Enlightenment meta-narratives

Orientation Why should you care about a bunch of dead white guys? To pull some lyrics from Sam Cooke’s Wonderful World, the Yankee working class “don’t know much about history, don’t know much about geography”. So why would they care at all about an intellectual movement that began 300 years ago in a country notorious […]

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
— H. L. Mencken, In Defense of Women, 1918