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Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in Modern European Thought Eight Seminars: Fridays 2-4 Pm; Course Co-Ordinator: M.A

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Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in Modern European Thought Eight Seminars: Fridays 2-4 Pm; Course Co-Ordinator: M.A MPhil in European Literature and Culture (Lent Modules 2008) Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in Modern European Thought Eight Seminars: Fridays 2-4 pm; course co-ordinator: M.A. Ruehl (mar23), Trinity Hall The Enlightenment was one of the main ‘roads to modernity’ in eighteenth-century Europe and its latter-day proponents still regard its central tenets – rationalism, secularism, individualism – as the very definition of what it means to be modern. For many historians of European thought, it represents the single most significant event since the Renaissance: an intellectual revolution that fundamentally transformed man’s understanding of his place in the natural as well as the social world and produced not just the ‘ideas of 1789’, but the various ideologies (liberalism, socialism, pacifism) that would shape Western political theory and praxis over the next two centuries. While the scholarly output on the Enlightenment and its various individual representatives is vast, relatively little is known about those thinkers who resisted the ‘Age of Reason’ and launched what Isaiah Berlin later identified as a ‘Counter-Enlightenment’. And yet there was, as early as the mid-eighteenth century, a vociferous and highly articulate contingent in the new ‘republic of letters’ which fiercely opposed the materialism and atheism of the lumières, their abstract, a-historical conceptions of the self and their levelling of national traditions and cultural diversity in the name of universalism and progress. These anti-philosophes, though frequently marginalized in the history of ideas, played a no less important role in the formation of European thought. Appalled by the rapid ‘disenchantment of the world’ (Max Weber), they attacked what they viewed as the terribles simplifications and, especially in the wake of the French Revolution, the doctrinaire intolerance of their enlightening enemies. In doing so, they not only formulated crucial new concepts and ideals that laid the discursive foundations for what we now call, somewhat vaguely, ‘the Right’; they also forced the ‘party of progress’ to re-define its own positions. In this seminar, we will trace the intellectual struggles over Enlightenment from the critique of revealed religion in the ancien régime to the ‘culture wars’ of the present day. We will examine these struggles as on-going, politically charged controversies about the nature and meaning of modernity, without, however, establishing any facile links between ‘the unfinished project of modernity’ (Jürgen Habermas) and the ‘Enlightenment project’. We shall approach both projects, instead, as profoundly dialectical phenomena that were generated and defined, from the beginning, by their opposites. Particular attention will be given, accordingly, to liminal figures, theorists at the interface between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment like Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud, and Adorno, who embraced central aspects of Aufklärung while questioning its triumphalist belief in humanity’s inexorable march towards ever higher levels of rationality, emancipation, and civilization. We shall read the works of these theorists as ‘historically’ as is possible in such a text-based seminar, concentrating on the following themes, listed here, rather simplistically, as binary oppositions: progressivism/historicism, optimism/Kulturkritik, society/community, reason/faith, rationalization/myth, peaceful meliorism/violent renewal. Although many of the texts on our syllabus are by German authors, we will also look at the specific national contexts (political, social, cultural) that conditioned the debates about Enlightenment in other countries, most notably France. The reading list attached below, though quite expansive, is by no means final and the course co-ordinator strongly welcomes bibliographical suggestions from all participants. General reading Introductions R. Porter and M. Teich (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge 1981) J. Schmidt, ‘Aufklärung, Gegenaufklärung, Dialektik der Aufklärung’, in J. Schmidt (ed.), Aufklärung und Gegenaufklärung in der europäischen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Darmstadt 1989), pp. 1-33 U. Im Hof, The Enlightenment (Oxford 1994) ** D. Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge 1995) ** J. Schmidt, ‘Introduction: What is Enlightenment? A Question, its Context, and Some Consequences’, in: J. Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-century Answers and Twentieth-century Questions (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1996), pp. 1-45 J. Yolton, R. Porter, P. Rogers and B. Stafford (eds), The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment (Oxford 1991) * R. Porter, The Enlightenment, 2nd edn (London 2001) A.C. Kors (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, 4 vols (Oxford 2003) * H. Stuke, ‘Aufklärung’, in: O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. I (Stuttgart 1972), pp. 243-342 Sourcebooks and readers * P. Hyland, O. Gomez and F. Greensides (eds), The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader (London 2003) S. Eliot and B. Stern (eds), The Age of Enlightenment: An Anthology of Eighteenth-Century Texts (Oxford 1979) ** J. Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Questions and Twentieth-Century Answers (Berkeley and London 1996) * I. Kramnick (ed.), The Portable Enlightenment Reader (London 1995) M.C. Jacob, The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents (London 2000) On the ‘intellectual historical’ approach to the Enlightenment (and its discontents) * K.M. Baker, ‘On the Problem of the Ideological Origins of the French Revolution’, in: K.M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge 1990) R. Darnton, ‘The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France’, Past and Present 51 (1971) ** R. Darnton, ‘In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas’, Journal of Modern History 43 (1971), pp. 113-32. R. Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham 1991) J. Lough, ‘The Literary Underground Revisited’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 329 (1995) D. Goodman, The Republic of Letters. A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca and London 1994) Major monographs on the Enlightenment E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton 1951) ** P. Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York 1966-69) R. Anchor, The Enlightenment Tradition (Berkeley 1967) R.H. Commager, The Empire of Reason (New York 1977) R. Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775– 1800 (Cambridge/Mass. 1979) * M.C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment – Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (Oxford 1981) ** R. Koselleck, Critique and Crises: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge/Mass. 1998) * J. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (Oxford 2001) 2 R. Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York 2001) J. Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public Sphere in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge 2001) * G. Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York 2005) R. Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason: How the Enlightenment Transformed the Way We See our Bodies and Souls (London 2005) J. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 (Oxford 2006) On the Counter-Enlightenment R.R. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton 1939) H. Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment (Cambridge 1958) ** I. Berlin, ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, in: I. Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. H. Hardy (Oxford 1970) M. Landmann, ‘Critiques of Reason from Weber to Bloch’, Telos 29 (1976), pp. 187-198 D. Masseau, Les Ennemis des Philosophes: L’antiphilosophie au Temps des Lumières (Paris 2000) K.M. Baker and P. Reill (eds), What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Stanford 2001) * D. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity, new edn (Oxford 2002) J. Mali and R. Wokler, Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment (Philadelphia 2003) ** Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton 2004) A. Compagnon, Les Antimodernes: de Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes (Paris 2005) * G. Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (London 2006) Z. Sternhell, Les anti-Lumières : Du XVIIIe siècle à la guerre froide (Paris 2006) Seminar 1 Foundational statements: What is Enlightenment? What is Counter-Enlightenment? Set texts Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750) Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ (1784) Additional primary literature Voltaire, Essay on Customs and Morals (1756) Herder, Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind (1774) Mendelssohn, ‘On the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ (1784) Hamann, ‘Metacritique on the Purism of Reason’ (1784) Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795) Secondary Literature ** D. Outram, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in: D. Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge 1995), pp. 1-14 * H.B. Nisbet, ‘“Was ist Aufklärung?” The Concept of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany’, Journal of European Studies
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