In Enlightenment Aberrations, David W. Bates shows that error was a
complex, important, and by no means entirely negative concept in
Enlightenment thought, one that had a decisive influence in
revolutionary debates on political identity and national history.
What can it mean to write a history of error? In Bates's view all
philosophy, insofar as its project is the search for truth, begins
in error. If truth is posited as a goal to be attained, not as a
given of some kind, then error assumes a central role in the quest
for truth. Going beyond both liberal celebrations and postmodern
critiques of Enlightenment reason, Bates reveals just how crucial
the problematic relation between human "wandering" and the mystery
of truth was in eighteenth-century thought.
The author draws on a wide range of Enlightenment thinkers,
including Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Jean d'Alembert,
Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Charles Bonnet, showing how they
wrestled with the "risk and promise" of error. He then demonstrates
how the concept of error and its dialectical relationship to truth
played out in the political culture of the French Revolution,
particularly in the Terror. In the final chapters, Bates looks at
the post-revolutionary transformations of the Enlightenment
discourse of error and its subsequent history in modern European
thought.
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