The New Enlightenment: On Steven Pinker & Beyond

Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now establishes that great progress has been made on the aims of the European Enlightenment. However, the minds of many economists, moralists and political thinkers in the West are still set firmly in the eighteenth century. The progress has been due mainly to the physical scientific revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the industrial revolutions they generated. But a new enlightenment is needed now to overcome this poverty of social theory, and bring our economists and political theorists up to date in the socially connected, commercially integrated, and existentially threatened world of the 21st century.