The Left’s Convenient Amnesia

The academic left did not critique the Enlightenment. It declared it morally tainted and beyond repair. That declaration has become ritualized. It is repeated often enough to feel settled. It is neither rigorous nor historically honest. The Enlightenment had limits, immoral ones. Everyone knows that. But treating those limits as moral collapse is an evasion, allowing critics to keep the moral inheritance while refusing responsibility for it. Enlightenment thinkers wrote toward a future they would never see. Not one lived in the world they were arguing into existence. Is that fact ignored because it ruins present postures of superiority?

The standard academic move is reduction. Enlightenment thought is flattened into 18th century British Philosophers John Locke and Adam Smith plus property and empire, then dismissed as morally bankrupt. You see this reasoning from many disciplined disciples of 20th century French philosopher/psychologist Michel Foucault, turning reason into a mask for power, or in post-structuralist readings that make moral aspiration impossible. Power explains everything. Moral progress explains nothing, in turn disappearing individual development, disagreement, and moral learning over time.

Locke, Hume, Smith, and the Evolution of Thought

John Locke is treated as the original sin. Property. Possession. Empire. End of story. But Locke is also where bodily autonomy entered political philosophy, refusing to leave to this day. The claim that my body is my labor and thus the product of my labor is not a side note. It is the beginning of bodily autonomy, self-ownership as a moral category. That idea has not stayed frozen. It mutates, expands, and is argued over to this day. Enlightenment thought does not end with Locke. It begins there.

18th century Scottish Historian and Philosopher David Hume explicitly rejects the fantasy that reason governs human life. Hume’s close friend, Adam Smith, founder of capitalism, builds an account of moral psychology grounded in sympathy, foundational to his economic philosophy, rather than mere calculation. This is not Enlightenment hubris. It is Enlightenment self-correction. Yet today Smith is often reduced to a proto-economist, or, along with Hume, a racist moralist (he horrifically was), while their psychological insights about emotion, moral perception, and human agency are often claimed as modern innovations.

Three Germans:........

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