The Other Enlightenment: Self-Estrangement, Race, and Gender

Challenging widespread misunderstandings, this book shows that central to key enlightenment texts was the practice of estranging taken-for-granted prejudices by adopting the perspective of Others.

The enlightenment?s key progenitors, led by Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot, were more empiricist than rationalist, and more critical than utopian. Moreover, each was an artful exponent of the ?proto-postmodernist? practice of asking Europeans to review what they considered unquestionable through...