[...] post-Enlightenment literature, is his own. In the end, Pinker is merely waving a tattered banner of Enlightenment liberalism at the specter of a diverse range of thinkers he might as well have from clipped from the bibliography of an overheated Dinesh D’Souza diatribe—his featured anti-Progress apostates are Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Zygmunt Bauman, Edmund Husserl, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jean-François Lyotard. His consideration of civil war, in other words, is a matter of politics, not science. And politics, as that Progress-baiting post-philosophe Foucault wrote, “is the continuation of civil war.”