Enlightenment and Authority

In 1784, the philosopher Immanuel Kant completed an essay on the nature of ‘enlightenment’ and its implications for society. He defined the term to mean the personal transformation of people’s way of thinking, not just by the accumulation of learning, but by individual people’s willingness to derive their own conclusions about life based on their reason, intellect and wisdom. He equated ‘enlightenment’ with intellectual maturity, which he contrasted with depending on others (such as religious authorities) for one’s beliefs and opinions.

Kant was aware of the problems generated by enlightenment. Most people (even those in authority) were not yet enlightened by his definition. But if enlightenment became common, then there would be problems in maintaining order - people might choose to disobey their rulers, women their husbands, and children their parents. The answer was for enlightenment to be coupled with obedience. People could be enlightened in their private life, but should adhere to convention and consequently express accepted views in their work and public duties. The exemplary society in this respect was the Prussia in which he lived, and Kant designated his time as ‘the Age of Frederick’, named after the authoritarian king of that land.

Kant’s conclusion that enlightenment is compatible with and may even require authoritarian government has been a common stance among public intellectuals since his time. Intellectuals may not support such governments with the same enthusiasm as Kant, but they have limited power in wider society, and therefore depend on that of their rulers to ensure the application of their ideas. This has been particularly the case when intellectuals have sought to achieve major changes in the lives of the rest of us. Given the ‘unenlightened’ character of most people, and hence their probable resistance to such schemes to improve their lives, it has been particularly tempting for intellectuals to support the use of authoritarian methods to create a new kind of person. Historically, this has often involved the mass slaughter of many of the older kinds of person. Popular resistance could be rationalised as ‘lack of enlightenment’, ‘superstition’, ‘false consciousness’ and so on.

Even in more democratic societies, intellectuals may find authoritarianism tempting as a means for achieving a better life for the rest of us. Jeremy Bentham proposed an extraordinarily dehumanising regime for prisoners called the ‘panopticon’. Later intellectual reformers proposed that mental illness and intellectual disability could be best managed in vast authoritarian institutions. In the 20th century, public intellectuals argued for massive slum clearance projects, fragmenting communities and re-housing people in poorly-maintained blocks of flats built miles away from their families, employment, entertainment, shops and so on. The Red Road flats in Glasgow (shown above) were one of the extreme demonstrations of this type of social engineering.

What these exercises have in common is the belief that the good life can be discerned by reason, that it can be applied in an undifferentiated way to whole categories of people such as ‘the peasantry’ or ‘the working class’. This simplified view of the complexities and diversity of people may be a product of lack of experience and seeing the world through books and political debates rather than through observation and experience. In other words, many intellectuals are themselves unenlightened by Kant’s definition.