The Enlightenment, the Nation-state and the Primal Patricide of Modernity

Abstract

Critics of a so-called ‘Enlightenment Project’, however striking the differences between them, characteristically subscribe in one way or another to two fundamental propositions. They believe, on the one hand, that in replacing dogmatic faith with dogmatic reason the Enlightenment loved the thing it killed and framed the secular world of modernity within an ideological mould which merely turned Christianity inside out, in the service of absolutist principles of another sort. They imagine that it made science the new religion of mankind and offered terrestrial grace or happiness to its true believers alone. That in essence is the thesis of Carl Becker’s Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-century Philosophers, first published in 1932, and in its more political manifestations, such as in Jacob Talmon’s Origins of Totalitarian Democracy or Simon Schama’s Citizens,¹ much the same proposition informs their authors’ interpretation of the excesses of the French Revolution.