The peculiar human self-consciousness associated with the idea of a new century and the idea of a new millennium encourages us to make judgements about the past and to think about new possibilities.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are exceptionally conscious of the remarkable development of human society through the last ten centuries of frenzied social experience. We are conscious of the power of social systems which have emerged from that experience, especially the systems known as democracy and capitalism. We are conscious also of the paradoxes of our social experience, all the good and all the evil done by and through the social systems which we have made.

We are conscious of our inherent freedom to reconceive and reform the social systems which we have made, and yet we seem also to be the slaves of the systems we have made. Two aspects of our experience offer us the hope of regaining and reusing our freedom – the role of law as the means of ideal-governed social self-constituting and the power of the mind to transcend itself in what we have experienced from time to time as ‘enlightenment’.

Humanity has the need and the possibility of a New Enlightenment. The author's Eunomian project (reconceiving society and law) and his Eutopian project (reconceiving the human mind) are New Enlightenment projects.