Um...the France and Austria of which time period? It DOES make a difference.
In general I'd say France.
Did the Enlightenment fail?
In what way? (ha one sentence to cover answer and question so I don't forget the question this time)
Well...the Enlightenment evolved from the Renaissance, combined with new discoveries in science and exploration, and gave rise to some grandiose new ideas about law and human nature. In practice, it seems like those ideas were either disregarded or ultimately proved wrong. Things didn't change all that much: we're not living in Thomas More's Utopia, or Thomas Jefferson's great anarcho-agarian republic of gentleman-farmers, or even Thomas Paine's common sense reality. The New World is the same as the Old World....or so it seems.
Do you agree?
*wtf edit I used my scrollwheel to scroll down and somehow it hit post*
If I understand correctly you are saying The New World Order that Bush the first talked about is actually The Old World Order. I want my great anarcho-agarian republic of gentleman-farmers. I think in this sense it failed because we allowed government to skip over Orwell and not be Big Brother but Big Mother. We want government to keep us safe from ourselves and raise our children for us. I think that with a few exceptions that if we took the U.S. Constitution and took it back to the first ten amendments along with things like rights for blacks, women, etc. This country would be much better off. I also would like to see that there is at least a 10 year ban on becoming a lobbyist after leaving political office, maybe we wouldn't be getting a$$-F@#!ed by big business. How long until we just quit the pretenses and just elect General Motors or CBS or Sony or insertotherlargemultinationalconglomeratehere, to political office instead of individual people.
What do you think?
My personal disdain for Libertarianism aside, what I think is maybe the Enlightenment thinkers had it wrong from the beginning. There were all these meditations on the true nature of the human being, and I wonder if perhaps these meditations were disproven by later scientific discoveries. The two most influential political philosophers came at the issue from opposite ends: Thomas Hobbes, who believed that Man is by nature a self-destructive brute and society exists to tame his baser urges; and John Locke, who believed that Man is by nature a well-meaning and empathetic creature, and society exists as a form of mutual protection. It was Locke's philosophy that influenced the American branch of the Enlightenment and led to the Revolution. But then a few years later comes Charles Darwin and his theory of Natural Selection, which seems to blow all that out of the water. If Man is nothing more than an animal, subject to the same forces and instincts that shape all life on this planet, then Man's default nature is self-interested and morally neutral. Maybe then Morality is just a thought exercise dreamed up by gentlemen of leisure in French salons. And maybe it is just human nature not to live in harmony, but to struggle with and dominate each other...and maybe poor Thomas Jefferson was wrong, and Alexander Hamilton was right.
Anyway...sorry to hijack this thread. Just, when I get interviewed, I get thoughtful.
