New in paperback. With an afterword by the author. Hardcover was published in 2015. Examining Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Horkheimer, Adorno, Foucault, and Pope Benedict XVI, the author shows how transhistorical, philosophical interpretations of the Enlightenment have diverged from ones grounded in careful historical reconstructions of the ideas, practices, and institutions of eighteenth-century Europe.