“The Western republics that emerged from the Age of Enlightenment wrested power from Old World oligarchs and installed it with the governed.”
It’s quite simple to see the monstrous secular humanist religions of communism, Nazism and gaiaism as the direct descendants of the Enlightenment.
Nietzsche recognized that. When the enlightenment had “killed God”, the world would spasm with the realignment of world order.
Enlightenment crowned humanism supreme. The logical endpoint of humanism is bizarre utopias created by man’s reason like the isms above. And here we are.
What the author really wants to do is go back to the point where humanism had not completed its task.
And who elevates these “intellectuals” to positions of being embraced as “brilliant”?