Editing Age of Enlightenment (section)

===Modern study===
In their 1947 book ''[[Dialectic of Enlightenment]],'' [[Frankfurt School]] philosophers [[Max Horkheimer]] and [[Theodor W. Adorno]], both wartime exiles from Nazi Germany, critiqued the supposed rational basis of the modern world:

{{blockquote|Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant.<ref name="Zuidervaart p185">{{cite book |last1=Zuidervaart |first1=Lambert |title=Social Philosophy after Adorno |date=2007 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-1-139-46453-6 |page=185 |doi=10.1017/CBO9780511618970.009 |chapter=Appendix: Adorno's Social Philosophy}}</ref>}}

Extending Horkheimer and Adorno's argument, intellectual historian [[Jason Josephson Storm]] argues that any idea of the Age of Enlightenment as a clearly defined period that is separate from the earlier [[Renaissance]] and later [[Romanticism]] or [[Counter-Enlightenment]] constitutes a myth. Storm points out that there are vastly different and mutually contradictory periodizations of the Enlightenment depending on nation, field of study, and school of thought; that the term and category of "Enlightenment" referring to the Scientific Revolution was actually applied after the fact; that the Enlightenment did not see an increase in [[disenchantment]] or the dominance of the [[mechanism (philosophy)|mechanistic worldview]]; and that a blur in the early modern ideas of the [[humanities]] and natural sciences makes it hard to circumscribe a Scientific Revolution.<ref>{{cite book |last=Josephson-Storm |first=Jason |title=The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences |location=Chicago |publisher=University of Chicago Press |year=2017 |pages=58–61 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xZ5yDgAAQBAJ |isbn=978-0-226-40336-6}}</ref> Storm defends his categorization of the Enlightenment as "myth" by noting the regulative role ideas of a period of Enlightenment and disenchantment play in modern Western culture, such that belief in magic, spiritualism, and even religion appears somewhat taboo in intellectual strata.<ref>{{cite book |last=Josephson-Storm |first=Jason |title=The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences |location=Chicago |publisher=University of Chicago Press |year=2017 |pages=61–62 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xZ5yDgAAQBAJ |isbn=978-0-226-40336-6}}</ref>

In the 1970s, study of the Enlightenment expanded to include the ways Enlightenment ideas spread to European colonies and how they interacted with indigenous cultures and how the Enlightenment took place in formerly unstudied areas such as Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Poland, Hungary, and Russia.<ref>Outram, 6. See also, A. Owen Alridge (ed.), ''The Ibero-American Enlightenment'' (1971)., Franco Venturi, ''The End of the Old Regime in Europe 1768–1776: The First Crisis.''</ref> Intellectuals such as [[Robert Darnton]] and [[Jürgen Habermas]] have focused on the social conditions of the Enlightenment. Habermas described the creation of the "bourgeois public sphere" in 18th-century Europe, containing the new venues and modes of communication allowing for rational exchange. Habermas said that the public sphere was bourgeois, egalitarian, rational, and independent from the state, making it the ideal venue for intellectuals to critically examine contemporary politics and society, away from the interference of established authority. While the public sphere is generally an integral component of the social study of the Enlightenment, other historians{{efn|e.g. Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, Brian Cowan, Donna T. Andrew.}} have questioned whether the public sphere had these characteristics.