View source for Counter-Enlightenment

{{distinguish|Dark Enlightenment}}
The '''Counter-Enlightenment''' was a term that some 20th-century commentators have used to describe multiple strains of thought that arose in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in opposition to the 18th-century [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]].

Though the first known use of the term in English was in 1949 and there were several uses of it,<ref>Listed by Henry Hardy in the second edition of Isaiah Berlin, ''Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas'' (Princeton University Press, 2013), p. xxv, note 1.</ref> including one by [[Germans|German]] [[philosopher]] [[Friedrich Nietzsche]], Counter-Enlightenment is usually associated with [[Isaiah Berlin]], who is often credited for re-inventing it. The starting point of discussion on this concept in English started with Isaiah Berlin's 1973 Essay, ''The Counter-Enlightenment''<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|title=Counter-enlightenments : from the eighteenth century to the present|last=1965-|first=Garrard, Graeme|date=2006|publisher=Routledge|isbn=0203645669|location=Abingdon [England]|oclc=62895765}}</ref>''.'' He published widely about the Enlightenment and its challengers and did much to popularise the concept of a Counter-Enlightenment movement that he characterized as [[Relativism|relativist]], [[Rationalism|anti-rationalist]], [[Vitalism|vitalist]], and organic,<ref>Aspects noted by Darrin M. McMahon, "The Counter-Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France" ''Past and Present'' No. 159 (May 1998:77–112) p. 79 note 7.</ref>  which he associated most closely with [[German Romanticism]].

==Development and significant people==
[[File:Jmaistre.jpg|thumb|200px|left|[[Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre]] was one of the more prominent altar-and-throne counter-revolutionaries who vehemently opposed Enlightenment ideas.]]

=== Early stages ===
Despite criticism of the Enlightenment being a widely discussed topic in twentieth-century thought, the term 'Counter-Enlightenment' was underdeveloped. It was first mentioned briefly in English in [[William Barrett (philosopher)|William Barrett]]'s 1949 article "Art, Aristocracy and Reason" in ''[[Partisan Review]].'' He used the term again in his 1958 book on existentialism, ''Irrational Man;'' however, his comment on Enlightenment criticism was very limited.<ref name=":0" /> In Germany, the expression "Gegen-Aufklärung" has a longer history. It was probably coined by [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] in "Nachgelassene Fragmente" in 1877.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Werke: Kristische Gesamtausgabe|last=Nietzsche|first=Friedrich|publisher=Walter de Gruyter|year=1877|isbn=|location=Berlin|pages=478}}</ref>

[[Lewis White Beck]] used this term in his ''Early German Philosophy'' (1969), a book about Counter-Enlightenment in Germany. Beck claims that there is a counter-movement arising in Germany in reaction to [[Frederick the Great|Frederick II]]'s secular authoritarian state. On the other hand, [[Johann Georg Hamann]] and his fellow philosophers believe that a more organic conception of social and political life, a more vitalistic view of nature, and an appreciation for beauty and the spiritual life of man have been neglected by the eighteenth century.<ref name=":0" />

=== Isaiah Berlin ===
[[Isaiah Berlin]] established this term's place in the [[history of ideas]]. He used it to refer to a movement that arose primarily in late 18th- and early 19th-century Germany against the [[rationalism]], [[universalism]] and [[empiricism]], which are commonly associated with the Enlightenment. Berlin's essay "The Counter-Enlightenment" was first published in 1973, and later reprinted in a collection of his works, ''Against the Current'', in 1981.<ref>http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/ac/counter-enlightenment.pdf</ref> The term has been more widely used since.

[[File:Johann Georg Hamann (1730 –1788).jpg|thumb|[[Isaiah Berlin]] traces the Counter-Enlightenment back to [[J. G. Hamann]] (shown).]]

Berlin argues that, while there were opponents of the Enlightenment outside of Germany (e.g. [[Joseph de Maistre]]) and before the 1770s (e.g. [[Giambattista Vico]]), Counter-Enlightenment thought did not start until the Germans 'rebelled against the dead hand of France in the realms of culture, art and philosophy, and avenged themselves by launching the great counter-attack against the Enlightenment.' 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 shift of consciousness that occurred in Europe at this time, leading eventually to [[Romanticism]]. The consequence of this revolt against the Enlightenment was [[Pluralism (political philosophy)|pluralism]]. The opponents to the Enlightenment played a more crucial role than its proponents, some of whom were [[monists]], whose political, intellectual and ideological offspring have been [[terreur]] and [[totalitarianism]].

