The New Enlightenment: On Steven Pinker & Beyond

The Case for Scientific Realism in Morals, Economics and Politics.

Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now establishes that great progress has been made on the aims of the European Enlightenment. However, the minds of many economists, moralists and political thinkers in the West are still set firmly in the eighteenth century. Progress has been due mainly to the physical scientific revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the industrial revolutions they generated. A new enlightenment is needed to overcome this poverty of social theory, and bring our economists and political theorists up to date in the socially connected, commercially integrated and existentially threatened world of the 21st century.

Brian Ellis is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at La Trobe University and a lifetime student of the philosophy of science.