Due to the emphasis the modern Enlightenment places on the popular dispensation of reason and the rational triumph over superstition, its primary advocates always afforded a central place to the university. Modernity’s principles of science and politics, in particular its newly discovered science of politics, required enlisting the university as a weapon against a calcified tradition that was ripe for final and decisive replacement. The victory of human reason could only become complete when the traditional university, the bearer of a now-obsolete intellectual heritage, was transformed into an agent of philosophical liberation. Given the university’s indispensability to the success of … Continue reading The Technocratic American University