Recent rhetoric about “The Enlightenment” is bizarre. A major strand of the Enlightment was about the Perfectibility of Man through Reason. The revolutionary reconstruction of society. The French Revolution is a child of the E & the Bolshevik Revolution one of its grandchildren.
It’s as if the fans of the Counter-Enlightenment forgot themselves and have appropriated the Enlightenment.
“The Enlightenment” cannot be selectively and whiggishly reduced to liberalism and natural science. The Enlightenment is also synonymous with scientism and rationalist social engineering.
This heroes' genealogy making the rounds of Twitter is what I'm talking about: "The Enlightenment" without Diderot or d’Alembert (editors of the Encyclopédie), Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Condorcet, d’Holbach, Turgot, Quesnay (other famous contributors). 
The French part (which was most of it) & the radical Enlightenment have been erased out of that picture for presentist reasons. Conservative historian G Himmelfarb at least had the sense to invent (distinguish) 3 different Enlightenments so she could say the French one was 'bad' 
BTW I'm NOT recommending Himmelfarb. Only noting she saw the E. as problematic (for her), not as the source of all that is good & great. Likewise, without endorsing I note, Hayek also saw much of the E. as negative & avoided today’s bizarre pop celebration of “The Enlightenment” 
Commenters keep saying the E. must be divided into "Voltaire v Rousseau" or "moderate v radical" etc. & they're missing the point. The wrong but very popular idea of the E today is that it was mostly a British empiricist affair & the French rationalists had nothing to do with it!
Only 2 ppl have guessed who I'm subtweeting in this thread, but (given some of the comments) I note it is *not* Mokyr. Mokyr explicitly investigates the connection btw 'high' science & the non-scientific tinkerers of the 18th c. in what he calls the "Industrial Enlightenment".
As @jtlevy has mentioned, this "Pop Enlightenment" that I've been describing contrasts strongly with Jonathan Israel ( global.oup.com/academic/searc…) who now dominates the historiography of the Enlightenment & he attributes to the “Radical Enlightenment” most modern ‘basic values’: 
Summary: There now exists a sanitised, narrowed-down, & anti-historical “Pop Enlightenment" which reduces the Enlightenment to liberalism and empiricism, whilst erasing other dimensions of the Enlightenment which have been criticised by conservatives, liberals & the left alike.
PS — Only a handful of people seemed to realise that I have been talking about the “Pop Enlightenment” of Pinker or his acolyte-followers (I’m not sure which yet)
PS #2: I have not endorsed any particular interpretation of the Enlightenment or its alleged consequences or descendants. I simply referenced other interpretations to show that the "Pop Enlightenment" has an extremely narrow set of characters.
No less an intellectual historian than Isaiah Berlin did the complete opposite of the "Pop Enlightenment" -- he reduced it to continental utopian rationalism & scientism & a precursor of totalitarianism.
This is also very true, though I deliberately tried to compare the “Pop Enlightenment” with centre-right interpretations
Just one more addition: this thread does NOT dispute that the world has continuously been getting better, at least in a long run perspective. I am simply making a historiographic point.
I endorse this comment! Although Edmund Burke has been traditionally considered a figure of the Counter-Enlightenment, the “Pop Enlightenment” is noticeably Burkean in turning the continental rationalists into desaparecidos
Religion note: The "Pop Enlightenment" tends to be radically secular & atheistic; and tends to downplay, or rationalise away, the religiosity of the figures of the Enlightenment it picks and chooses to champion.
Isaac Newton, one of the greater gods of the Pop Enlightenment, had some of the most bizarre mystical beliefs possible ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_New… ) -- totally contrary to the radically anti-superstition stance of the Pop Enlightenment.
Keynes, who bought the manuscripts of Newton's occult works, called him, "not the first of the Age of Reason [but] the Last of the Magicians". A great terse summary of the anti-historicity of the Pop Enlightenment
A mostly blithering review of Pinker's new book. Pinker benefits from an advantage first discovered in the Enlightenment, appropriately enough. Voltaire: 'I always made one prayer to God: "O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!" God granted it.' the-tls.co.uk/articles/publi…
BLITHERING: "what happens if many of the goods being measured – electric lighting, cars, televisions, computers – get cheaper and cheaper as time goes on, so that a rising standard of living is concealed by falling prices?"
The weakest part of the review is actually what the reviewer says is the weakest part of the book. It's amazingly flaccid. And disappointing because while you can't really dispute the improvement in human life since ~1800, surely there's much to bicker about over its causes?! 
