Counter-Enlightenment
This page covers the political concept of Counter-Enlightenment. For a page on Counter-Enlightenment from a philosophical perspective, see
the Philosophyball Page
Not to be confused with
Dark Enlightenment
"Men gather the clouds, and then they complain of the tempests that follow."
"Now, this might strike some viewers as harsh, but I believe everyone involved in this story should die."
Counter-Enlightenment is the umbrella term that represents a general political view opposed to the ideas of the 
Enlightenment, viewing them as fundamentally misguided at best or evil and degenerate at worst. Enlightenment ideas that are condemned include: 
Secularism and 
Materialism, 
Whig historiography and the notions of 
social progress, 
egalitarianism and the blank slate theory, the 
inherent rights of man as a secular concept, negative freedom (the absence of external constraints on personal decision making), 
nationalism (which may be considered a secular religion to supplant actual religions), 
popular sovereignty, 
Humanism (which is viewed to be incompatible with many religions), 
Democracy (including 
non-liberal democracy), 
anti-royalism and 
Republicanism as expressions of popular sovereignty, and many, many other enlightenment ideas.
Depending on the context, these ideas may be contested from an explicitly religious context, especially from that of an organised religion like Christianity or Islam, the theology of which may explicitly condemn these ideas ("liberalism is a sin"). In other cases, it comes from other foundations such as "the nature of man" and "the nature of history" (progressive vs cyclical). Oftentimes, these two perspectives complement each other and function in tandem, but sometimes there is a disconnect between what one may call the temporal perspective and the religious perspective.
History
Despite criticism of the Enlightenment being a widely discussed topic in twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought, the term 'Counter-Enlightenment' was slow to enter general usage. It was first mentioned briefly in English in William Barrett's 1949 article "Art, Aristocracy and Reason" in Partisan Review. He used the term again in his 1958 book on existentialism, Irrational Man; however, his comment on Enlightenment criticism was limited. In Germany, the expression "Gegen-Aufklärung" has a longer history. It was probably coined by Friedrich Nietzsche in "Nachgelassene Fragmente" in 1877.
Lewis White Beck used this term in his Early German Philosophy (1969), a book about Counter-Enlightenment in Germany. Beck claims that there is a counter-movement arising in Germany in reaction to Frederick II's secular authoritarian state. On the other hand, Johann Georg Hamann and his fellow philosophers believe that a more organic conception of social and political life, a more vitalistic view of nature, and an appreciation for beauty and the spiritual life of man have been neglected by the eighteenth century.
Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin established this term's place in the history of ideas. He used it to refer to a movement that arose primarily in late 18th- and early 19th-century Germany against the rationalism, universalism and empiricism that are commonly associated with the Enlightenment. Berlin's essay "The Counter-Enlightenment" was first published in 1973 and later reprinted in a collection of his works, Against the Current, in 1981. The term has been more widely used since.
Berlin argues that, while there were opponents of the Enlightenment outside of Germany (e.g. 
Joseph de Maistre) and before the 1770s (e.g. Giambattista Vico), Counter-Enlightenment thought did not take hold until the Germans 'rebelled against the dead hand of France in the realms of culture, art and philosophy, and avenged themselves by launching the great counter-attack against the Enlightenment.' This German reaction to the imperialistic universalism of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, which had been forced on them first by the francophile Frederick II of Prussia, then by the armies of Revolutionary France and finally by Napoleon, was crucial to the shift of consciousness that occurred in Europe at this time, leading eventually to Romanticism. The consequence of this revolt against the Enlightenment was pluralism. The opponents to the Enlightenment played a more crucial role than its proponents, some of whom were monists, whose political, intellectual and ideological offspring have been terror and totalitarianism.
Darrin McMahon
In his book Enemies of the Enlightenment (2001), historian Darrin McMahon extends the Counter-Enlightenment back to pre-Revolutionary France and down to the level of 'Grub Street,' thereby marking a major advance on Berlin's intellectual and Germanocentric view. McMahon focuses on the early opponents to the Enlightenment in France, unearthing a long-forgotten 'Grub Street' literature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries aimed at the philosophes. He delves into the obscure world of the 'low Counter-Enlightenment' that attacked the encyclopédistes and fought to prevent the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas in the second half of the century. Many people from earlier times attacked the Enlightenment for undermining religion and the social and political order. It later became a major theme of conservative criticism of the Enlightenment. After the French Revolution, it appeared to vindicate the warnings of the anti-philosophes in the decades before 1789.
