“Like any good philosopher, Joseph Heath is on a mission to discover the sources of our rational selves, and to restore reason over passion in our public lives. Just in time, too, for the ascent of noisy, angry, ‘common sense’ politics in the United States and elsewhere today threatens the fundamental premise of liberal democracy—that people working together in a spirit of compromise and trust can actually achieve progressive social change.
ENLIGHTENMENT 2.0 is thus both a diagnostic tool and a program for recovery from the politics of truthiness and shameless sloganeering. Heath is a marvelous writer—witty, incisive, counterintuitive —just the sort of bold thinker liberals need if they are going to dust off the tenets of Western civilization and get themselves back in the game.”
—ROBERT WRIGHT, author of Our Man in Tehran: Ken Taylor, the CIA and the Iran Hostage Crisis
“Alarmed by the descent of politics into a fact-free zone populated by spin doctors and half-wit demagogues, Heath sets out to map the rise of unreason in the West by exploring the contested boundary regions between Enlightenment-era philosophy and modern evolutionary psychology. He argues convincingly that political discourse and consumer marketing that cynically exploit innate, irrational prejudices are doing more than just debasing democracy—they are fatally undermining the fragile social and linguistic underpinnings on which reason itself relies for much of its power to persuade, and to uncover truths not available to intuition and emotion.
ENLIGHTENMENT 2.0 is a project not just to redeem politics, but civilization.”
—WADE ROWLAND, author of Greed, Inc.: Why Corporations Rule Our World and How We Let It Happen