Anthony Pagden: Why the Enlightenment Still Matters

ORIGINALLY RELEASED 15 FEBRUARY 2024 · 1 HR 11 MIN · SEASON 1, EPISODE 18

Professor Anthony Pagden joins Samuel Woodall to ask what the Enlightenment was, why it still matters and how its ambitions continue to shape modern political life.

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Episode summary

The Enlightenment is often reduced either to a triumphant story of reason and progress or to a catalogue of modernity’s failures. Anthony Pagden places it within the religious, political and philosophical conflicts from which it emerged. The conversation ranges from Montaigne and Descartes to the challenge Enlightenment thinkers posed to inherited authority.

Pagden also considers the Enlightenment as a continuing political inheritance. Reason, social bonds, liberal democracy, cosmopolitanism and international institutions appear not as settled achievements, but as contested projects whose histories help explain both their power and their limits.

Questions explored

• How should the Enlightenment be defined?
• What changed when reason challenged inherited religious authority?
• How did Enlightenment thinkers imagine social and political bonds?
• Why do cosmopolitanism and international institutions remain contested inheritances?

Participants

• Samuel Woodall: Host of Beyond the Text, intellectual historian and PhD candidate at the University of Buckingham.
• Anthony Pagden: Professor of History and Political Science at UCLA whose work examines empire, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, internationalism and the intellectual history of Europe.

Sources and further reading

• Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Anthony Pagden, The Pursuit of Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

Transcript and original show notes

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