The Counter-Enlightenment is an essay by Isaiah Berlin that examines eighteenth and nineteenth-century critics of Enlightenment rationalism and universalism, arguing that their ideas helped shape modern pluralism, historicism, and cultural particularism.
The essay was a synthesis of lectures and longer essays on the critics of the Enlightenment, especially Giambattista Vico, Johann Gottfried Herder, Joseph de Maistre and Johann Georg Hamann; his essays on Vico, Hamann and Herder were later collected in Three Critics of the Enlightenment. Berlin referred to this movement as the Counter-Enlightenment, a movement that arose primarily in late 18th and early 19th century Germany against the Enlightenment’s rationalism, universalism and empiricism.
In the essay, Vico is presented as as an early critic of attempts to understand human society through timeless rational principles detached from history,[1] Herder as a defender of cultural plurality and national individuality,[2] Hamann as a critic of abstract reason who stressed the role of language and imagination, and de Maistre as an authoritarian and anti-rationalist opponent of revolutionary universalism.
Commentators have argued that Berlin’s engagement with Counter-Enlightenment thinkers informed his view of ethics, a value pluralism and critique of monism.[3] The essay was first published in 1973 in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas,[4] and later reprinted in a collection of his works, Against the Current, in 1981.[5]
References
- ^ Berlin 1975, p. 5.
- ^ Berlin 1975, p. 11.
- ^ Cherniss & Hardy 2010.
- ^ https://xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=DicHist/uvaGenText/tei/DicHist2.xml;chunk.id=dv2-11;toc.depth=1;toc.id=dv2-11;brand=default
- ^ “Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas”. Princeton University Press. Archived from the original on 2 June 2013. Retrieved 18 April 2013.
Bibliography
- Berlin, Isaiah (1973). “The Counter-Enlightenment” (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-09-03. Retrieved 2013-08-03.
- Cherniss, Joshua; Hardy, Henry (25 May 2010). “Isaiah Berlin”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 7 March 2012.
- Mali, Joseph; Wokler, Robert (2003). “Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment”. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. 93 (5). University of Pennsylvania Press. JSTOR 20020351.