Counter-Enlightenment

In the history of ideas, the counter-Enlightenment is a name first given by Isaiah Berlin to currents of thought that opposed the rationalist and liberal ideals of the Enlightenment. Berlin's project in a series of essays was the critical recovery of the ideas of Giambattista Vico, Johann Georg Hamann (whom Berlin virtually rediscovered in the essay The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the origins of modern irrationalism), and Johann Gottfried Herder, and an account of their appeal, so foreign to the Enlightenment, and their 19th- and 20th-century consequences. For Berlin and modern historians, the counter-Enlightenment embodies a pluralist vision, accepting the fundamental irreconcilability of cultural values and their ineradicable conflicts with rationalism, as well as the conflicts within Romanticism, irrationalism, mysticism, and neo-Medieval forms of religious thought.

References

• Berlin, Isaiah, "The Counter-Enlightenment" in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ISBN 0374527172.
• Berlin, Isaiah, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, Henry Hardy, editor, Princeton University Press, 2003
• Mali, Joseph and Robert Wokler, "Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment" in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 2003, ISBN 0871699354
• McMahon, Darrin M., Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity details the reaction to Voltaire and the Enlightenment in European intellectual history from 1750 to 1830, relevant to late 20th century conservative-liberal tensions in the US "culture wars".