This is a profoundly misleading account, but it is what Americans have been brought up on for generations now, throughout the 20th Century.
Brooks thinks that the Enlightenment never ended (about the time of the American Rebellion or the French Revolution, in my judgment)! From some of Professor Kaiser's remarks, he seems to share this time warp view as well.
Brooks thinks 20th century leaders, but only some of them he likes, are Enlightenment leaders! He really believes that.
Do you think Enlightenment requires democracy? It certainly never meant anything of that kind for a long time, long before the Age of the Democratic Revolution, beginning only in about 1760.
How can you claim that Brooks' view is incorrect? Who would believe you? Where in this barrage would one begin?
Do you then get pegged as a Bannonist, whatever that turns out to be?
It certainly goes back to arguments claiming that the French Revolution somehow represented the Enlightenment. The founding fathers certainly all thought of themselves as enlightenment thinkers.
Of course Napoleon turned out to be a different thing, or did he? So, was he actually anti Enlightenment then?
He certainly believed in careers open to talent, and to rationalization and consolidation of the ostensibly backward Old European Order Europe, much as enlightened despots had themselves been trying to do for decades. He didn't care for religion. That's an enlightenment plus. He wasn't fond of an aristocracy, except of his relatives. That was an enlightenment plus. Jefferson started out calling him a wonderful man. Doesn't that make him the modern enlightened ruler par excellence, even though he didn't do it very democratically, to say the least? If not, why not?
The 19th Century movements Brooks calls anti Enlightenment, socialism, fascism, communism, were also themselves intellectual children of the Enlightenment. That is the ugly little secret he doesn't tell you either. WWI was painted as an imperialist war, thus somehow Anti Enlightenment.
Nationalism was a child of the Enlightenment.
Fascism, was a child, intellectually, of the enlightenment no less than was liberal democracy.
Communism, intellectually yet another child of the enlightenment.
Both communism and fascism sort of sprang from Hegel, who himself sort of sprang from the likes of Rousseau and Kant.
Brooks doesn't really want to get into what I call this dark side of the Enlightenment, call it the Endarkenment.
He mentions Locke and Kant....He doesn't, of course, mention Rousseau, etc., classic later enlightenment thinker, hugely influential on the founding fathers and on revolutionary democratic Europe, idol of Robespierre.
He doesn't touch Hume, hugely important but poison for Brooks' theory of the power and goodness of Enlightenment reason. Yet he covers himself with his remarks on skepticism, painting it as leading to mostly good things in American democracy, separation of powers, checks and balances, things like that, things that, sadly, have not panned out at all as originally planned here, or as lauded by Tocqueville.
With Hume, on the intellectual plane, and especially with Rousseau, on the individual and emotional one, the Enlightenment worm had already turned on itself in mid 18th Century thought, actually even before the democratic revolution began in earnest in the 1760s.
Skepticism and the wantonness of the individual will represented the death of the Enlightenment, not its fruition. But the Enlightenment had plenty of offspring.
