The Post-Enlightenment Blunder, and the Failure to Develop Academic Inquiry so as to Become Rationally Devoted to Helping Humanity Create a Civilized World

The philosophes of the eighteenth century French Enlightenment made a profound discovery. We can learn from scientific progress how to make social progress towards an enlightened world. But, in developing this idea, the philosophes blundered. They should have, first, generalized the progress-achieving methods of science, and then got the resulting methods into social life so that social progress might be made towards an enlightened world with some of the success achieved by science in making progress in knowledge. This would have involved developing social inquiry as social methodology, or social philosophy. But the philosophes and their successors proceeded quite differently. They applied the progress-achieving methods of science, not directly to social life, but to improving knowledge about social life—to developing social inquiry as social science. That is the post-Enlightenment blunder. Unacknowledged and uncorrected, it led universities in the twentieth century to devote themselves to the pursuit of knowledge. Correct the blunder, and it becomes apparent we need a revolution in universities so that their basic task becomes to seek and promote wisdom, and humanity comes to have what it so urgently needs, institutions of learning rationally devoted to helping us learn how to make progress towards a better world.