There is no more pressing question for humanity in the present period than that of the failure of the revolutions which began in the Enlightenment to make good on their promise of liberation. Liberalism, which promised to all the freedom to decide rationally, for themselves, what it means to be human, and to act on that freedom so long as it does not conflict with the similar freedom for others, has instead given birth to Capital, which requires under pain of starvation that all do its will, and which is di
The principal response (generally called poststructuralist or deconstructionist) to these failures over the course of the past 50 years has been to blame the Enlightenment itself for the “failure” of the liberal, democratic, and socialist revolutions —to claim that the ideal of rational autonomy was, from the beginning, a reflex of a will to domination which defined European civilization as colonial at the very root. As Quijano and Dussel put it, Descartes’ cogito is just a cover for ego conquiro which def
We have devoted a good bit of our scholarly career to defeating this narrative (Mansueto 2005, 2010). Instead, we have argued that rational dialectics forms an integral part of the broader Axial Age (Jaspers 1953) project of religious problematization, rationalization, and democratization which is by no means uniquely European, but which includes Judaism, Buddhism, the Jaina tradition, and the Upanishads, Zoroastrianism, and the historic Chinese schools (especially Confucianism and Taoism) as well as Hell