Review: Cherubino's Leap: In Search of the Enlightenment Moment, by Richard Kramer

Abstract

Cherubino's Leap: In Search of the Enlightenment Moment , by Richard Kramer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. xvi, 224 pp. The Enlightenment is having a moment. Cognitive psychologist, linguist, and public intellectual Steven Pinker has made it the subject of his latest best-seller, Enlightenment Now . As usual, Pinker is everywhere. His fluorescent-orange dust-jacket typeface shouts at me from bookstore displays, from dozens of reviews in the media, and from college library study-carrels. I imagine encountering students for whom “the Enlightenment” is not a foreign concept but rather a buzzword. I join the masses and read the book. “Foremost is reason. Reason is nonnegotiable,” runs Pinker's punchy prose—for he is also author of The Sense of Style , a linguist's present-day challenge to the oldfangled and yet ageless Elements of Style by Oliver Strunk and E. B. White. “If there's anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common,” he writes, “it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world.”1 Then, insistently and energetically in the seventeen chapters that follow, he harnesses the scientific method in order to demonstrate the value of that method. Dozens of charts show that life is getting better. “This evidence-based take on the Enlightenment project reveals that it was not a naive hope,” Pinker concludes. “The Enlightenment has worked —perhaps the greatest story seldom told.”2 Hence, a 500-page public relations campaign, justified with the claim that many people are “cynical about the Enlightenment-inspired institutions that are securing this progress, such as liberal democracy and organizations of international cooperation.” Their cynicism motivates …