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

McMahon, Darrin M.

ISBN 10: 0195158938 / ISBN 13: 9780195158939

Published by Oxford University Press, 2001

About this Item

xiii, 262 pp. "Conceiving of modernity as an ongoing contest between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment leads McMahon to the intriguing conclusion that today's 'culture wars' have been a permanent feature of modern life from the beginning." A few b&w illustrations. Bright clean copy.

Seller Inventory # 017614

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195158938
• ISBN 13: 9780195158939
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • History

About this title

Synopsis

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.

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

"[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