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What Is Counter-Enlightenment? 3 © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. •INTRODUCTION• 1 2 3 Answer to the Question: What Is 4 5 Counter-Enlightenment? 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 I of the Enlightenment the eighteenth century was com- 13 monly known as the century of lumière, or light. Its advocates 14 viewed themselves as the “party of humanity”: they sought to rep- 15 resent the “general will” rather than the standpoint of particular 16 interests, estates, or castes. The champions of Enlightenment coun- 17 terposed reason as an analytical solvent to dogma, superstition, and 18 unwarranted social authority. Their compendium of political griev- 19 ances culminated in the cahiers de doléances submitted to Louis XVI 20 in conjunction with the summoning of the Estates General in 1788— 21 a damning indictment of the injustices and corruptions that pre- 22 vailed under the absolute monarchies of Louis and his predecessor, 23 Louis XV. With one or two notable exceptions (e.g., Jean-Jacques 24 Rousseau), the philosophes were political moderates. They confi- 25 dently believed that the monarchy could be progressively restruc- 26 tured, and, consequently, put their faith in piecemeal political reform 27 from above. As such, most were proponents of either “Enlightened 28 Despotism” or, in the case of the so-called Anglomaniacs, English- 29 style constitutional monarchy. Yet, time and again, monarchical 30 intransigence pushed them in the direction of democratic republi- 31 canism. When on June 27, 1789, the deputies representing the Third 32 Estate—whose members had been bred on Enlightenment pre- 33 cepts—took their seats in the National Assembly on the left side of 34 the hall, the modern political left was born.1 35 Of course, the same sequence of events precipitated the birth of S36 the modern political right, whose adherents elected to sit on the R37 For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. 2 INTRODUCTION 1 opposite side of the Versailles assembly hall on that fateful day in 2 1789. But in reality the political battle lines had been drawn decades 3 earlier. By mid-century defenders of the ancien régime knew that the 4 cultural momentum lay with the “party of humanity.” A new breed 5 of anti-philosophe emerged to contest the epistemological and 6 political heresies proposed by the Party of Reason—the apostles of 7 Counter-Enlightenment. Relying mainly on theological arguments, 8 the anti-philosophes cautioned against the spirit of critical inquiry, 9 intellectual hubris, and the misuse of reason. Instead, they empha- 10 sized the need to preserve order at all costs. They viewed altar and 11 throne as the twin pillars of political stability. They believed that any 12 challenge to their unquestioned primacy threatened to undermine 13 the entire social edifice. They considered self-evident the view—one 14 in effect shared by many of the philosophes themselves—that men 15 and women were fundamentally incapable of self-governance. Sin 16 was the alpha and omega of the human condition. One needed 17 both unquestioned authority and the threat of eternal damna- 18 tion to prevent humanity from overreaching its inherently fallible 19 nature. Unfettered employment of reason as recommended by the 20 philosophes was an invitation to catastrophe. As one of the leading 21 spokesmen of the Counter-Enlightenment, Antoine de Rivarol (one 22 of the major sources for Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolu- 23 tion in France), remarked in 1789, “From the day when the monarch 24 consults his subjects, sovereignty is as though suspended... When 25 people cease to esteem, they cease to obey. A general rule: peoples 26 whom the king consults begin with vows and end with wills of their 27 own.”2 28 Rivarol and company held “philosophy” responsible for the cor- 29 ruption of morals, carnal licentiousness, depravity, political decay, 30 economic decline, poor harvests, and the precipitous rise in food 31 prices. The social cataclysms of revolutionary France—mob vio- 32 lence, dechristianization, anarchy, civil war, terror, and political 33 dictatorship—convinced the anti-philosophes of their uncanny 34 clairvoyance. 