SubStance

SubStance 32.3 (2003) 185-189

Moscovici, Claudia. Double Dialectics: Between Universalism and Relativism in Enlightenment and Postmodern Thought. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Pp. 169.

"The Enlightenment" and "Enlightenment thought" are weighty terms. In the past twenty years or so, they have taken on connotations nearly diametrically opposed to those they enjoyed in previous decades. For scholars such as Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay, the Enlightenment was a moral highpoint in the development of critical reason, seen as an arm that could be used to combat superstition of all stripes. For Cassirer, Gay, and a generation of literary critics and historians influenced by their work, the Enlightenment represented an antidote to the moral and political debacle of twentieth-century experience. If, however, one considers the pursuit of truth to be a mask for the exercise of power, or if specific interests, rather than universal ones, are found to be the real motivation behind the search for knowledge, then "the Enlightenment" risks becoming another word for—and justification of—exploitation. In the early 1980s, citing Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard among others, literary critics began to use "the Enlightenment" as a synonym for instrumental reason. In opposition to the views of Cassirer and Gay, many claimed that the humanism subtending Enlightenment thought, based as it was on narrow European norms, was in effect a form of exclusionary, even racist discourse. Instead of promoting freedom and tolerance, the Enlightenment actually worked against its own principles.

This critical landscape will be no surprise for readers of SubStance. Characterizations of Enlightenment thought as representing unqualified intellectual and political freedom have seemed passé and uncritical for quite some time. In another critical turn, though, a number of scholars have come to regard the claim that the Enlightenment represents nothing more than a philosophical justification for instrumental reason, as hasty and over-reaching. Recent publications, such as Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History, ed. Daniel Gordon (New York and London: Routledge, 2001) and What's Left of Enlightenment?: A Postmodern Question, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), have contributed to a re-evaluation of the period and its legacy. Claudia Moscovici's new book is a welcome contribution to this reassessment.

Engaging the works of major writers and critics (Lyotard, Saïd, Fanon, Kant, Diderot, d'Alembert, and Chateaubriand), Double Dialectics seeks to determine the relevance of eighteenth-century texts to current theory and criticism. [End Page 185] Moscovici states quite candidly her aim to bring the questions raised by postmodern objections to the Enlightenment in line with the "assumptions that enable most of us to live from day to day" (10). Double Dialectics does not suggest that our epistemological problems would be solved somehow by turning back the clock on theory; rather her claim is that postmodernism can be made to confront its own limitations through its encounter with Enlightenment thought (14). In clear and refreshingly unassuming prose, Moscovici takes seriously but also interrogates commonsensical reactions to the issues at hand, recognizing that "common sense itself is a very slippery concept that always depends in part upon a community that shares, debates and negotiates cultural assumptions" (3). (Unfortunately, common sense often failed when it came to the redaction of chapter endnotes, as for example when we read about Edward Saïd's Orientalism in the text and are then referred to a note that states merely, "see Edward Saïd's Orientalism," without page numbers and without further commentary, qualification, or expansion of any kind)

The basic argument of Double Dialectics is that the opposition between universalism and relativism is generally understood within the framework of a "single dialectical" process, resulting in fossilized binary hierarchies and irresolvable oppositions (3). The universalist creates unity by eliminating differences, whereas the relativist forces heterogeneity out of sameness. Our view of the Enlightenment has been informed by this binary logic. By invoking a double dialectical process, in which opposing terms negate but at the same time incorporate elements of each other, Moscovici...