The Enlightenment is having a moment. Cognitive psychologist, linguist, and public intellectual Steven Pinker has made it the subject of his latest best-seller, Enlightenment Now. As usual, Pinker is everywhere. His fluorescent-orange dust-jacket typeface shouts at me from bookstore displays, from dozens of reviews in the media, and from college library study-carrels. I imagine encountering students for whom “the Enlightenment” is not a foreign concept but rather a buzzword. I join the masses and read the book.

“Foremost is reason. Reason is nonnegotiable,” runs Pinker's punchy prose—for he is also author of The Sense of Style, a linguist's present-day challenge to the oldfangled and yet ageless Elements of Style by Oliver Strunk and E. B. White. “If there's anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common,” he writes, “it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world.”1 Then, insistently and energetically...

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