Stéphanie Roza, La gauche contre les Lumières ? Fayard,

The ‘culture wars’ , where to begin, where to end? “We are witnessing” writes Stéphanie Roza, “at the present moment, in some of the academic and activist world.. a “tir de barrage” against “imperial Reason”, the humanist Enlightenment Project originally formed in the 18th century. It stands accused as fundamentally imperialist, neo-colonial, male and oppressive, “in a word, ‘white’.” Against these views the feminist philosopher, specialist in the  Enlightenment ideas, and early socialist thinkers (Comment l’utopie est devenue un programme politique,)  member of la Fondation Jean-Jaurès, affirms that this blanket rejection offers no prospect of human emancipation.

For Roza the anti-Enlightenment currents she surveys offer are more than a dead-end.  Taken as a whole they are a “regression” to conservative and counter-revolutionary hostility towards the Enlightenment, the hatred of Edmund Burke and de Masitre, for the French Revolution. Sexed up by a…