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.

See also

• J. G. Hamann
• Johann Gottfried Herder
• Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
• Joseph de Maistre
• Counter-Reformation
• The Enlightenment