The Enlightenment was an era in which philosophers and other scholars constructed a new understanding of the role played in human affairs by reason, by freedom, and by individualism. Challenges to such view emerged in the Romantic, Post-Romantic and subsequent periods of man's historical development. This essay will consider challenges to Enlightenment ideas and values as reflected in a set of diverse works, some from fiction and some from philosophy and political science. The specific challenges addressed with be the Romanic construction of man as bound inextricably to Nature and influenced as much by the natural world as his own reason and the growing recognition of the failure of society to provide for meaningful advancement for the vast majority of humans, who lacked essential freedom and individual autonomy as a consequence of industrial capitalism.
One must consider, in the context of the failure of post-Enlightenment society to guarantee or provide support for individual freedom and autonomy, the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx and Engels (1), in The Communist Manifesto, wrote that:
"The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat."
In their view, therefore, the ideals of Enlightenment thought regarding the role to be played by reason in structuring new, freer and egalitarian societies were never fully realized.
In fact, as Marx and Engels (2) put it:
"Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was ac...