Recovering (From) Enlightenment

When we speak of the “Enlightenment,” those of us who are not Buddhists commonly refer to a complex movement of thought, culture, temperament, and politics represented in its early phases by thinkers like Descartes and Locke and in its later phases by figures like Kant or, in America, Jefferson and Paine. This self-styled “Age of Reason,” or what we might call the “historical” or “classical” Enlightenment, is often said to have succumbed in the nineteenth century to the forces of reaction and romanticism. But “the Enlightenment” is also invoked, most often by or on behalf of modern liberal political and constitutional theorists, to designate a sort of political-moral ideal that ostensibly has guided and continues to guide American constitutionalism. This more modern iteration is supposed to be connected to the historical Enlightenment, it seems, mainly on the basis of a professed allegiance to governance by “reason.”