AGAIN, THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT REMAINS RELEVANT

Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, translated from the German by Fritz . A. Koelln & James P. Pettegrove; with a new forward by Peter Gay (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) (From Peter Gay's "Foreword": "When in October 1932, Ernst Cassirer, then a professor of philosophy at the University of Hamburg, sat down to write a preface for his new monograph, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Weimar Republic had only three more months to live. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was invited to form a government, and promptly put an inglorious end to the political system that had governed postwar Germany, at times happily, often less so. In those days no one, not even Cassirer, saw the tragedy as still another signal defeat for the thought of the Enlightenment. But with its contempt for reason, its celebration of prejudice, and its cultivation of hero worship, the new Nazi regime was nothing less than that--a triumph for the forces of superstition, bigotry, and pitiless violence. However relevant the thought of the eighteenth century to the political battles of the twentieth, Cassirer was too scrupulous a scholar to point it out. But today, some seventy-five years after he had completed this masterly anatomy of Enlightenment thought, the parallels between the present day and the part of the past that was then his subject, seem almost obvious." Id. at vii. And now America must live in, and cope with, the Donal Trump legacy.).