=== Darrin McMahon ===
In his book ''Enemies of the Enlightenment'' (2001), historian [[Darrin McMahon]] extends the Counter-Enlightenment back to pre-Revolutionary France and down to the level of '[[Grub Street]],' thereby marking a major advance on Berlin's intellectual and Germanocentric view. McMahon focuses on the early opponents to the Enlightenment in France, unearthing a long-forgotten '[[Grub Street]]' literature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries aimed at the ''[[Philosophy|philosophes]]''. He delves into the obscure world of the 'low Counter-Enlightenment' that attacked the ''[[encyclopédistes]]'' and fought to prevent the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas in the second half of the century. Many people from earlier times attacked the Enlightenment for undermining religion and the social and political order. It later became a major theme of conservative criticism of the Enlightenment. After the French Revolution, it appeared to vindicate the warnings of the ''[[Antiphilosophy|anti-philosophes]]'' in the decades prior to 1789.

=== Graeme Garrard ===
[[File:Jean-Jacques Rousseau (painted portrait).jpg|thumb|left|[[Graeme Garrard]] traces the origin of the Counter-Enlightenment to [[Rousseau]].]]

[[Cardiff University]] professor Graeme Garrard claims that historian [[William Everdell|William R. Everdell]] was the first to situate Rousseau as the "founder of the Counter-Enlightenment" in his 1971 dissertation and in his 1987 book, ''Christian Apologetics in France, 1730–1790: The Roots of Romantic Religion''.<ref>{{Citation | first = Graeme | last = Garrard | quote = To my knowledge, the first explicit identification of Rousseau as "founder of the "Counter-Enlightenment" appears in William Everdell's study of Christian apologetics in eighteenth-century France. | title = Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment: A Republican Critique of the ''Philosophes'' | publisher = State University of New York Press | year = 2003}}</ref> In his 1996 article, "the Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity", in the ''[[American Political Science Review]]'' (Vol. 90, No. 2), [[Arthur M. Melzer]] corroborates Everdell's view in placing the origin of the Counter-Enlightenment in the religious writings of [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]], further showing Rousseau as the man who fired the first shot in the war between the Enlightenment and its opponents.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Melzer|first=Arthur M.|date=1996|title=The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity|journal=The American Political Science Review|volume=90|issue=2|pages=344–360|jstor=2082889|doi=10.2307/2082889}}</ref> [[Graeme Garrard]] follows Melzer in his "Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment" (2003). This contradicts Berlin's depiction of Rousseau as a ''[[philosophe]]'' (albeit an erratic one) who shared the basic beliefs of his Enlightenment contemporaries. But similar to McMahon, Garrard traces the beginning of Counter-Enlightenment thought back to France and prior to the German ''[[Sturm und Drang]]'' movement of the 1770s. Garrard's book ''Counter-Enlightenments'' (2006) broadens the term even further, arguing against Berlin that there was no single 'movement' called 'The Counter-Enlightenment'. Rather, there have been many Counter-Enlightenments, from the middle of the 18th century to 20th-century Enlightenment among critical theorists, postmodernists and feminists. The Enlightenment has opponents on all points of its ideological compass, from the far left to the far right, and all points in between. Each of the Enlightenment's challengers depicted it as they saw it or wanted others to see it, resulting in a vast range of portraits, many of which are not only different but incompatible.

=== James Schmidt ===
The idea of Counter-Enlightenment has evolved in the following years. The historian James Schmidt questioned the idea of 'Enlightenment' and therefore of the existence of a movement opposing it. As the conception of 'Enlightenment' has become more complex and difficult to maintain, so has the idea of the 'Counter-Enlightenment'. Advances in Enlightenment scholarship in the last quarter-century have challenged the stereotypical view of the 18th century as an '[[Age of Enlightenment|Age of Reason]]', leading Schmidt to speculate on whether the Enlightenment might not actually be a creation of its opponents, but the other way round. The fact that the term 'Enlightenment' was first used in 1894 in English to refer to a historical period supports the argument that it was a late construction projected back onto the 18th century.

