Irrationalism and Politics in the Eighteenth Century George Armstrong Kelly I TThE INTELLECTUAL object had fled before the concept was invented. Irrationalism is a neologism coined in the nineteenth century for its own particular uses.1 Though the denizens of the siecle des lumieres might flay one another’s rational capacities, they found no need for this word (their word was ''enthusiasm” or "superstition”). Thus our topic is focused around a linguistic an achronism. But this is a formalistic objection; let us pass on regard less. If politics had been rational in the eighteenth century, it is un likely that its pattern would have been broken by a massive up heaval in France with enduring fallout elsewhere. If the thinking about politics that led to the collapse of the ancien regime had it self been entirely rational, it is unlikely that so much intellectual provender for future antagonisms, extending even to our own times, could have been harvested. Once these banalities are stated, we pass to more difficult mat ters. We may criticize either the timidity or the temerity of Enlight enment political thinkers; but we are faced with a strong common presumption that Enlightenment means the orderly application of reason to the organization and conduct of human affairs. To be sure, it would not be hard by ordinary standards to find unreasonable people—even mild proponents of unreason—writing about or active in politics in the Age of Reason, through both pre meditation and ignorance. The greatest writer of its earlier half, 239 Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century himself a onetime political pamphleteer, ’'gave the little wealth he had/To build a house for fools and mad,” apparently with some conviction.2 Mesmer, Cagliostro, the physiognomist Lavater, the Marquis de Sade, miscellaneous illuminati^ the "philosophe inconnu ” and the strange entourage of Frederick William II saw the century out. Obscure Gothicists and antiquarians like Gebelin, the boy Chatterton who wrote in excruciating and mimed fifteenthcentury language, and the "magician of the North” Hamann clat tered around its fringes. Whether or not they were irrational is a matter of argument. At least they were not the Comte de Lautreamont , or Franz von Baader, or Carlyle, or Nietzsche. Their real importance is conjectural. Their impacts on politics are en tirely nebulous. In general, politics—and political theory—resisted the more extreme rejections of reason afforded by certain cultureclusters of the eighteenth century. Nobody yet dreamed of a "magic idealism,” or of a blending of Machiavellism and metaphysics, or of a social reconstruction supported by "positivistic religion.” No doubt there was a normal cargo of misfits, fools, and fana tics—though rather fewer mystics than usual. But to inventory that cargo is not as interesting as cracking the nervous rational soli darity of the thinking man’s eighteenth century with finger-exer cise psychoanalyses of both practical politicians and gens de lettres who were perilously close to the brink. Can one not say that Diderot and Swift glimpsed the pit of the irrational ? That Doctor Johnson’s melancholy is not entirely wholesome? That Rousseau’s logic found its deepest sources in a pathologic? Is there not general agreement that the German Enlightenment was skin-deep, mask ing Sturm-und-Drang pathos, Rosicrucian profundity, soil-andaltar localism, pantheosophic vitalism, bardic feudalism, and filigreed Masonic cultism? There can be no doubt that as we travel east we discover the century’s darker features and trail off into something that is less than a kosher Age of Reason. How frail, anyway, is the crust of reason, as Freud reminds us; how close to its surface are the succubi and incubi of the steamy pudding be neath.3 That much can scarcely be in dispute. Local history of the twen tieth century alone shows us that the sapience of the Encyclopedia 240 Symposium*. Irrationalism and Politics of Diderot and d’Alembert did not belong to the mass of men or to practically anyone who lived beyond the fringes of Edinburgh, London, Paris, Bordeaux, Milan, Geneva, Berlin, and Weimar. The Enlightenment prophesied; it should not have so readily presumed to achieve. Our main problem lies not so much in the concept of ’’irration alism” (which we shall take...