The American Declaration of Independence, a model of Enlightenment thinking, both appropriated Britain's "13 colonies", but also inspired the empire "on which the sun never sets".
In the aftermath, I prefer to focus on the genius part of it, especially since brilliance is an endangered species in this era in which a majority of at least one major political party seeks to kill the Enlightenment ideas on which this nation was founded.
These founding citizens could not fulfill the promise of the Enlightenment ideals on which they founded a nation.
While she is here, she is writing a major survey of the recent literature on the Scottish Enlightenment, of which Adam Smith, along with his good friend David Hume, was an important part.
The idea of a breaking point stems from the 18th and19th century pseudo-scientific study of war, heavily influenced by the Age of Enlightenment, of which Carl von Clausewitz's work On War is the most prominent example.
The show they are rehearsing is a collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland, Anything That Gives Off Light, which aims to draw a direct line from the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment to the ones on which America was founded.
The goal of Mimamsa is to provide enlightenment on dharma, which in this school is understood as the set of ritual obligations and prerogatives that, if properly performed, maintains the harmony of the world and furthers the personal goals of the performer.
They've picked the Enlightenment as a place on which to stand their ground and draw a grotesque caricature of the threat they face: imminent mob rule by a bunch of hand-chopping, adultress-stoning superstitious fanatics.
Where we might hope for enlightenment about the issues on which we will vote, we find gossip about the habits and style of political leaders, an obsession with statistically meaningless shifts in opinion polls and empty speculation about outcomes.
Yet even as these changes were occurring, the Scottish Highlands and Hebridean Islands were attracting increased attention as a region where witness experience in sublime and communal forms had managed to trump enlightened progress and the probabilistic, abstract, and mediated mentality on which the Enlightenment was predicated.
