Defines the enlightenment as clear logical public thinking and investigation, and reckons that its chief proponents were Bacon and Voltaire with the Scottish phiolosophers and especially Kant as his personal favourite. Hind argues that the enlightenment is being cheapened by being opposed to religion and pseudoscience. He says that the religious opposition is unrepresentative of traditional religion and that the enlightenment has no quarrel with faith. Furthermore he reckons that homeopathy and alternative medicine and even post modernism are not significant problems for public reasoning to worry about.
The real problem for the enlightenment mission is its possible subversion by the corporation and by the state. The former is not disinterested in science but distorts it for its own reasons. Its only goal is profit, not truth. The state he says cannot be trusted with science as it too manipulates society through propaganda, and media manipulation and it is hidden from rational criticism by its extensive use of secrecy..
Against all this he wants to establish an open critique where all can contribute freely to intellectual advance. I am not convinced we need anything new, I reckon an open press, and unbiased journals already provide the opportunity for open discussion. ( )

How and why could the Right pose today as the heir of the Enlightenment? A well argued book that poses this and other significant and timely questions, even if its structure leaves a few things to be desired. Counterposing the "occult" to the "open" Enlightenment might be a little too schematic, but the author is clearly up to something here. ( )

I am not a big believer in the threats to reason commonly touted - religious fundamentalism, environmentalism, postmodernism etc - and neither is Dan Hind. He has written a book about it.
Whilst it wanders a little in places his central premise is fascinating: the main threat to reason comes from it's self-proclaimed defenders in many cases.
He gives a brief (but accurate) account of the historical enlightenment (although I do not share his enthusiasm for Kant), and suggests that it has two manifestations - an "occult" enlightenment in search of using knowledge to support powerful elites, and a more liberationist project (I think he is unfair to some Critical Theorists and Post-Modernists in not crediting them with this aim too; although undoubtedly this does not apply to them all). The most memorable example for me was his decision to contrast the perceived threat to our health from unregulated alternative medicine to the criminal approach to our health of those in the regulated pharmaceutical industry. He suggests essentially that misuse of state power and science threaten far more people, and I suspect he is very very right.
A great book, though his conclusion seems a little odd, and I utterly disagree with his rejection of conventional politics; the personal liberation projects he suggests seem unlikely to change the world fast enough to my mind, but you should draw your own conclusions (which is surely what the author would have wanted). ( )