Susan Neiman.
Moral Clarity: a guide for grown-up idealists.
Bodley Head. 2009
Neiman argues that critics and defenders of the Enlightenment have colluded in making a caricature of what was a richly various set of projects; that secular misreadings of religion comfort their authors at the expense of a mature understanding; and that only a renewed attentiveness to the claims of justice can fashion a response to the enormities of our times.
Through her equal commitment to the claims of reason and the facts of the world, her shrewd and generous readings of the Western canon, and above all through her conviction that politics is a moral endeavour, Neiman issues an irresistible invitation to make the world more just. At once reasonable and passionate, ambitious for progress, and alive to risks that must accompany progress, Moral Clarity both rediscovers the idealism of the Enlightenment and enacts its virtues.