==The French Revolution==
[[File:Edmund Burke by James Northcote.JPG|thumb|Political thinker [[Edmund Burke]] opposed the [[French Revolution]] in his ''[[Reflections on the Revolution in France]]''.]]

By the mid-1790s, the [[Reign of Terror]] during the French Revolution fueled a major reaction against the Enlightenment. Many leaders of the French Revolution and their supporters made [[Voltaire]] and [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau|Rousseau]], as well as [[Marquis de Condorcet]]'s ideas of reason, [[progress]], anti-clericalism, and emancipation central themes to their movement. It led to an unavoidable backlash to the Enlightenment as there were people oppose to the revolution. Many counter-revolutionary writers, such as [[Edmund Burke]], [[Joseph de Maistre]] and [[Augustin Barruel]], asserted an intrinsic link between the Enlightenment and the Revolution.<ref name=":0" /> They blamed the Enlightenment for undermining traditional beliefs that sustained the [[ancien regime]]. As the Revolution became increasingly bloody, the idea of 'Enlightenment' was discredited, too. Hence, the French Revolution and its aftermath have attributed to the development of Counter-Enlightenment thought.{{Citation needed|date=December 2018}}

[[Edmund Burke]] was among the first of the Revolution's opponents to relate the ''philosophes'' to the instability in France in the 1790s. His ''[[Reflections on the Revolution in France]]'' (1790) refers the Enlightenment as the principle cause of the French revolution. In Burke's opinion, the ''philosophes'' provided the revolutionary leaders with the theories on which their political schemes were based on.{{Citation needed|date=December 2018}}

[[Augustin Barruel]]'s Counter-Enlightenment ideas were well developed before the revolution. He worked as an editor for the anti-''philosophes'' literary journal, ''[[:fr:L'Année littéraire|L'Année Littéraire]]''. Barruel argues in his ''[[Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism]]'' (1797) that the Revolution was the consequence of a conspiracy of ''philosophes'' and freemasons.{{Citation needed|date=December 2018}}

In ''Considerations on France'' (1797), [[Joseph de Maistre]] interprets the Revolution as divine punishment for the sins of the Enlightenment. According to him, "the revolutionary storm is an overwhelming force of nature unleashed on Europe by God that mocked human pretensions.<ref name=":0" />"

==Romanticism==
In the 1770s, the '''[[Sturm und Drang]]''<nowiki/>' movement started in Germany. It questioned some key assumptions and implications of the ''[[Age of Enlightenment|Aufklärung]]'' and the term '[[Romanticism]]' was first coined. Many early Romantic writers such as [[Chateaubriand]], [[Novalis|Federich von Hardenberg]] ([[Novalis]]) and [[Samuel Taylor Coleridge]] inherited the Counter-Revolutionary antipathy towards the philosophes. All three directly blamed the ''philosophes'' in France and the ''Aufklärer'' in Germany for devaluing beauty, spirit and history in favour of a view of man as a soulless machine and a view of the universe as a meaningless, disenchanted void lacking richness and beauty. One particular concern to early Romantic writers was the allegedly anti-religious nature of the Enlightenment since the ''philosophes'' and ''[[Aufklarer]]'' were generally [[deists]], opposed to [[revealed religion]]. Some historians, such as [[Johann Georg Hamann|Hamann]], nevertheless contend that this view of the Enlightenment as an age hostile to religion is common ground between these Romantic writers and many of their conservative Counter-Revolutionary predecessors. However, not many have commented on the Enlightenment, except for Chateaubriand, Novalis, and Coleridge, since the term itself did not exist at the time and most of their contemporaries ignored it.<ref name=":0" />

[[File:Goya - Caprichos (43) - Sleep of Reason.jpg|left|thumb|''[[The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters]]'', c. 1797, 21.5 cm × 15 cm. One of the most famous prints of the ''[[Caprichos]]''.]]
The philosopher [[Jacques Barzun]] argues that Romanticism has its roots in the Enlightenment. It was not anti-rational, but rather balanced rationality against the competing claims of intuition and the sense of justice. This view is expressed in Goya's ''Sleep of Reason'', in which the nightmarish owl offers the dozing social critic of ''[[Los Caprichos]],'' a piece of drawing chalk. Even the rational critic is inspired by irrational dream-content under the gaze of the sharp-eyed lynx.<ref>[http://www.worldandi.com/newhome/public/2004/february/bkpub1.asp Linda Simon, ''The Sleep of Reason'']</ref> Marshall Brown makes much the same argument as Barzun in ''Romanticism and Enlightenment'', questioning the stark opposition between these two periods.

