The Enlightenment, Civil Society, and Economy

Abstract

The Enlightenment constitutes a generalized “Copernican revolution” or creative destruction in civil society, as well as the economy, in interaction and mutual reinforcement with its revolutionary operation and change in culture and polity discussed earlier. In particular, the Enlightenment represents the process of destruction, in the form of intellectual delegitimation (“deconstruction”), of theocratic “sacred” civil society found in the pre-Enlightenment, especially Civitas Dei in medievalism. It does so because this theocratic, “godly” version amounted to a sort of “McCann because of lacking such a sphere of private liberties or a life-world (Habermas 2001) autonomous from theocratic religion and tyrannical state merged and mutually reinforced and perpetuated.