Just finished ch 20 (3 more to go) of ¡Enlightenment Now! As several have already noted, ¡EN! is mostly *not* about the Enlightenment, so I have made a mistake: there is much more Enlightenment in the Wikipedia entry for the E than in ¡Enlightenment Now! :-)
80% of ¡Enlightenment Now! is an extended love poem to Max Roser, i.e., it is heavy on the descriptive statistics of The Progress or The Great Improvement. But those are already very familiar (but I grant that there is still a readership unfamiliar with Max Roser).
But like Better Angels, ¡Enlightenment Now! (so far) is casual on the causes of the Great Improvement. Peter Turchin criticised BA for not having a good theory. I thought the Flynn Effect was a pretty good hypothesis, but it's true Pinker's cultural explanation is rather ad hoc
On the subject of inequality, I agree with Pinker's (implicit) resurrection of the Kuznets Curve, which has been dimissed too much because the shape has not been stable but I've always thought it captures a greath truth about historical industrialisation .... 
i.e., richer countries redistribute more. I think Scheidel understates this too. The Left also often regard the politics of redistribution as exogenous & completely contingent when (as Kuznets himself speculated) more wealth may induce more redistributive politics (up to a point)
OTOH Pinker comes close to "Disarticulation Goes North" of @brankomilan (glineq.blogspot.nl/2015/10/disart…) using global & historical inequality trends + a cosmopolitan welfare function to downplay concerns re inequality in rich countries; even briefly suggests more pro-growth policies :-)
Although I think it's just that Pinker wants to argue the rise in inequality in the rich countries does not contradict the narrative of The Progress and the Great Improvement; even if the Left often fear that narrative gets used to defeat concerns about inequality
Pinker's micro-Lomborg chapter on the environment is very bland. Has the usual true but well-worn stuff about ecological scares of the past; long run trend for dematerialisation & decarbonisation; case for optimism ≠ a case for policy quiescence; lots of green technology etc.
BIG LACUNA: Pinker does not apply his skills to address the Degrowth movement where he surely agrees w @brankomilan! Are current growth rates consistent w his optimism? Popular critiques of long-run optimism argue past growth borrows from "the bank of future enviro catastrophe"
I've finished Pinker's book & the connection btw "Enlightened values" & the Great Improvement is mostly bland, almost vapid statements. But unconvincing is the argument there may be real threats to "Enlightenment values" today. This is probably right :-)
OK I am bored with Pinkersprach now (also because another new book has induced The Great Agitation in my mind) but having been a fan of The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, and (for all its faults) Better Angles, this is the most boring Pinker book I've read.
P.S. -- I am simply representing the degrowther arguments in this tweet in order to express regret Pinker did not address them. Anyone who attributes to me the ideas in this tweet will be blocked :-)
I ¡strongly! endorse point #7 in @tylercowen's assessment of Pinker's book (marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…); the point about "irreducible irrationality" was something I was groping toward last week but did not quite manage to express as well. 
Similar thoughts on "irreducible irrationality" above & below this tweet
Positivism & empiricism are not natural behaviours. All kinds of biases are powerful. Yet Pinker, the New Atheists, & what I call "The Pinkerians" seem terribly utopian about turning people into Empiricists. Hence the hype about supposed threats to "Enlightenment values"
And I tend to think the turn to "Enlightenment ideas and values", especially if it is depicted as something sudden & abrupt in the 17th-18th centuries, is rather overstated as the cause of The Progress or The Great Enrichment or The Great Improvement in the last 200 years.
IMO it is completely overstated that people have historically become less 'irrational' (by Pinker's empiricist definition). Most people simply defer to Science & Technology because they are perceived to deliver tangible, palpable results. Not the case with social sciences.
In short: I don't think human beings have become more 'empiricist' in the past 500 years, perhaps apart from an extremely small section of the elite. I think most people have switched *one* of their sources of blind and unquestioned authority to Science and Technology.
Another way to put it: The Pop Enlightenment Rage against Mass Irrationality is just the natural scientists' (or the sciencey people's) counterpart to the Technocratic Lamentation against the Irrational Voter
I've received TOO MANY comments to respond, but too many people have their own pet Enlightenments to flog, and their own pet peeves with other people's Enlightenments. I don't really care about those things.
I'm comfortable with the following statements:
(a) There is no "The Enlightenment".
(b) The contribution of ideas & values ascribed to the "Pop Enlightenment" toward the progress of the last 200 years is overstated.
(c) Threats to "Enlightenment values" are grossly exaggerated
(a) There is no "The Enlightenment".
(b) The contribution of ideas & values ascribed to the "Pop Enlightenment" toward the progress of the last 200 years is overstated.
(c) Threats to "Enlightenment values" are grossly exaggerated
This:
