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Do we need a New Enlightenment to cut through a new obscurantism? Or is the Enlightenment part of a bad past of racism, slavery, and exploitation? In many ways, the ideas of the Enlightenment are tarnished by their historical association with historical injustices, dictatorships and utopian experiments that left a bloody trace throughout history, an inhuman rationalism more akin to capitalist excess than to liberté-égalité-fraternité. 

But this is only one face of Enlightenment thinking, an invention of later historians. Behind this sanitised facade lies a landscape of hair-raising debates, doubts and discussions that have lost nothing of their power to astonish and to question the status quo and the lies societies like to tell themselves.

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