Whose Enlightenment?

Abstract

The Enlightenment seems out of kilter. Until fairly recently, its trajectories were beguilingly simple and straightforward. Devised by Western metropolitan masterminds, the Enlightenment was piously appropriated by their latter-day apprentices in Central and Eastern Europe. This process of benign percolation made modern science, political liberty, and religious toleration trickle down to East-Central Europe. The self-orientalizing of nineteenth-century Central European intellectuals reinforced this impression, making concepts that were ostensibly authentic and pristine at their “Western” sources seem garbled and skewed once appropriated in their region.

Connected global intellectual history and the decolonisation of the curriculum

“…Further, as we see from today's migration crisis, rise of popularism and climate change denial, the idea that ‘Enlightenment values’ such as democracy, tolerance or science are somehow purest at the sources in the Western world, where they supposedly originated, is unsustainable. As one enlightenment historian recently observed, ‘today science, liberty, and toleration are recognised to have also been patchier and more ‘provincial’ at their putative sources in England, France and the Netherlands' (Filafer, 2017, p. 111). What needs to be decolonised is the colonial mythology that Europe had some kind of exclusive monopoly on the production and consumption of certain concepts, or that the European articulation of ideas are the ideal types, to use the Weberian category, while the rest of the world looks back at Europe through a distorted mirror.…”