Stephen Eric Bronner is an American political scientist and philosopher, Board of Governors Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States, and is the Director of Global Relations for the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights.
271110: very good. political philosophy is not a main interest, so i have only read fringes of argument denigrating the enlightenment. this work reminds me i am a child of enlightenment. all the values, dreams, faiths i have are enlightenment ideals. i do not ever need to argue for these are axiomatic, i can recognize no other position but that of an engaged leftist sentiment. i am heartened that somebody will formulate argument, clarify, promote enlightenment ideals, and speak against those who embody counter-enlightenment. i may not know enough to give it 5 stars, but it trends that way.
Very good so far as it goes, but it fails to address the new crisis for Enlightenment thought, which is the ecological crisis. He briefly mentions that ecologists question progress, and dismisses the problem in a sentence or two by saying that the answers to environmental problems are going to be technological. That is insufficient treatment of what many feel is the big failure of the Enlightenment project in a book that spends chapters dealing with other objections.
The book explores contemporary society's interpretation of the Enlightenment and the impact that these interpretations have had on society. Bronner attempts, with relative success, to demystify beliefs regarding the Enlightenment and shows that we are still developing and learning from their successes and failures.
Should be required reading for anyone who reads the Dialectic of the Enlightenment, by Adorno & Horkheimer, especially those who think well of that tome of misdiagnosis. I know I have the order of the author's names backwards, but so did they regarding the Enlightenment.