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A review essay on books by (1) Stephen Eric Bonner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (New York: Columbia U Press, 2004); (2) Ira Katznelson, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia U Press, 2003); (3) Katherine Labio, Origins and the Enlightenment: Aesthetic Epistemology from Descartes to Kant (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U Press, 2004); & (4) David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke U Press, 2004).

The meeting in 1774 between Lobsang Palden Yeshes (1738-1780), the Third Pan­chen Lama, and George Bogle (1746-1781), an agent of the East India Company, was the first encounter between Britain and Tibet. This remarkable moment in world history brought the Scottish Enlightenment into contact with Tibetan Lamaist Bud­dhism. The commentaries written during this episode are used to test the widely held view that Enlightenment thinking led to European imperialism. The evidence from this encounter shows that Enlightenment-era mentalities could be both supportive of and antipathetic to imperialism. The article ends by glancing briefly at Tibetan impe­rialism in an earlier period to suggest that both Buddhism and the Enlightenment were sometimes implicated in the creation of empires but that neither can be viewed as the root cause of imperialism.

Western conceptions of modernity -- &, by extension, "postmodernity" -- typically conflate various historical processes, such as the development of capitalism & the rise of Enlightenment rationalism. Those conflations are also reflected in the identification of "bourgeois" & "capitalist." However, the cultural & intellectual forms of the French Enlightenment are distinct from the ideologies of capitalism. The Enlightenment belongs to a social, political, & economic formation quite different from capitalist society. These differences affected conceptions of progress, science, & the role of intellectuals. Adapted from the source document.

A review essay on books by (1) Knud Haakonssen [Ed], The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U Press, 2006); & (2) Mark Goldie & Robert Wokler [Eds], The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U Press, 2006).