Introduction: Answer to the Question: What Is Counter-Enlightenment?

Abstract

I  of the Enlightenment the eighteenth century was commonly known as the century of lumière, or light. Its advocates viewed themselves as the “party of humanity”: they sought to represent the “general will” rather than the standpoint of particular interests, estates, or castes. The champions of Enlightenment counterposed reason as an analytical solvent to dogma, superstition, and unwarranted social authority. Their compendium of political grievances culminated in the cahiers de doléances submitted to Louis XVI in conjunction with the summoning of the Estates General in 1788— a damning indictment of the injustices and corruptions that prevailed under the absolute monarchies of Louis and his predecessor, Louis XV. With one or two notable exceptions (e.g., Jean-Jacques Rousseau), the philosophes were political moderates. They confidently believed that the monarchy could be progressively restructured, and, consequently, put their faith in piecemeal political reform from above. As such, most were proponents of either “Enlightened Despotism” or, in the case of the so-called Anglomaniacs, Englishstyle constitutional monarchy. Yet, time and again, monarchical intransigence pushed them in the direction of democratic republicanism. When on June 27, 1789, the deputies representing the Third Estate—whose members had been bred on Enlightenment precepts—took their seats in the National Assembly on the left side of the hall, the modern political left was born.1 Of course, the same sequence of events precipitated the birth of the modern political right, whose adherents elected to sit on the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 S36 R37 © 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.