SO MANY IDEAS CONCERN THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT, CONCERNING INTELLECTUALISM AND ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM,
Scott L. Montgomery & Daniel Chirot, The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) (The four ideas are freedom equality, evolution, and democracy.The three most influential intellectuals: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin. The titles to the seven chapter provide the basic outline to the book: Adam Smith: The Science of Man, Morality, and Money;" "Karl Marx: The Tragic Consequences of a Brilliant Theory;" "Charles Darwin: Struggle and Selection in the Realm of Ideas;" "Making Democracy: The Jefferson-Hamilton Debates;" "Counter-Enlightenment: From Antimodernism to Fascism;" "Christian Fundamentalism: The Politics of God in America;' "Purifying Islam: The Muslim Reaction against the Western Enlightenment;" and "Conclusion: The Power of Ideas and the Importance of the Humanities." "The humanities should in their own way be no less compulsory than the social and natural sciences, and to dismiss them, as too many do today, is to diminish our capacity to know and understand the ideas that have shaped how we think and what we believe." Id. at x. My favorite sentence: "It is not by chance that the national conversation about U.S. democracy has always been more of a street brawl than a debate over brandy." Id. at 219-220. The authors raise the following question" "And so wee need to ask: given their political activism and demands, what would American society look like if fundamentalism were place in power? What sort of America would this be? Let us count the ways. . . ." Id. at 374. "Our analyses in this book are meant to show the great value to be gained by going back to the original texts in order to study the actual thought of seminal intellectuals and to better see where and how they were subsequently embrace (or enslaved) for distinct purposes. Only in this way can we bring to light their vast history fertility, whose full extent we have not yet come near to exhausting. We should say, in fact, that such study is essential both for gaining a more complete understanding about the creation and spread of modern freedom, plus the institutions to implement and protect them, and for comprehending the varied resistance to such freedoms and the reason why this continues." Id. at 419. Both the law, in general, and legal education, in particular, are among the institutions to implement and protect modern freedoms. How good of a job are the law and legal education doing on this count? Reasonable minds may disagree, but I give both B-minuses (A- if grading on an international curve) at best. On so many fronts, America has retreated to the 1950s--if not the 1920s.).