By the middle of the 19th century, the memory of the French Revolution was fading and so was the influence of Romanticism. In this optimistic age of science and industry, there were few critics of the Enlightenment, and few explicit defenders. [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] is a notable and highly influential exception. After an initial defence of the Enlightenment in his so-called 'middle period' (late-1870s to early 1880s), Nietzsche turned vehemently against it.

==Totalitarianism==
In the intellectual discourse of the mid-20th century, two concepts emerged simultaneously in the West: enlightenment and [[totalitarianism]]. After [[World War II]], the former re-emerged as a key organizing concept in social and political thought and the history of ideas. The Counter-Enlightenment literature blaming the 18th-century trust in reason for 20th-century [[totalitarianism]] also resurged along with it. The ''locus classicus'' of this view is [[Max Horkheimer]] and [[Theodor Adorno]]'s ''[[Dialectic of Enlightenment]]'' (1947), which traces the degeneration of the general concept of enlightenment from ancient Greece (epitomized by the cunning 'bourgeois' hero Odysseus) to 20th-century fascism. They mentioned little about Soviet [[communism]], only referring to it as a regressive totalitarianism that "clung all too desperately to the heritage of bourgeois philosophy".<ref>Adorno & Horkeimer, [[Dialectic of Enlightenment]], 1947, pp. 32–33</ref>

The authors take 'enlightenment' as their target including its 18th-century form – which we now call 'The Enlightenment'. They claim it is epitomized by the [[Marquis de Sade]]. However, there were philosophers rejecting Adorno and Horkheimer’s claim that Sade's moral skepticism is actually coherent, or that it reflects Enlightenment thought.<ref>Geoffrey Roche, "Much Sense the Starkest Madness: de Sade’s Moral Scepticism." ''Angelaki'' Volume 15, Issue 1 April 2010, pages 45 – 59. Retrieved 12 December 2010. [http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a925285995~db=all~jumptype=rss].</ref>

Many postmodern writers and feminists (e.g. Jane Flax) have made similar arguments. They regard ''the'' Enlightenment conception of reason as totalitarian, and as not having been enlightened enough since. For Adorno and Horkheimer, though it banishes myth it falls back into a further myth, that of individualism and formal (or mythic) equality under [[instrumental reason]].

[[Michel Foucault]], for example, argued that attitudes towards the "insane" during the late-18th and early 19th centuries show that supposedly enlightened notions of [[moral treatment|humane treatment]] were not universally adhered to, but instead, the [[Age of Enlightenment|Age of Reason]] had to construct an image of "Unreason" against which to take an opposing stand. Berlin himself, although no postmodernist, argues that the Enlightenment's legacy in the 20th century has been [[monism]] (which he claims favours political authoritarianism), whereas the legacy of the Counter-Enlightenment has been pluralism (associates with liberalism). These are two of the 'strange reversals' of modern intellectual history.

==See also==
{{Wikipedia books|Enlightenment}}
{{columns
|col1=
* [[Alasdair MacIntyre]]
* [[Anti-intellectualism]]
* [[Augustin Barruel]]
* [[Charles Taylor (philosopher)|Charles Taylor]]
* [[Chateaubriand]]
* [[Dark Enlightenment]] (Neo-reactionary movement)
* [[Darrin McMahon]]
* [[Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi]]
* [[Panagiotis Kondylis]]
* [[Monaldo Leopardi]]
* [[Giacomo Leopardi]]
* [[Friedrich Nietzsche]]
* [[Jean-Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan]]
|col2=
* [[Johann Georg Hamann]]
* [[John N. Gray]]
* [[Joseph de Maistre]]
* [[Martin Heidegger]]
* [[Walter Benjamin]]
* [[Lewis White Beck]]
* [[Leo Strauss]]
* [[Carl Schmitt]]
* [[Ernst Jünger]]
* [[Natural philosophy]]
* [[Norbert Elias]]
* [[Novalis]]
* [[Juan Donoso Cortés]]
* [[Søren Kierkegaard]]
* [[Voltaire]]
|col3=
* [[Louis Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald]]
* [[Thomas Carlyle]]<ref>It is difficult to label Carlyle's thought, but his famous conception on the "Hero Worship" and traditionalism, as well as his, somehow, critical analysis on the French Revolution (in one of his classic books), links him close to the Counter-Enlightenment</ref>
* [[Julius Evola]]
* [[Jacques Derrida]]
* [[Gilles Deleuze]]
* [[Giorgio Agamben]]
* [[Georges Bataille]]
* [[Pierre Klossowski]]
* [[Charles Maurras]]
}}

