Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

by Steven Pinker

The Enlightenment is conventionally placed in the last two-thirds of the 18th century, though it flowed out of the

Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason in the 17th century and spilled into the heyday of classical liberalism of the first half of the 19th.

but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress.

(As Montesquieu wrote, “If triangles had a god they would give him three sides.”)

Kant, Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Adam Smith were inquisitive psychologists and all too aware of our irrational passions and foibles.

To the Enlightenment thinkers the escape from ignorance and superstition showed how mistaken our conventional wisdom could be, and how the methods of science—skepticism, fallibilism, open debate, and empirical testing—are a paradigm of how to achieve reliable knowledge.

because they were haunted by a historical memory of centuries of religious carnage:

(As the economist Ludwig von Mises put it centuries later, “If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread.”)

Alexander Hamilton—designed the institutions of the young nation to nurture it.