Zeev Sternhell . The Anti‐Enlightenment Tradition . Translated by David Maisel . New Haven : Yale University Press . 2010 . Pp. xi, 532. $55.00.

Abstract

Widely reputed to be an expert on the intellectual antecedents of fascism, Zeev Sternhell has produced works marked by moral passion and a corresponding conviction that ideas matter, and have mattered, profoundly. In this new book, a revised and expanded translation of the French edition published in 2006, the author considerably widens both his range of intellectual references and the stakes of his argument. Not only did the anti-Enlightenment intellectual tradition prepare the way for fascism, but it constituted “an upheaval that continues to have a profound effect on the society of our time” (p. 404). Sternhell unequivocally embraces what he calls the Franco-Kantian Enlightenment tradition, based on such familiar notions as rationalism, universalism, individualism, and the scope for engineering societal improvement. In doing so he provides a good sense of the affirmative, optimistic side of that tradition, which, as he argues, is sometimes too quickly denigrated. But his major concern is to counter what he takes to have been the deleterious tradition of anti-Enlightenment thought that began in the later eighteenth century, and that was itself novel, modern, even revolutionary in reacting against the revolutionary implications of the Enlightenment departure.