The twenty-first century has been hard on the Enlightenment. Lauded as a foundational moment in the story of human progress—the font from which all civilized life supposedly sprang—its position and its claim for the triumphant power of human reason no longer seem so secure. The Enlightenment’s most prominent political offspring, communism and liberalism, lay either apparently dead or seemingly in terminal decline, while its technological children, the fruits of the fossil-fuel driven industrial