Practice question · Sort into groups
Sort each position by whether it treats the Enlightenment as the ORIGIN of a liberating modernity or offers a CRITIQUE of that view.
Groups: Enlightenment as origin · Critique of that view
- Rights, criticism and science begin in this period
- The same economies ran on Atlantic slavery throughout
- Public reasoning by private persons is a political innovation
- A reason aimed at control produces domination, not freedom
Hints
- One column celebrates an inheritance; the other asks what the inheritance cost or where it came from.
- Horkheimer and Adorno, the global historians, and the slavery objection all belong together.
Show the answer
Enlightenment as origin: Rights, criticism and science begin in this period, Public reasoning by private persons is a political innovation
Critique of that view: A reason aimed at control produces domination, not freedom, The same economies ran on Atlantic slavery throughout
Why
The three critiques attack different things — the content of reason, the geography of causation, and the moral accounting — and none of them denies that something important happened. That is why the debate is durable: it is not about whether the period mattered but about how to describe what it was.
Practise The Late Eighteenth Century and the Debate over Modernity
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