35 In a much-cited essay Isaiah Berlin contended that one could 36S trace the origins of fascism to Counter-Enlightenment ideologues 37R like Joseph de Maistre and Johann Georg Hamann.3 Indeed, a cer- For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. WHAT IS COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT? 3 tain plausibility marks Berlin’s claim. For one of fascism’s avowed 1 goals was to put an end to the Enlightenment-derived nineteenth- 2 century worldview: the predominance of science, reason, democ- 3 racy, socialism, individualism, and the like. As Goebbels pithily 4 observed a few months after Hitler’s rise to power, “The year 1789 5 is hereby erased from history.”4 Maistre and his contemporaries 6 were horrified by the specter of radical change. As such, they pre- 7 ferred the “contrary of revolution” (reform from above) to the 8 specter of “counter-revolution,” which would merely perpetuate 9 the cycle of violence. 10 The fascists, conversely, crossed the Rubicon and never looked 11 back. They knew that, in an age of total war, a point of no return 12 had been reached: there could be no going back to the tradition- 13 bound cocoon of the ancien régime. They elected to combat the val- 14 ues of the French Revolution with revolutionary means: violence, 15 war, and total mobilization. Thereby, they ushered in an alternative 16 vision of modernity, one that was meant to supersede the stand- 17 point of the philosophes and the political champions of 1789. 18 19 20 Who’s Afraid of Enlightenment? 21 22 Surely, one of the more curious aspects of the contemporary period 23 is that the heritage of Enlightenment finds itself under attack not 24 only from the usual suspects on the political right but also from 25 proponents of the academic left. As one astute commentator has 26 recently noted, today “Enlightenment bashing has developed into 27 something of an intellectual blood-sport, uniting elements of both 28 the left and the right in a common cause.”5 Thus, one of the peculi- 29 arities of our times is that Counter-Enlightenment arguments once 30 the exclusive prerogative of the political right have attained a new 31 lease on life among representatives of the cultural left. Surprisingly, 32 if one scans the relevant literature, one finds champions of post- 33 modernism who proudly invoke the Counter-Enlightenment her- 34 itage as their own. As the argument goes, since democracy has been 35 and continues to be responsible for so many political ills, and since S36 the critique of modern democracy began with the anti-philosophes, R37 For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. 4 INTRODUCTION 1 why not mobilize their powerful arguments in the name of the 2 postmodern political critique? As a prominent advocate of postmod- 3 ern political theory contends, one need only outfit the Counter- 4 Enlightenment standpoint with a new “articulation” (a claim 5 couched in deliberate vagueness) to make it serviceable for the ends 6 of the postmodern left.6 Yet those who advocate this alliance of 7 convenience between extreme right and extreme left provide few 8 guarantees or assurances that the end product of the exercise in 9 political grafting will result in greater freedom rather than a 10 grandiose political miscarriage. 11 One of the crucial elements underlying this problematic right- 12 left synthesis is a strange chapter in the history of ideas whereby 13 latter-day anti-philosophes such as Nietzsche and Heidegger became 14 the intellectual idols of post–World War II France—above all, for 15 poststructuralists like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles 16 Deleuze. Paradoxically, a thoroughgoing cynicism about reason and 17 democracy, once the hallmark of reactionary thought, became the 18 stock-in-trade of the postmodern left.7 As observers of the French 19 intellectual scene have frequently noted, although Germany lost on 20 the battlefield, it triumphed in the seminar rooms, bookstores, and 21 cafés of the Latin Quarter. During the 1960s Spenglerian indict- 22 ments of “Western civilization,” once cultivated by leading repre- 23 sentatives of the German intellectual right, migrated across the 24 Rhine where they gained a new currency. Ironically, Counter- 25 Enlightenment doctrines that had been taboo in Germany because 26 of their unambiguous association with fascism—after all, Nietzsche 27 had been canonized as the Nazi regime’s official philosopher, and for 28 a time Heidegger was its most outspoken philosophical advocate— 29 seemed to best capture the mood of Kulturpessimismus that predom- 30 inated among French intellectuals during the postwar period. Adding 31 insult to injury, the new assault against philosophie came from the 32 homeland of the Enlightenment itself. 33 One of the linchpins of the Counter-Enlightenment program 34 was an attack against the presuppositions of humanism. By chal- 35 lenging the divine basis of absolute monarchy, the unbelieving 36S philosophes had tampered with the Great Chain of Being, thereby 37R undermining morality and inviting social chaos.
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