Critiques of the Enlightenment Ideologies

Abstract

The politics of modernity and the ideologies that express the modernist perspective have suffered badly in the twentieth century. The experiences of fascism, the barbarism of Nazism, and the mass terror and violence of Stalinism have severely dented belief in the power of reason, in the capacity of humanity to construct a good society and eradicate violence and political tyranny (Miliband, R. 1994, p. 58). Nor has the experience of the years since the end of fascism, as humanity advances towards the end of the twentieth century, been very encouraging in terms of realisation of the Enlightenment project of a world ruled by reason. Critics of that project point to the emergence of religious and ethnic fundamentalism, to desperate appeals to national identity, to illustrate their view that the idea of a society controlled by rational cooperation between human beings is further away than ever, that what has been called the politics of identity and difference can take abrasive and antagonistic forms in the world of modern politics, making the politics of modernity an unrealisable project. The very process of modernity has ‘hollowed out’ the community, and the seeming decline of liberalism and socialism has left a void that can all too easily be filled by irrational and emotive ideologies, such as extreme forms of ethnic nationalism. Hence modernity has led, in the view of critics such as John Gray (1995), to ‘disenchantment’ with the process of rationalisation, and hence to the privileging of movements and ideas that exalt emotivism and myth, for example extreme-right forms of nationalism.