The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment Karen Pagani Thorne, Christian. The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 376. Christian Thorne’s The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment is a highly provocative and remarkably erudite study on the pre-history of anti-foundationalist thought. Thorne’s aim, broadly, is to call into question the widely held (though less and less confidently articulated) belief among contemporary theorists of the Left that attacks on metaphysics, on epistemology, on claims to universality, humanism and, of course, the Enlightenment contain the (ever-deferred) promise of political reform simply by virtue of their predilection for “self-defeating concepts, concepts that resist the very abstraction to which they are otherwise addicted” (312). Opposing this view, Thorne’s conceptual-historical account reminds us that “anti-foundationalism is not everywhere the same” and that theories that tend “to convert early modern skeptics into post-structuralists before the fact” amount to little more than “an epistemological determinism fully as egregious as the economic or technological determinisms that have preceded it” (13). With admirable clarity, the Introduction sets up the stakes of the project: critical theory always strives to be something other than philosophy insofar as, in its attempts to “plunge thought back into the material [End Page 139] world so that it may, at last, spring it loose therefrom,” it aims to “undo the false distinction between thought and action” (10) that has always served as philosophy’s alibi. Althusser, Adorno and Horkheimer, Eagleton, Foucault and Canguilhem, Luhmann, Cavell—Thorne is talking about “almost all critical theory” (10) so the list is, as one might expect, long— have imparted onto theory a pronounced skepticism toward “the eternal essences or spirit that philosophy takes to be the object of all thought.” This skepticism, with which we are by now all too familiar, is marked by hostility toward reification, facts, presence, concepts, instrumental rationalities, truth claims—the usual suspects (10). What is, by Thorne’s lights, lacking in critical theory is “an account of the changing ways in which human societies have refused to know” and, most importantly, the political agendas that informed and directed such refusals. Thorne seeks to fill this void by taking “the critical emphasis off the Enlightenment,” and turning his attention instead to another tradition, that of skepticism (16). The bulk of The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment is comprised of what the author himself refers to as a series of case studies. These studies meticulously tease out the often overlooked political agendas of many of the skeptical thinkers from whom anti-foundationalist thought has taken its cue. In Thorne’s pre-history, theory is unapologetically portrayed as the bastard (or, perhaps more correctly, estranged) child of a long tradition of skepticism toward metaphysics, epistemology and knowledge itself. Far from carrying within it the germ for reform and radical politics, Thorne argues that the skeptical tradition to which anti-foundationalist thought owes its argumentative forms has historically been one of the most tenacious foot-soldiers of authoritarian pragmatism, “a means of defending established (but increasingly contested) practices without claiming these practices to be true” (11). The sheer density of The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment makes it nearly impossible to paraphrase. There are, however, a few key analyses that need to be detailed here, though much will necessarily be given short shrift. The book is made up of three parts, each divided into three chapters. Parts II and III address the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively. Part I examines the writings of Sextus Empiricus and Michel de Montaigne in relation to their particular political contexts. Chapter one gives the reader practice in thinking skeptically. It consists in a textual analysis of Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism, “a kind of skeptical handbook, a compendium of arguments designed to fluster the philosophers,” the “ur-text for the many anti-foundationalisms that will follow” (24; 314). This early chapter underscores what readers today might otherwise overlook: that the suspension of judgment and the refusal of knowledge stemming from the Pyrrhonist’s capacity to [End Page 140] systematically debate both sides of the argument need not be radical. The Pyrrhonist, according to Thorne’s reading, is a case...