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Counter-Enlightenment political thought refers to a range of views that share the belief that the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment in the West was fundamentally mistaken in ways that have seriously damaged religion, morals, and society. The Enlightenment was a period of reform when prominent and influential European and American philosophers, historians, economists, and politicians challenged many traditional beliefs and institutions in the name of reason, science, and progress. Critics of this movement’s emphasis on the power and centrality of reason in human affairs have sought to depict it as both exaggerated and dangerous.

Over the past 250 years, the Enlightenment has attracted critics from across the ideological spectrum, ranging from devout conservative Catholics to radical feminists, from nineteenth-century romantic poets to twentieth-century neo-Marxists and even liberals. Most disagree on their interpretation of what the Enlightenment was; however, there is broad agreement among its adversaries that the period was socially and politically harmful, if not disastrous. There have been, and still are, many Counter-Enlightenments, from the eighteenth century to the present, covering not only a wide range of specific criticisms of the Enlightenment, but also many different, and sometimes incompatible, depictions of the Enlightenment by its critics, each of which suits their own beliefs, agendas, and interests.

Early Critiques Of The Enlightenment

The first serious, systematic critique of the Enlightenment came from the eighteenth-century Swiss writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had been a friend and ally of many of its leading proponents such as the writer Denis Diderot and the philosopher and mathematician Jean d’Alembert. Yet in his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750) Rousseau praises ignorance and associates the acquisition of knowledge of the arts and sciences with decadence and moral depravity. Many philosophers were shocked by this stance, which they saw as a betrayal of the ideals of the Enlightenment. D’Alembert sought to counter it in his Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie (1751), which became the French Enlightenment’s unofficial manifesto. This early skirmish over the effects of the arts and sciences on morals soon escalated into an epic clash between Rousseau and the philosophers of the Enlightenment, which has continued without interruption ever since.

In the decades preceding the French Revolution (1789– 1799), Enlightenment philosophers sparred constantly with orthodox religious writers such as the conservative Jesuit Guillaume-François Berthier, who assaulted the Encyclopédie for attacking Christianity and for its alleged corrosion of traditional morals and beliefs. After 1789, many writers blamed the violent excesses of the French Revolution on the Enlightenment which, it was widely believed, had systematically destroyed the legitimacy of monarchy and aristocracy in Europe and plunged the continent into decades of political chaos and bloodshed. The most eloquent proponent of this view was the conservative Savoyard Catholic Joseph de Maistre, whose Considerations on France (Considérations sur la France, 1796) depicts the events of the 1790s as divine punishment for the sins of the Enlightenment. Its most popular advocates were the Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, author of the influential Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and the Abbé Augustin Barruel. Barruel’s bestselling Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire du Jacobinisme, 1797) makes the case that a conspiracy of Enlightenment philosophers, Freemasons, and the secret Illuminati Order deliberately sought to overthrow established monarchs and governments in Europe in the name of reason and progress.

Many romantic writers at the end of the eigteenth century and early nineteenth century in France, Germany, and Britain condemned the Enlightenment as antireligious, although their own religious views were often far less orthodox than those of its earlier Enlightenment critics such as Berthier. The belief was widespread among these romantic poets and writers that the Enlightenment’s allegedly narrow emphasis on reason at the expense of emotion and passion had led to a world devoid of beauty, imagination, and spirit. This is a central theme of François-René de Chateaubriand’s enormously popular and influential book The Genius of Christianity (Le Génie du Christianisme, 1802), an aesthetic defense of Christianity that depicts the beauty and mystery of faith as a casualty of the Enlightenment’s relentless assault on traditional religious beliefs in the name of reason. Many romantic writers shared the mistaken conviction of earlier religious opponents of the Enlightenment that the philosophers of the Enlightenment were mostly atheists; in fact, very few were.

Twentieth-Century Counter-Enlightenment Thought

Attacks on the Enlightenment were common throughout the nineteenth century, most notably in the later works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who associated it with the French Revolution as its earlier critics had done. But it was not until the end of World War II (1939–1945) that Counter-Enlightenment thought became as widespread as it had been during and after the French Revolution. According to a generation of intellectuals born at the turn of the century, the Enlightenment played a central role in the emergence of twentieth-century totalitarianism, epitomized by Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. After World War II, German critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno associated the Western conception of Enlightenment with a narrowly instrumental form of reason that was repressive and totalitarian in their very influential book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Cold–war liberals of the same generation, such as philosophers Jacob Talmon and Isaiah Berlin, saw the legacy of the Enlightenment as directly linked to twentieth-century communism. In addition, their conservative contemporaries Michael Oakeshott and Eric Voegelin restated earlier, orthodox attacks on Enlightenment rationalism for its disastrous political and spiritual effects.

Among later generations of thinkers, postmodernists have been the Enlightenment’s most vociferous critics. Works such as Madness and Civilization (1961) and Discipline and Punish (1975), by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, chronicle the emergence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of a new disciplinary society that was liberal and humane in name and rhetoric but sinister and highly controlling in practice. Postmodern feminists such as Sandra Harding have attacked the Enlightenment for its supposedly pure conception of reason in which important gender differences are suppressed in the interests of men.

New forms of Counter-Enlightenment thought continue to proliferate today, for example, among some environmentalists critical of the modern West’s faith in science and technology. Given that so many of the values, practices, and beliefs of modern Western civilization are rooted in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, it is certain that its assumptions and consequences will remain matters of deep and abiding contestation.

Bibliography:

Berlin, Isaiah. “The Counter-Enlightenment.” In Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Garrard, Graeme. Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present. London: Routledge, 2006.
Mali, Joseph, and Robeert Wokler, eds. Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003.
Masseau, Didier. Les ennemis des philosophes: L’antiphilosophie au temps des Lumières. Paris: Albin Michel, 2000.
McMahon, Darrin. Enemies of the Enlightenment:The French CounterEnlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Norton, Robert E. “The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 68 (2007): 635–658.