Margaret Jacob has argued that in order to understand the origins of “our politics and of democratic discourse” we should look back to the lodges of the eighteenth-century Freemasons: “Rather than imagining the Enlightenment as represented by the politics of Voltaire, or Gibbon, or even Rousseau, or worse as being incapable of politics, we might just as fruitfully look to the lodges for a nascent political modernity.” While her thesis has not met with universal acceptance, her notion of a “radical Enlightenment,” centering on exclusivist societies such as the Freemasons, deserves further investigation.

– Alexander Dugin