Religious conservatives have tended ever since to view the Enlightenment and its books with suspicion. They are hardly alone. When the upheavals of the French Revolution revealed the perils of unraveling established authority, many wondered if the Enlightenment injunction to ''Dare to know''-to think for oneself-was really such a good thing.

To 19th-century socialists or 20th-century Marxists, on the other hand, the Enlightenment seemed a rather tepid affair. Its vaunted liberal freedoms and individual rights, they argued, were really the false freedoms of the few, merely used to promote the rising bourgeoisie's ascent to power. By contrast, in the aftermath of World War II, critics of a variety of political persuasions came to see the influence of the Enlightenment as all too vast.

In an infamous case for the prosecution, the left-leaning German philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argued that the Enlightenment was responsible for the Holocaust. Incapable of defining absolute moral ends, the Enlightenment's ''instrumental reason'' could define only means. A tool of power, it encouraged human beings to see their fellows as objects to be exploited like the natural resources of the earth. ''Enlightenment behaves towards things,'' Horkheimer and Adorno affirmed, ''as a dictator toward men.'' In a grim pun, they added, ''The fully enlightened earth radiates the triumph of destruction.''

Looking on from a quite different perspective, leading defenders of the West during the Cold War, such as the Oxford political theorist Isaiah Berlin, leveled similar charges regarding the allegedly totalitarian tendencies lurking in the Enlightenment. In their view, however, the end product was not the Holocaust but the Gulag. The Enlightenment's will to intellectual mastery, they charged, and its attempt to link all values-moral, political, and aesthetic-to a uniform rational system was akin to the perverted force that drove communist tyranny, stamping out genuine pluralism and difference in the name of reason.

More recently, a number of postmodern scholars have given their own spin to such interpretations. Frequently drawing on the work of the late French philosopher Michel Foucault, they tend to be suspicious, even contemptuous, of the Enlightenment's claims on behalf of reason. Such critics point out, for example, that so-called ''enlightened'' scientists developed dubious and ultimately insidious ways to classify gender difference and racial inferiority in the 18th century, basing their conclusions on the alleged authority of reason. And they press the uncomfortable fact that good enlightenment figures like Jefferson, Kant, and Hume had what by today's standards are extremely distasteful views on ''inferior'' (e.g. nonwhite) peoples. Far from being a movement of freedom, enlightenment was a tool of hegemony and social control.

enlightenment? terrible discussion- review in itself is so p-m confused, everybody except pre-revolution french feudals seem anti-foundational in outlook. including frankf school. standard = a-level geography..