In this ten-minute video, economic professor Ashley Hodgson lays out how a shift at the foundational base of a field of knowledge occurs and builds on new building blocks.
Ashley Hodgson’s New Enlightenment argues that modern societies are governed less by conscious choice than by incentive-driven systems that shape beliefs, behavior, and outcomes at scale. Drawing on behavioral economics and systems thinking, she challenges Enlightenment assumptions about rational individuals, neutral markets, and linear progress (especially GDP-centric thinking). Her central claim is that humans now function within a kind of social superorganism, where misinformation, institutional incentives, and feedback loops distort what people perceive as rational or true. A new enlightenment, she argues, requires updating our models of rationality, knowledge, and governance to reflect these systemic dynamics rather than relying on outdated economic myths.
Hodgson offers a compelling critique of Enlightenment assumptions and a sophisticated account of systemic failure, but her ‘New Enlightenment’ functions more as a diagnostic framework than as a theory of institutional emergence or system dynamics.
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