and do so far more efficiently. If you restrict information, people will eventually long for it; if you provide them with a glut they will simply want the noise to stop. This is not, however, an argument against the Enlightenment, but a demand to extend it to help us understand the forces at work in preventing autonomy today. Among the many things we owe to the Enlightenment is the question: what do you want to be, and do, when you grow up? Before it, the question was unintelligible: you did whatever your parents did, unless pestilence or war came between you and your destiny. Only with the Enlightenment, and its demand that careers be open to talent, did it make sense to consider what it meant to come of age. That demand is far from realised today, and it was only broached in the 18th century, but that was enough to make the son of a barely literate East Prussian saddle-maker focus on the question: what does it mean to grow up? Kant’s most famous essay, What is Enlightenment?, defines it as reason’s emancipation from its self-imposed immaturity. We choose immaturity because we are lazy and scared: how much more comfortable it is to let someone else make your decisions! ‘If I have a book that takes care of my understanding, a preacher who takes care of my conscience, a doctor who prescribes my diet, I need not make any effort myself. I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will handle the business for me.’ With a familiarity surprising in a man who had no children, Kant discusses the ways in which children learn to walk. In order to do it they must stumble and fall, but to eliminate their bruises by keeping them in baby carriages is a recipe for keeping them infantile. Kant’s target was not overprotective mothers but authoritarian states, which have an interest in keeping their citizens from thinking for themselves. We’re often unwilling to summon the energy or run the risks – even the risk of embarrassment! – that thinking for ourselves would demand. It’s easy to see why this is the message that teachers emphasise when they teach What is Enlightenment? in highschools. Surely the young should not be led to think there’s anything wrong with society that a little effort on their part can’t fix? Thus Kant’s message became a neoliberal mantra that only strengthened existing orders: any dissatisfaction you may feel with the world around you is your own fault. If only you could get rid of your own laziness and cowardice, you could be enlightened, grownup and free. No wonder Germans of a certain age, who had to memorise the essay in school, roll their eyes and groan at the very mention of ‘self-imposed immaturity’.