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Mapping anti-Enlightenment movements

Mapping anti-Enlightenment movements

This mapping attempts to organize in a coherent manner the major ideological currents which oppose modernity on its two principles, autonomy (a common world subject to criticism) and sovereignty (a democratic society).

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Mapping anti-Enlightenment movements

From progressivism to obscurantism

Mapping originally published on the Lieux Communs website in June 2022 and frequently updated since.

This mapping attempts to organize in a coherent manner the major ideological currents which oppose modernity on its two principles, autonomy (a common world subject to criticism) and sovereignty (a democratic society).

It has two objectives:

To list, without claiming to be exhaustive, all the personalities, groups and institutions working towards the end of the autonomy project as it was carried by modernity, the Enlightenment, the West as the seed of individual and collective emancipation.
They are distributed around a dozen large poles in concentric circles representing a set of ideological domains, political causes and fields of action, which range from indigenism to neo-feminism, from Islamo-leftism to decolonial ecology or from borderlessness to anti-cops, etc. When you click on one of these poles, their real name appears as well as a summary definition, grouping together "What they claim to do", "What they actually do", "Their ideological methods", and "Real impact". These sets being porous and their actors shifting, this classification offers an effective identification that takes into account the continuum that these largely interconnected environments constitute.

Organize this political-ideological magma according to a reading grid on two axes. The first, vertical, opposes at the top the progressives or rather the deconstructionists, to the obscurantists, here the fundamentalists placed at the bottom; and the second opposes the communitarians or tribalists, on the left, to the imperialists, here at the bottom.
Deconstructionists seek to ruin the idea of ​​common rules and benchmarks by perverting the principle of reasoned discussion; they are heirs of the left: postmoderns who work for anomie. They prepare the ground for fundamentalists who want to impose a system of closed and pseudo-traditional values ​​that escape critical examination. They lock themselves in their cultural determinisms: they are the premoderns who work for heteronomy. Tribalists claim their particularities against the very principle of society by assigning the individual a specific place in his supposed community. Refusing to form a society, they only act for the interests of their claimed clan. On the contrary, imperialists want to organize the whole of society according to a single principle, an empire without limits, reducing the community to a cohabitation of competing communities. Fighting against all popular sovereignty, they campaign for world domination.

The full presentation text, which also sets out its theoretical foundations, is “Wokism and obscurantism: articulations and complementarities”; it is available here.

The ideological "poles" (colored circles) and axes (black lines at the top and bottom) are clickable areas, meaning they open onto descriptive entries, as well as information on certain organizations and individuals, the number of which grows with updates, approximately every two years. In general, the map and entries will be updated and expanded over time. Please feel free to contact us (lieuxcommuns@protonmail.com ) to help keep it up to date and to send us your suggestions.

Click on the image below

(activate explanatory notes by clicking on the ideological poles and axes, enlarge using ctrl+/-)

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