What was counter enlightenment

He also refuses the idea of a universal and uprooted Man, but believes in the particularity of each people and of each nation:. I have seen in my life Frenchmen, Italians, Russians; I know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian; but as for the man, I declare that he has not met him in my life; if it exists it is well without my knowledge. The condemnation is actually about a state of mind that has diverted philosophy from religion, and not about a current of thought whose doctrinal coherence is the fruit of the intellectual constructions of the Enlightenment:.

In the totalitarianisms of the 20th century Isaiah Berlin The historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin is the first to produce an important study on romantic counterrevolutionary authors. Isaiah Berlin first defines the philosophers of the Enlightenment, despite their doctrinal differences, by a movement that believes that it is possible to build a coherent system of laws and universal goals common to all humanity, likely to replace the dogmas, the superstitions and prejudices held by those who governed the individuals:.

But that these laws were very real, and knowable with certainty, or at least in a probable manner, did not make any doubt for anyone; it was the central dogma of all Enlightenment philosophy. Despite the heterogeneity of the refusal of the theories of the Enlightenment, these authors reject all universal principles and accessibility for all individuals to the laws of reason The source of authority must be absolute, and so terrifying, that the slightest attempt to question it immediately entails formidable sanctions.

Only then will men learn to obey. And who is the enemy? All those who throw powder in the eyes of the people or seek to subvert the established order. According to him, it would be ridiculous to look in thought against revolutionary theocratic prefigurations disaster of modernity, by talking a writer of what he did not speak his mind and bringing issues that were not hers. In Neoconservatism Z. Sternhell In his book The anti-Enlightenment, the historian of ideas Zeev Sternhell believes that doctrinal oppositions since the end of 18th century are based on the confrontation between the heirs of the Enlightenment, progressive and universalist; and those of anti-Enlightenment, conservatives, neoconservatives and reactionaries:.

After the first generation of thinkers against-Enlightenment embodied by Johann Gottfried Herder and Edmund Burke, a new wave appears throughout the xix th century England and France, and grows facing the democratization of political life and the political events of the time as the spring of peoples or the Paris Commune.

Worn by Thomas Carlyle, Ernest Renan or Hippolyte Tainethis thought theorizes the long fall of a Western civilization community and impregnated with the fear of God, victim of democratic decadence and the grip of materialism. For Sternhell, these broad ideological lines will seal the critique of rationalist modernity for a century and a half.

Their solution is to uproot the idea of the omnipotence of the individual, replenish organic communities and end the universal suffrage and equality 1. This confrontation is not so Manichean nature, or a simple artificial extension of the quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. Sternhell rather tries to demonstrate that there existed, and still exists, two antagonistic ways of conceiving modernity: one that uses as arguments, depending on the time, the search for individual happiness, freedom, the promise of progress, the secularization of spirits, etc.

He used the term to refer to a movement that arose primarily in late 18th- and early 19th-century Germany against the rationalism, universalism and empiricism commonly associated with the Enlightenment. The term has had wide currency since. Berlin argues that, while there were enemies of the Enlightenment outside of Germany e. Joseph de Maistre and before the s e. This German reaction to the imperialistic universalism of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, which had been forced on them first by the francophile Frederick II of Prussia, then by the armies of Revolutionary France, and finally by Napoleon, was crucial to the epochal shift of consciousness that occurred in Europe at this time, leading eventually to Romanticism.

A great many of these early opponents of the Enlightenment attacked it for undermining religion and the social and political order. This later became a major theme of conservative criticism of the Enlightenment after the French Revolution appeared to vindicate the warnings of the anti-philosophes in the decades prior to Also, like McMahon, it traces the beginning of Counter-Enlightenment thought back to France and prior to the German Sturm und Drang movement of the s.

Rather, there have been many Counter-Enlightenments, from the middle of the 18th century through to 20th-century Enlightenment critics among critical theorists, postmodernists and feminists. The Enlightenment has enemies on all points of the ideological compass, from the far left to the far right, and all points in between.

Counter-Enlightenment and Counter-Revolution Although serious doubts were raised about the Enlightenment prior to the s e. Hamann in Germany in particular , the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution fueled a major reaction against the Enlightenment, which many writers blamed for undermining traditional beliefs that sustained the ancien regime, thereby fomenting revolution. Counter-revolutionary writings like those of Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre and Augustin Barruel all asserted a close link between the Enlightenment and the Revolution, as did many of the revolutionary leaders themselves, so that the Enlightenment became increasingly discredited as the Revolution became increasingly bloody.

That is why the French Revolution and its aftermath was also a major phase in the development of Counter-Enlightenment thought.

Barruel argues in Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism — one of the most widely read books of its period — that the Revolution was the consequence of a conspiracy of philosophes and freemasons.

In Considerations on France , Maistre interprets the Revolution as divine punishment for the sins of the Enlightenment. Romantic revolt against the eighteenth century Many early Romantic writers such as Chateaubriand, Novalis and Samuel Taylor Coleridge inherited this Counter-Revolutionary antipathy towards the philosophes.

He draws on archival research from academic prize contests to deconstruct the binary and argue for a more complex view of the Enlightenment. Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus.

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