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Overview
In Enlightenment Aberrations, David W. Bates shows that error was a complex, important, and by no means entirely negative concept in Enlightenment thought, one that had a decisive influence in revolutionary debates on political identity and national history. What can it mean to write a history of error? In Bates's view all philosophy, insofar as its project is the search for truth, begins in error. If truth is posited as a goal to be attained, not as a given of some kind, then error assumes a central role in the quest for truth. Going beyond both liberal celebrations and postmodern critiques of Enlightenment reason, Bates reveals just how crucial the problematic relation between human "wandering" and the mystery of truth was in eighteenth-century thought. The author draws on a wide range of Enlightenment thinkers, including Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Jean d'Alembert, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Charles Bonnet, showing how they wrestled with the "risk and promise" of error. He then demonstrates how the concept of error and its dialectical relationship to truth played out in the political culture of the French Revolution, particularly in the Terror. In the final chapters, Bates looks at the post-revolutionary transformations of the Enlightenment discourse of error and its subsequent history in modern European thought.Synopsis
In Enlightenment Aberrations, David W. Bates shows that error was a complex, important, and by no means entirely negative concept in Enlightenment thought, one that had a decisive influence in revolutionary debates on political identity and national history. What can it mean to write a history of error? In Bates's view all philosophy, insofar as its project is the search for truth, begins in error. If truth is posited as a goal to be attained, not as a given of some kind, then error assumes a central role in the quest for truth. Going beyond both liberal celebrations and postmodern critiques of Enlightenment reason, Bates reveals just how crucial the problematic relation between human "wandering" and the mystery of truth was in eighteenth-century thought.
The author draws on a wide range of Enlightenment thinkers, including Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Jean d'Alembert, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Charles Bonnet, showing how they wrestled with the "risk and promise" of error. He then demonstrates how the concept of error and its dialectical relationship to truth played out in the political culture of the French Revolution, particularly in the Terror. In the final chapters, Bates looks at the post-revolutionary transformations of the Enlightenment discourse of error and its subsequent history in modern European thought.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Enlightenment Aberrations is an important and distinctive book. It is thoroughly researched and engages critically with some of the most important analyses and debates concerning Enlightenment epistemology and socio-political theory."-Daniel Brewer, University of Minnesota"Professor Bates has produced a bold and stimulating book, one that will require and reward more than a single reading. In retracing eighteenth-century ground he has certainly found sufficient kindling to start a discussion. But, given the ultimately humane and generous spirit of his work, I am sure he also hopes to have found enough material to light a path for all those among us who so often lose our way."-Alan Williams, Wake Forest University. H-France, August 2002
"'Enlightenment Aberrations' exposes an enduring French engagement with the epistemological and ontological problems of error. Bates's approach to the 'structure of error' is innovative and important. . . .'Enlightenment Abberations' stands as an ambitious and important study. . . .Bates powerfully argues that the portrait of the Enlightenment as the domain of totalizing, instrumental reason is flawed and ahistorical. This caricature can best be best transcended by recapturing the subtlety of Enlightenment error."-Joseph Zizek, Univeristy of Auckland. Canadian Journal of History XXXVIII, April 2003
"Bates makes an insightful argument for the nuances of Enlightenment thought, and he persuasively concludes that the alleged eighteenth-century penchant for universal truths was actually more prevalent among theorists in the nineteenth century. . . Bates develops these themes in a carefully written narrative that addresses present concerns at the same time that it engages the text and ideas of the past. This kind of exchange with past writers is a distinctive contribution of good intellectual history; it provokes us to rethink errors in our own knowledge, eben as we challenge and rethink the errors of others."-Lloyd Kramer, UNC-Chapel Hill, American Historical Review, Feb. 2003.