The Logic of Enlightenment - Article Example

In the past two centuries, the logic of Enlightenment previously materialized into colonial rule and remains in the contemporary post-Cold War world. Notwithstanding this prevalence, the practical implications of this worldview have significantly changed since the nineteenth century.
With the belief in Enlightenment ideals, people started to deal with the need for improvement in anything they do and anywhere they go. In detail, ‘spirit of the age’ included “the primacy of reason/rationalism, a belief in empiricism, the concept of universal science and reason, the idea of progress, the championing of new freedoms, the ethic of secularism and the notion of all human beings as essentially the same” (Power 154). Due to this, colonialism as a phenomenon was an outcome of Enlightenment logic, because European empires went to other lands to ‘improve’ people living there (Craggs 34). Even though this period ended, we still feel the presence of its ideals.
As for the Cold War discourse that started as an aftermath of World War II, many assumptions and policies simply reflected the colonial past. Precisely, they were “metropolitan concern to maintain and modernize…, and contact with local people, knowledge, and conditions” (Craggs 39). However, the end of colonialism in the post-World War II era was a significant driver for change that we see in contemporary times. For instance, new universities based on multi- and inter-disciplinary studies appeared only in the twentieth century. They raised numerous questions, including the definition of the development term itself (Porter 137). As Potter thinks of this new approach, it contributed to the development of development studies as the discipline that investigates “the evolution of human geography” (50). As a field of analysis for development theories, the concept ‘Third World’ entered the stage. In fact, it made evident that people have started to imagine the new geography in the last six decades. It happened because of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. As Dodds explains, the Third World is a battlefield for the developed countries in terms of ideological and economic influence (43). However, the collapse of the Soviet Union ended this era.
Since the 1990s, postcolonialism as the new philosophy questions all the previous meta-narratives, including the concept of ‘development’ (Potter 52). Even though both Cold War rivals emphasized the need for development in the Third World, the poverty of the South and the wealth of the North maintain the division in the contemporary world. In other words, “both development theories were losing out in terms of their explanatory power” (Schuurman 55). Read More