Stanford Humanities Center
Dan Edelstein is an assistant professor of French at Stanford. His book, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century France, 1699-1794, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.
SHC Project
"The Genesis of Enlightenment"
His current project is a critical reassessment of Horkheimer and Adorno's claims about the Enlightenment, mythology, and twentieth-century ideologies. This project reassess the controversial relationship between Enlightenment thought, modern mythology, and totalitarian ideologies, famously suggested by Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. While disputing their fundamental claims, I suggest that the philosophes’ desire to “naturalize” their arguments often resulted in the production of counter-mythologies, some of which persisted into the twentieth century.
