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

Darrin M. McMahon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 23, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0195136853 | ISBN-13: 978-0195136852

Critics have long treated the most important intellectual movement of modern history--the Enlightenment--as if it took shape in the absence of opposition. In this groundbreaking new study, Darrin McMahon demonstrates that, on the contrary, contemporary resistance to the Enlightenment was a major cultural force, shaping and defining the Enlightenment itself from the moment of inception, while giving rise to an entirely new ideological phenomenon-what we have come to think of as the "Right." McMahon skillfully examines the Counter-Enlightenment, showing that it was an extensive, international, and thoroughly modern affair.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

History has often overlooked the men and women who resisted the triumphal progress of Western society toward Reason: spiritual Luddites, it seems at first glance, hoping to smash the ideological machinery of atheism and democracy. But in this sophisticated deconstruction of conservative opposition to the Enlightenment, McMahon, a fellow in history at NYU, re-envisions intellectual history from 1750 to 1830 as an ideological dialectic foreshadowing the culture wars of our own time and helping to define modernity. As McMahon shows, many Catholics saw Voltaire and his ilk as harbingers of degenerate hedonism, a diabolical menace to church, state and family. These anti-philosophes accused their enemies of practicing the very intolerance they condemned, and were convinced that danger lurked in philosophic fanaticism. Their horrified voices, audible from the mid-18th century on, became louder as the Enlightenment gathered momentum. Unable to stop the French Revolution, their protests seemed prophetic to many when idealism turned to terror. The ghost of Counter-Enlightenment ideology has been conspicuous in more recent times in Spain, Italy and Latin America, just as the specter of leftist violence has been repeatedly invoked. McMahon's argument is deeply versed in recent scholarship; his prose is polished, and the book is illustrated with compelling examples of visual propaganda (notably, Voltaire caught in flagrante delicto). While this title lacks the mass appeal of Simon Schama's Citizens or other narrative-oriented histories of the revolution, its relevance to conservative-liberal tensions in the U.S. make it worthy of broad intellectual discussion.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

"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

"Remarkably well written...it will force revisions both of established views of, and new challenges to, the French and European Enlightenment."--Times Literary Supplement

"[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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (August 23, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195136853
• ISBN-13: 978-0195136852
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,061,294 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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28 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Other Side of the Story, November 10, 2002

By 

H. F. Gibbard "Noir Guy" (Dark City, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Hardcover)

This book provides an excellent look at how the Enlightenment in France was seen by its enemies. McMahon discusses in detail the arguments made by religious and political thinkers who dissented from the liberalizing currents that swept Europe in the Eighteenth Century. His discussion of the use of invective and paranoid rhetoric by the Right is a worthy companion to Robert Darnton's studies of the same tactics employed by liberal enemies of the Ancien Regieme.

Rick Perlstein theorizes in his recent book "Before the Storm" that the Sixties were as much about the rise of the American Right as they were about the New Left. McMahon makes the same point about the liberalism of the Revolutionary era. The conservative movement defined both itself and the left in reaction to the influx of new ideas. This book is an excellent study of this phenomenon.

34 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful, December 23, 2001

By 

[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Hardcover)

It is the most useful value of this book by Darrin McMahon that it shows the fallacy of those assumptions. There is, in McMahon's account a coherent and formidable counter-enlightenmnet ideology. It is not the pluralist and skeptical objections of a Herder or a Hamann, but the authoritarian, deeply Catholic and deeply illiberal world of Gerard, Seguir, Sabatier, Bonald and Barruel. The reader may wonder whose these people are, and in contrast to must recent writing critical of the Enlightenment, McMahon does not find these intellectuals worthy of much sympathy or intellectual admiration. The most famous of these is probably the Abbe Barruel, not for the acuity of his thought, but because he wrote in the late 1790s a book that became the bible of right-wing paranoia. In it he claimed that the French Revolution was a conspiracy of atheists, and Freemasons. As Norman Cohn pointed out a generation ago, this ideology would ultimately manifest itself in the forging of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

McMahon starts off with a chapter on pre-revolutionary Counter-Enlightenment which concentrates on Catholic and Royalist objections to the Enlightenment. He points out that many of them cited Rousseau against the deists and atheists, though later Rousseau would join Voltaire and Diderot as the anti-christ of the Enlightenment. In contrast to Furet he notes how conspiracy theories proliferated on the Counter-Enlightenment before the fall of the Bastille and as the years went on, fears of philosophe and Protestant conspiracies proliferated in the counter-revolutionary press. A particular virtue of McMahon's account is how well-documented it is. Too much revisionist history concentrates on only a few intellectuals, and concentrating on their exegesis. This is true of Keith Michael Baker's Inventing the French Revolution and for scholars such as Mona Ozouf who look at Robespierre and Saint Just, but not Barere or Carnot. McMahon is also useful on how this ideology formed a Counter-Enlightenment international, that spread its influence most in Catholic countries (though Edmund Burke did give Barruel a warm and most undeserved endorsement). Contra Joan Landes he reminds us of the obvious fact the leading supporters of female subordination were on the Counter-Enlightenment Right. He is useful in citing Timothy Tackett on the rise of conspiracy theory paranoia in revolutionary France, as well as Sheryl Kroen's work on the Restoration Regime.

There are some reservations to be made about the book. There is a tendency to over-emphasize the similarities between left and right (especially in these days when the similarities in America between right and center are all too evident). While it is true that the fears of both extremes fed the other, McMahon does not explain why the center failed to hold if its opponents were so patently paranoid. (My answer: arguably they weren't). Nor is McMahon as clear as he could be on the "modernity" of the Counter-Enlightenment. To some extent, describing something as modern is almost tautological. After all the World Trade Center was attacked with airplanes, not torches. How could one live and have an effect on the modern world without sharing some of its modernity? In pointing out that the Counter-Enlightenment wanted a revived Catholicism that was utopian to demand, McMahon does not sufficiently probe whether any political movement could survive without an appeal to something beyond the actually existing. McMahon also spends surprisingly little time discussing Joseph De Maistre, certainly the most important of these intellectuals. Nor is he entirely fair to Adorno and Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which does explicitly state that Enlightenment is essential to any hope for a better society. Adorno explictly stated that the only cure for the dilemmas of reason were more reason. McMahon cites Robert Darnton's critique. But Darnton fails to mention Adorno's defence of reason, and he makes his cases by citing the "good guys" of the Enlightenment. It is true, and important to remember, that Diderot admired Tahitian society and that Condorcet was open-minded and pluralistic. But it is also true that Hume and Kant indulged slavery and white supremacy and that Bentham was notoriously unimaginative and dogmatic. The scientism of a Teller or a Galton or a Heisenberg may be a heresy, but it is not a minor or incidental one. Notwithstanding these criticisms, however, this is an important book.

26 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Something you didn't learn in college, November 1, 2001

By 

W. R. Everdell (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Hardcover)

It's hard to write about the early history of the right wing because the real right has never been very well represented in the US and because the Enlightenment and the Revolution tend to crowd out the Counter-Enlightenment and Counter-Revolution. McMahon's book is the best there is on this subject in English and I know of nothing better in French or any other language. There aren't a lot of pages but they cover a tremendous lot of ideas and thinkers. Fans of political thought from any wing will be fascinated.