An illustration of how intellectuals think

FOLLOWING, is an EXAMPLE of intellectual reasoning, an instance where mentation is assumed to be sufficient to explain the world we inhabit.
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Quote, from an interview with Marcel Gauchet:
You claim that the period that is most analogous to our own in the history of modern democracy is what you describe as the “crisis of liberalism” between 1880 and 1914. What do you see as the resemblance?

There is a parallel between the two periods, but at the same time an opposition that makes the parallel all the more significant. This first crisis was one of frustration with democracy’s promises. It came at a moment when universal suffrage had become absolute law, when some even began to regard it as the very definition of democracy. In other words, it was a time where the masses entered into politics. But at this moment, there was a radical disjunction between the reality of society—i.e., class divisions, capitalist antagonisms, etc.—and the “mendacious” liberal parliamentary regime, judged as such for its inability to resolve the social question. This powerlessness of democracy to fulfill the promise of sovereignty, awakened by the institution of universal sufferage, led people on both the far left and the far right to seek solutions to the question of the good regime outside of parliamentary democracy. Hence the radical contestations of “bourgeois” democracy that led to the rise of totalitarian movements in the aftermath of the First World War.....

End quote.

The sufficiency of man's reasoning powers is an unstated but basic aspect of modernity. Missing above is a sense of the import of Confucius when he says Knowing what you know, and remembering what you do not know, is real wisdom.

Now, actually it is a great article, full of ideas I had not been aware of, and I heartily recommend following the link above.