The Enlightement and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture by Louis Dupré (review)

304 BOOK REVIEWS apart from the Church's jealous eyes. Does the argument that the primary political teaching of the Church is a strictly limited conception of politics paradoxically lead to a more aggressively secular politics? Christian life is lived in a tension between eschatology and Incarnation, between the Kingdom as "already" here, and "not yet" fully here. We are called to build up the Kingdom by bringing Christ's life into every aspect of our life, including politics. Yet we are also warned against worshipping the work of our hands because the Kingdom is only fully present eschatologically. My question is whether O'Donovan's emphasis on the "not yet" limits his vision of what politics can do "already" to build up the Kingdom of God. Moreover, could a more Catholic, sacramental conception of politics describe our political life in a richer way? Could a more incarnational emphasis provide a more expansive account of what decent politicians can aspire to do? O'Donovan points out that many dangers attend such questions. But that is all the more reason to engage them thoughtfully. However, even when one disagrees with O'Donovan, the power of his argument leads us to raise the most important questions and motivates us to think through them with the utmost care. Villanova University Villanova, Pennsylvania THOMAS W. SMITH The Enlightement and the Intellectual Foundations ofModern Culture. By LOUIS DUPRE. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv+ 397. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-300-10032-9. This book calls to mind the fine book that was its predecessor, Passage to Modernity (1993), and it shows the same excellences we find in the previous volume. It is a book of admirable erudition which nevertheless is carried very lightly. It is full of insightful detail, and there are fine discussions of a whole host of significant individual thinkers. It continues the work of the first volume in addressing the nature of modernity, though the focus has shifted from early modernity and deals with what Dupre calls the second wave of modernity, namely, that relating to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, in its diverse expressions. He does not mean the book to be an intellectual history but rather an attempt to draw an intellectual portrait of a crucial epoch in European history, with special emphasis on those concerns that have contributed to the shaping of our own world. Dupre is also attentive to the crisis of the Enlightenment which, to a degree, is almost contemporary with Enlightenment itself, especially as inseparable from the rise of Romanticism. While his focus is BOOK REVIEWS 305 first on the Enlightenment, and while he is not uncritical, he is not as critical as some more recent radical attacks on the Enlightenment. The book begins with an outline of a different cosmos that emerges with modern science and materialism, and with a new sense of selfhood emerging in modernity. Dupre sees the age of Enlightenment less as the age of reason than as the age of self-consciousness. People become more reflective about all spheres of life, including the most intimate region of feeling. We see this reflected in the efforts to articulate a new conception of art, in which a more expressive theory gradually took the place of a more mimetic conception. We see it in the conception ofthe moral life and its associated questions, particularlywith respect to freedom, and not least in Kant's critique of his predecessors and his efforts at forging a new synthesis. Dupre dedicates a chapter to each of these considerations: a different cosmos, a new sense of self, the new conception of art, and the moral crisis. The chapter on "Moral Crisis" covers a lot ofground and includes interesting discussions of Spinoza and modern rationalism, the empiricist "deconstruction" of moral rationalism, the stress on moral feeling and moral sense with thinkers such as Rousseau and Shaftesbury, the move towards utilitarianism with thinkers like Hutcheson, Mandeville, and Hume. The chapter culminates with a discussion of Kant's critical theory of morality, though there is an interesting appendix on how some of these moral changes are evident in the drama of the period of the Enlightenment. Dupre offers us also...