The eighteenth century’s two revolutions—the revolution of reason and the revolution of technology—were supposed to guide us toward a universal paradise. Instead, we live in a time of mass extinction and cultural disintegration. This, argued John Ralston Saul in his 1992 book Voltaire’s Bastards, is a direct result of the flawed assumptions on... See more

The problem, though, is that there are other consequences: climate change, nuclear weapons, and the mass deaths of the industrial wars and revolutions of the twentieth century. We want to believe that horrors like Nazism or the mass murders of the Communist regimes were driven by irrational fanaticism: that they were reversions to a barbaric past... See more

But the bliss of that new dawn was short-lived, and not just because of the appearance of the guillotine in public squares across the country. The bigger problem was that the new notions of the philosopher-revolutionaries didn’t actually work. Removing the old customs and strictures led not to a flowering of virtue but to mass outbreaks of revenge.... See more

Monarchy, aristocracy, church, and customs of all kinds were to be swept away and replaced by a new world, designed to promote virtue through the rigorous application of that most vital of Enlightenment values: reason. There was a brief period, before the revolution descended into Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, in which such a new world seemed... See more

Critique of Pure Reason