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In Defence of the Enlightenment

7th Dec 2009; 18:30

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Internationally renowned thinker Tzvetan Todorov visits the RSA to defend the role of the Enlightenment as the philosophical cornerstone of the modern world, and to argue that the wisdom of the Enlightenment thinkers is as relevant and necessary today as it was in the eighteenth century.

Although our liberal democracies are the offspring of the Enlightenment, they also illustrate the ways in which its ideas have been distorted and perverted. People living in democracies today can be baffled by phenomena which resist easy judgement: globalisation and media omnipotence, state-sponsored torture and disinformation, moralism and the right of intervention, the dominance of economics, and the triumph of technology.

Todorov will argue that we cannot learn lessons from the past unless we know how to relate them to the present, and will remind us where to find, and how to use, the best tools mankind has ever developed for understanding and improving an open and just society.

Suggested hashtag for Twitter users: #rsatodorov