==Notes==
{{Reflist}}

==References==
* [[Jacques Barzun|Barzun, Jacques]]. 1961. ''Classic, Romantic, and Modern''. University of Chicago Press. {{ISBN|9780226038520}}.
* [[Isaiah Berlin|Berlin, Isaiah]], "The Counter-Enlightenment" in ''The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays'', {{ISBN|0-374-52717-2}}.
* Berlin, Isaiah, ''[[Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder]]''. ([[Henry Hardy]], editor). Princeton University Press, 2003
* [[William Everdell|Everdell, William R.]] ''Christian Apologetics in France, 1730–1790: The Roots of Romantic Religion.'' Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1987.
* Garrard, Graeme, ''Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment: A Republican Critique of the Philosophes (2003) {{ISBN|0-7914-5604-8}}
* Garrard, Graeme, ''Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present'' (2006) {{ISBN|0-415-18725-7}}
* Garrard, Graeme, "Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment" in ''Transactions of the American Philosophical Society'', ed. Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler (2003), {{ISBN|0-87169-935-4}}
* Garrard, Graeme, "The War Against the Enlightenment", ''European Journal of Political Theory'', 10 (2011): 277–86.
* [[Éric Humbertclaude|Humbertclaude, Éric]], ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=SQ7DwHe-HLMC&pg=PA75&dq=hultazob&hl=fr&ei=OoO4TOLWGY_Oswbd3qnIDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false Récréations de Hultazob]''. Paris: L'Harmattan 2010, {{ISBN|978-2-296-12546-9}} (sur Melech August Hultazob, médecin-charlatan des Lumières Allemandes assassiné en 1743)
* [[Jonathan Israel|Israel, Jonathan]], ''Enlightenment Contested'', Oxford University Press, 2006. {{ISBN|978-0-19-954152-2}}.
* Jung, Theo, "Multiple Counter-Enlightenments: The Genealogy of a Polemics from the Eighteenth Century to the Present", in: Martin L. Davies (ed.), Thinking about the Enlightenment: Modernity and Its Ramifications, Milton Park / New York 2016, 209-226 ([https://freidok.uni-freiburg.de/data/14105 PDF]).
* Masseau, Didier, ''Les ennemis des philosophes:. l’antiphilosophie au temps des Lumières'', Paris: Albin Michel, 2000.
* [[Darrin McMahon|McMahon, Darrin M.]], ''Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity'' details the reaction to Voltaire and the Enlightenment in European intellectual history from 1750 to 1830.
* Norton, Robert E. "The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment," ''Journal of the History of Ideas'', 68 (2007): 635–58.
* Schmidt, James, ''What Enlightenment Project?'', Political Theory, 28/6 (2000), pp.&nbsp;734–57.
* Schmidt, James, ''Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jacobins, British Hegelians and the Oxford English Dictionary'', Journal of the History of Ideas, 64/3 (2003), pp.&nbsp;421–43.
* [[Richard Wolin|Wolin, Richard]],  ''The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism'' (Princeton University Press) 2004, sets out to trace "the uncanny affinities between the Counter-Enlightenment and postmodernism."

==External links==
* [http://xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=DicHist/uvaGenText/tei/DicHist2.xml;chunk.id=dv2-11;toc.depth=1;toc.id=dv2-11;brand=default Isaiah Berlin,"The Counter-Enlightenment"], in ''Dictionary of the History of Ideas'' (1973)
* [http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2279/is_n159/ai_21029551 Darrin M. McMahon, "The counter-Enlightenment and the low-life of literature in pre-Revolutionary France,"]{{dead link|date=May 2017 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} from ''Past & Present,'' May 1998

{{Lutheran History}}

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