Enlightenment radicalism exceeds even de Sade in its ruthlessness about society

Evidence

It was as if he was practising on himself his own response to Adorno’s suggestion that they should publish translations of Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain and then texts by the Abbé Meslier in an Institute series: `The Abbé Meslier will hardly be suitable. There would only be sense in it if we published him as a whole, or at least with the decisive passages; but in what these say about society and politics they are even more ruthless than de Sade.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 496

Categorization

• CANDY: A satisfying gotcha: Horkheimer judged the priest Meslier’s social writings harsher than de Sade’s.
• XREF: Echoes the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s argument that the Enlightenment’s radical logic turns on itself. — connects to: Economic self-interest explanations of parental love predate Sade by millennia — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 91; Radical evil arises where all people become equally superfluous — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1034; enlightenment is indefatigably self-destructive in its own tendencies (+2 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Economic self-interest explanations of parental love predate Sade by millennia — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 91; Radical evil arises where all people become equally superfluous — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1034; enlightenment is indefatigably self-destructive in its own tendencies (+2 more)