Enemies of the Enlightenment
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (2001) is a book by historian Darrin McMahon.
It extends the Counter-Enlightenment both back to pre-Revolutionary France and down to the level of 'Grub Street', thereby marking a major advance on Isaiah Berlin's intellectual and Germanocentric view. McMahon focuses on the early enemies of the Enlightenment in France, unearthing a long-forgotten 'Grub Street' literature in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries aimed at the philosophes. He delves into the obscure and at times unseemly world of the 'low Counter-Enlightenment' that attacked the encyclopedistes and fought an often dirty battle to prevent the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas in the second half of the century. A great many of these early opponents of the Enlightenment attacked it for undermining religion and the social and political order. This later became a major theme of conservative criticism of the Enlightenment after the French Revolution appeared to vindicate the warnings of the anti-philosophes in the decades prior to 1789.
