A vital defense of free enquiry as a democratic force against state and corporation.

Today's media commentators and politicians constantly enlist the language and prestige of the historical Enlightenment to defend western science and rationality from its irrational enemies—Evangelicals, post-modernists, and Islamists, are on the march, they say. Yet, in exploring how the Enlightenment continues to operate as a powerful guiding principle in Western politics, The Threat to Reason reveals how the truly pressing threats to free inquiry reside within the allegedly enlightened institutions of state and corporation. In their hands, the potential of Enlightenment ideas is implicated in the maintenance and furthering of neoliberal market values, while the permanent war envisaged by American state planners transforms the Enlightenment into a resource for establishing information dominance. By default science becomes what corporations want, and progress becomes what the US military can impose on the world. In recovering the concept of Enlightenment from its self-appointed defenders, The Threat to Reason demonstrates its crucial importance to a truly democratic politics, rather than a political performance in which we remain merely spectators.