Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity

Critics have long treated the most important intellectual movement of modern hstory - the Enlightenment - as if it took shape in the absence of opposition. In this ground-breaking new study, Darrin McMahon demonstrates that, on the contrary, contemporary resistance to the Enlightenment was a major cultural force, shaping and defining the Enlightenment from the moment of its inception, while giving rise to an entirely new ideological phenomenon - what we have come to think of as the "Right". Born in France, but spread throughout Europe and the New World in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Counter-Enlightenment was neither a rarified current in the history of ideas nor an atavistic relic of the past, but an extensive, international, and thoroughly modern affair. Drawing on a range od primary sources, McMahon shows that well before the French Revolution, enemies of the Enlightenment were warning that the secular thrust of modern philosophy would give way to horrors of an unprecedented kind, Greeting 1789, in turn, as the realization of their worst fears, they fought the Revolution from its onset, profoundly affecting its subsequent course, The radicalization - and violence - of the Revolution was as much the product of militant resistance as any inherent logic. In the wake of Revolutionary upheaval, enemies of the Enligtenment assumed positions of immense cultural authority, consolidating their political vision of the Right in the first third of the nineteenth century, and spreading their construction of the Enlightenment throughout the world. In doing so they developed a critique of modernity that remains with us to the present day.

Review :
"[E]xcellently researched and elegantly written study....Using the theoretical and methodological tools forged in the last three decades of enlightenment scholarship, McMahon enriches our understanding of antiphilosophie by broadening the focus of inquiry to include names of largely forgotten men and women from varying geographical and confessional backgrounds whose opposition to the values of the Age of Enlightenment helped to define it as an intellectual movement. What we are looking at in this important study of the dialectics of Counter-Enlightenment is, in fact, the genesis of the European political Right from its last decade of the ancien regime to the postmodernist era."--The Historian "A well-written study...of an early culture war that will not be unfamiliar to us today--a war of mutual simplification and caricature spiraling downward into suspicion and hate....Presents a useful genealogy of a brand of conservatism that remained influential through the mid-20th century, and, more pressingly, a rough template for a host of counter-Enlightenment ideas that are with us still today, from Cambridge to Kabul."--Wall Street Journal "[I]n this sophisticated deconstruction of conservative opposition to the Enlightenment, McMahon...reenvisions intellectual history from 1750 to 1830 as an ideological dialectic foreshadowing the culture wars of our own time and helping to define modernity."--Publishers Weekly "This well-researched and beautifully written study applies insights of recent Enlightenment historiography to the heretofore neglected area of the anti-philosophes."--CHOICE "Beyond its chronological breadth and the relative novelty of its subject, this book has much to recommend it. Well-written and deeply researched, it takes up important historiographical questions. McMahons's work answers Roger Chartier's question about whether the existence of the Enlightenment was merely a fragment of the revolutionaries' imagination."--Journal of Social History "Required reading for all eighteenth-century specialists, and anyone interested in cultural history"-- French Review "Treating these writers seriously, as few have, while in no way aligning himself with the, the author gives these anguished mena tragic stature hitherto denied them by the heirs of Enlightenment that most serious historians are."--History "McMahon has performed a great service in bringing to life the lost world of French Counter-Enlightenment and its international echoes in Italy, Germany, and even North America. He is an artful and clear writer."--Claremont Review of Books "Presents interesting and hitherto little known evidence of the opposition to the Enlightenment in France exposing another side to the typically told story. McMahon makes a significant contribution to the study of the reception of the Enlightenment."--American Historical Review "Darrin McMahon's study of the 'culture wars' between the French philosophes and their enemies before, during, and after the French Revolution makes important contributions to our understanding of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and our contemporary situation....A richly textured study."--H-Net "McMahon's book will be of most interest to those who want to learn more about the French Revolution and the philosophies which became the driving force behind it. The parallels between the right-wing opposition to the Revolution and right-wing movements today are not his main theme; nevertheless, anyone willing to invest a bit of time with this book will discover a great many interesting and provocative parallels."--About.com