I believe that one of the few things that stands between us and an accelerated descent into darkness is the set of values inherited from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This is not a fashionable view at this moment, when the Enlightenment can be dismissed as anything from superficial and intellectually naive to a conspiracy of dead white men in periwigs to provide the intellectual foundation for Western imperialism. It may or may not be all that, but it is also the only foundation for all the aspirations to build societies fit for all human beings to live in anywhere on the Earth, and for the assertion and defense of their human rights as persons. In any case, the progress of civility which took place from the eighteenth century until the early twentieth was achieved overwhelmingly or entirely under the influence of the Enlightenment, by governments of what are still called, for the benefit of history students, “enlightened absolutists”, by revolutionaries and reformers, liberals, socialists and communists, all of whom belonged to the same intellectual family. It was not achieved by its critics.
- Eric Hobsbawm, “Barbarism: A User’s Guide” (1994)
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