Historical News
The thirty-seventh annual meeting of the
American Council of Learned
Societies, held in Washington, D.C.,
January 26-27, featured a panel of
twelve scholars discussing the
"relevance of eighteenth-century ideas in
twentieth-century society."
Thinking Americans have been aroused from
their complacency by the greatly
increased contact with other nations and
cultures, many of which are in sharp
conflict with our national interest,
values, and way of life. The startling
realization of the divergencies of
nations and cultures, and the portent of
active hostilities, has forced Ameri-
cans to review their own heritage
"with a view both to reassuring ourselves
and to assaying the contribution of the
American experience to the rest of
mankind." To this inquiry the panel
and the council devoted themselves.
Professor Walter L. Dorn of the
department of history of Ohio State
University was one of the twelve panel
specialists. Speaking on the question,
"Does the United States Still Need
the Eighteenth Century?" Professor
Dorn said: "An abject and
uncritical prostration before the thinkers of the
Enlightenment is just as mistaken as an
attempt to throw their ideas bag
and baggage into the dustbin. . . . What
they meant by rationalism was a
severely empirical inquiry into the
facts of observation and experience. The
defense, consolidation, and
popularization of this analytical and empirical
procedure has rightly been called the
core of the Enlightment. . . . That this
basic procedure which they and their
successors applied to the entire area
of human experience, religion, morality,
and society, still retains its essential
validity and still constitutes a source
of confidence that mankind is master of
its destiny is the position taken here.
"The great values of the Age of
Reason, the belief in the oneness of
humanity, the rights of man, its respect
for the human personality, its
freedom and equality which constitute
the matrix of our democracy, are
surely axiomatic in our own day. We have
gained some historical, psy-
chological, and sociological insight
since the Age of Reason, and we may
no longer share its robust faith in the
progress of reason in history--
though surely we have not abandoned it.
We have not renounced its ideals
or its methods which demand a rational
empirical study of experience that
will meet the most rigorous standards of
intelligence. Conceived in this