Abstract
This chapter postulates a historical critique of the unenlightened marriage between Christian providentialist thought and modern scientific and technological progress in the enlightenment. By focusing on the historical and political reversals of enlightenment in the United States—from the Founding Fathers to the champions of Manifest Destiny and from Theodore Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” to George W. Bush’s “Crusader Nation,” and then comparing these reversals to the downright failures of enlightenment in Spain and Latin America—this chapter calls into question the triumphalist vision according to which the United States is the epitome of enlightenment. The pursuit of a providentially ordained and technologically engineered enlightenment has led Americans to cultivate the economic freedoms of capitalism at the expense of the political freedoms of democracy. The seminal logic of Francis Bacon’s empire of reason, systematized by British thinkers like John Locke, was incorporated into America’s anti-imperial imperialism, which ultimately hollowed out republican idealism into a corrupted form of the White Man’s Burden in the election of 1900, after which universal surveillance was confounded with universal knowledge and imperialism with liberty.
“When republican virtue fails, slavery ensues.”
— Thomas Paine
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Notes
- 1.
The Amendment specifically called for “the recognition of the independence of the people of Cuba , demanding that the government of Spain relinquish its authority and government in the Island of Cuba and withdraw its land and naval forces from Cuba and Cuban waters, and directing the President of the United States to use the land and naval forces of the United States to carry these resolutions into effect” (Congressional Record, p. 4062).
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Britt Arredondo, C. (2018). Critique of Providential Enlightenment. In: Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70784-6_2
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