Ruth Scurr: belief

Transcript context

…Was Hayek correct that the French Enlightenment theorists were too rationalistic, assigned too strong a power to human reason, and thus inevitably were led down a kind of slippery slope where their liberty was self-undercutting — and that the British empiricist tradition is far superior? Agree or disagree? I disagree with that, actually. I don’t think you can be too rational. In that regard, I’m a real signed-up Enlightenment person. You have to be very careful about thinking — I recognize, of course, there are limits to reason and what it can achieve. I think Edmund Burke was exactly right about that: a profound political thinker Ultimately, I think we have to be very careful about accepting, in the first instance, that there are limits to what reason can achieve. We’ve got to — that’s where I disagree with Burke. I have more sympathy for the revolutionaries and what they were trying to do than he did. Are the origins of today’s woke and cancel culture found in the French Revolution?…

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