Enemies of the Enlightenment

Abstract

Abstract Critics have long treated the most important intellectual movement of modern hstory—the Enlightenment—as if it took shape in the absence of opposition. In this ground-breaking new study, Darrin McMahon demonstrates that, on the contrary, contemporary resistance to the Enlightenment was a major cultural force, shaping and defining the Enlightenment from the moment of its inception, while giving rise to an entirely new ideological phenomenon—what we have come to think of as the “Right”. Born in France, but spread throughout Europe and the New World in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Counter-Enlightenment was neither a rarified current in the history of ideas nor an atavistic relic of the past, but an extensive, international, and thoroughly modern affair. Drawing on a range od primary sources, McMahon shows that well before the French Revolution, enemies of the Enlightenment were warning that the secular thrust of modern philosophy would give way to horrors of an unprecedented kind, Greeting 1789, in turn, as the realization of their worst fears, they fought the Revolution from its onset, profoundly affecting its subsequent course, The radicalization—and violence—of the Revolution was as much the product of militant resistance as any inherent logic. In the wake of Revolutionary upheaval, enemies of the Enligtenment assumed positions of immense cultural authority, consolidating their political vision of the Right in the first third of the nineteenth century, and spreading their construction of the Enlightenment throughout the world. In doing so they developed a critique of modernity that remains with us to the present day.