The first modern critical discourse arose during the Enlightenment. In fact, one
might say that the defining characteristic of Enlightenment thought was a new,
self-consciously critical attitude toward prevailing cultural practices and institu-
tions. Although the broadly liberal humanist basis for the Enlightenment's cul-
tural criticism has itself been attacked by virtually every subsequent critical dis-
course, we should not overlook its crucial role in initiating a project that has
continued into our own time.

As we will see, the critical discourse that commenced in the Enlightenment in-
volved several different strands. Still, the cultural critics of the Enlightenment all
shared a number of important convictions; these permit us to refer to their collec-
tive orientation, despite their other differences, as that of liberal humanism. The
first and most pervasive characteristic was a common opposition to any claim to
truth or knowledge based solely on authority. At the beginning of the modern era,
there were three major sources of authority of particular concern to Enlighten-
ment thinkers: the church, the state, and Greco-Roman antiquity.

During the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic church was the most important,
pervasive, and powerful cultural institution. Although the universality of its influ-
ence had been seriously challenged in the early sixteenth century during the Ref-
ormation, the subsequent fragmentation of the Catholic church into various
competing religious groups often resulted in an overall intensification rather than
a waning of the influence of religious beliefs, practices, and institutions on cul-
ture. The bigotry, intolerance, and violence frequently resulting from adherence
to opposed religious creeds provoked critical responses from early Enlightenment
thinkers, who increasingly came to regard the institutionalized religions' demands
of faith on the part of their followers as diametrically opposed to reason, to the
human being's natural ability to adjudicate claims to truth for itself.

The Reformation was closely connected with the historical emergence of the
modern nation-state, a geographical area with fixed boundaries under a single,
centralized political authority. In many places in Europe, the nation-state first took
the form of absolute monarchy, based on a theory of the divine right of kings, itself
supported by the authority of religious doctrine. Again, while their concrete politi-

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