AGENCY AND ENLIGHTENMENT: Comment on W. Warren Wagar's "Toward a Praxis o f World Integration"

Abstract

However rare, a call to the secular and universal values of the Enlightenment is a special pleasure in an era of fractional identities where the dominant intellectual process is one which poses a "victim Olympics" as the highest form of analysis .That said, Wagar's assertion of the desirability of a "democratic, liberal, and socialist world commonwealth" would, should it actually become someone 's praxis, require an historic agent. Wagar leaves this in a voluntarist mode: people should become self-consciously internationalist and form, as metaphorically and not so metaphoricallylimned in his provocative novel, a "world party."