Richard Whatmore (12:00 BST)

The Enlightenment is popularly seen as the Age of Reason, a key moment in human history when ideals such as freedom, progress, natural rights, and constitutional government prevailed. In this radical re-evaluation, historian Richard Whatmore shows why, for many at its centre, the Enlightenment was a profound failure.

The End of Enlightenment traces the changing perspectives of economists, philosophers, politicians, and polemicists around the world, including figures as diverse as David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft. They had strived to replace superstition with reason, but witnessed instead terror and revolution, corruption, gross commercial excess, and the continued growth of violent colonialism.

Returning us to the tumultuous events and ideas of the eighteenth century and digging deep into the thought of the men and women who defined their age, Whatmore asks “Do we once again live in a world that has suffered an end of enlightenment as strategies formulated after 1945 have gradually failed or been abandoned?”

In conversation with Colin Kidd

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