[x]

The author has no idea what he is writing about. The so-called “Enlightenment” was as retrograde as the “Rennaisance”, which among other lovely things, reintroduced slavery into European culture. Why, just consider the wonderful things the Enlightenment did for France and the Continent: ideological murder on an industrial scale, larger scale war than had ever been known, the Red Terror, the complete destruction of the French economy and severe dmage to other Continental economies...ah, yes, the Enlightenment. It must have been a good thing because “intellectuals” in universities have been telling us that it was for a very long time.

Mokyr is writing about the British Enlightenment which was very different from the French. It was more involved with science and industry than with political or philosophical theories.

In the past I'd have agreed with you and identified the Enlightenment with the French Revolution and later totalitarian utopian projects. But the context has changed.

Years ago we thought in Cold War terms. Today the encounter between the West, which experienced the Enlightenment, and the Muslim World, which didn't, influences the way we think about the 18th century.

[achilles2000]

The point had to do with the dishonest historiography of the left’s “Enlightenment” historians who set about claiming that every positive development or every bit of progress was somehow part of the “Enlightenment”. What happened in England in political thought (the good parts) and in science, and especially Scotland, are a legacy of the Reformation.

Postmoderns are particularly adept at misappropriating things by simply saying that there were many “x’s” (e.g. “Enlightenments”) so that they can confuse peopole by grouping things that are dissimilar in principle under the same general term. The political uses of this sort of thing are legion.

Mokyr has no idea what he is saying.