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 Enlightenment.
Though the first known use of the term in
English was in 1949 and there were several
uses of it, including one by 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.
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 relativist, anti-rationalist,
vitalist, and organic, which he associated
most closely with German Romanticism.
== Development and significant people ==
=== 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'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.
In Germany, the expression "Gegen-Aufklärung"
has a longer history.
It was probably coined by Friedrich Nietzsche
in "Nachgelassene Fragmente" in 1877.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
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.
=== 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.
The term has been more widely used since.
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.
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 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 anti-philosophes
in the decades prior to 1789.
=== Graeme Garrard ===
Cardiff University professor Graeme Garrard
claims that historian 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.
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.
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 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 ==
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 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.
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.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.Augustin Barruel's Counter-Enlightenment
ideas were well developed before the revolution.
He worked as an editor for the anti-philosophes
literary journal, 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.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."
== 
Romanticism ==
In the 1770s, the 'Sturm und Drang' movement
started in Germany.
It questioned some key assumptions and implications
of the Aufklärung and the term 'Romanticism'
was first coined.
Many early Romantic writers such as Chateaubriand,
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 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.
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.
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".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.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 humane treatment
were not universally adhered to, but instead,
the 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 ==
== Notes