Graeme Garrard
Cardiff University professor Graeme Garrard claims that historian William R. Everdell was the first to situate Rousseau as the "founder of the Counter-Enlightenment" in his 1971 dissertation and in his 1987 book, Christian Apologetics in France, 1730–1790: The Roots of Romantic Religion. In his 1996 article, "the Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity", in the American Political Science Review (Vol. 90, No. 2), Arthur M. Melzer corroborates Everdell's view in placing the origin of the Counter-Enlightenment in the religious writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, further showing Rousseau as the man who fired the first shot in the war between the Enlightenment and its opponents. Graeme Garrard follows Melzer in his "Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment" (2003). This contradicts Berlin's depiction of Rousseau as a philosophe (albeit an erratic one) who shared the basic beliefs of his Enlightenment contemporaries. But similar to McMahon, Garrard traces the beginning of Counter-Enlightenment thought back to France and before the German Sturm und Drang movement of the 1770s. Garrard's book Counter-Enlightenments (2006) broadens the term even further, arguing against Berlin that there was no single 'movement' called 'The Counter-Enlightenment'. Rather, there have been many Counter-Enlightenments, from the middle of the 18th century to the 20th century among critical theorists, postmodernists and feminists. The Enlightenment has opponents on all points of its ideological compass, from the far left to the far right, and all points in between. Each of the Enlightenment's challengers depicted it as they saw it or wanted others to see it, resulting in a vast range of portraits, many of which are not only different but incompatible.
James Schmidt
The idea of Counter-Enlightenment has evolved in the following years. The historian James Schmidt questioned the idea of 'Enlightenment' and therefore of the existence of a movement opposing it. As the conception of 'Enlightenment' has become more complex and difficult to maintain, so has the idea of the 'Counter-Enlightenment'. Advances in Enlightenment scholarship in the last quarter-century have challenged the stereotypical view of the 18th century as an 'Age of Reason', leading Schmidt to speculate on whether the Enlightenment might not be a creation of its opponents, but the other way round. The fact that the term 'Enlightenment' was first used in 1894 in English to refer to a historical period supports the argument that it was a late construction projected back onto the 18th century.
The French Revolution
By the mid-1790s, the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution fueled a major reaction against the Enlightenment. Many leaders of the French Revolution and their supporters made Voltaire and Rousseau, as well as Marquis de Condorcet's ideas of reason, progress, anti-clericalism, and emancipation central themes to their movement. It led to an unavoidable backlash to the Enlightenment, as there were people opposed to the revolution. Many counter-revolutionary writers, such as 
Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, and Augustin Barruel, asserted an intrinsic link between the Enlightenment and the Revolution. They blamed the Enlightenment for undermining traditional beliefs that sustained the Áncien Régime. As the Revolution became increasingly bloody, the idea of 'Enlightenment' was discredited, too. Hence, the French Revolution and its aftermath have contributed to the development of Counter-Enlightenment thought.
Edmund Burke was among the first of the Revolution's opponents to relate the philosophes to the instability in France in the 1790s. His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) identifies the Enlightenment as the principal cause of 
the French Revolution. In Burke's opinion, the philosophes provided the revolutionary leaders with the theories on which their political schemes were based
Augustin Barruel's Counter-Enlightenment ideas were well developed before the revolution. He worked as an editor for the anti-philosophes literary journal, L'Année Littéraire. Barruel argues in his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797) that the Revolution was the consequence of a conspiracy of philosophes and freemasons.
In Considerations on France (1797), Joseph de Maistre interprets the Revolution as divine punishment for the sins of the Enlightenment. According to him, "the revolutionary storm is an overwhelming force of nature unleashed on Europe by God that mocked human pretensions.
Romanticism
In the 1770s, the 'Sturm und Drang' movement started in Germany. It questioned some key assumptions and implications of the Aufklärung, and the term 'Romanticism' was first coined. Many early Romantic writers such as Chateaubriand, Federich von Hardenberg (Novalis) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge inherited the Counter-Revolutionary antipathy towards the philosophes. All three directly blamed the philosophes in France and the Aufklärer in Germany for devaluing beauty, spirit and history in favour of a view of man as a soulless machine and a view of the universe as a meaningless, disenchanted void lacking richness and beauty. One particular concern to early Romantic writers was the allegedly anti-religious nature of the Enlightenment since the philosophes and Aufklärer were generally deists, opposed to revealed religion. Some historians, such as Hamann, nevertheless contend that this view of the Enlightenment as an age hostile to religion is common ground between these Romantic writers and many of their conservative Counter-Revolutionary predecessors. However, not many have commented on the Enlightenment, except for Chateaubriand, Novalis, and Coleridge, since the term itself did not exist at the time, and most of their contemporaries ignored it.
The historian Jacques Barzun argues that Romanticism has its roots in the Enlightenment. It was not anti-rational, but rather balanced rationality against the competing claims of intuition and the sense of justice. This view is expressed in Goya's Sleep of Reason, in which the nightmarish owl offers the dozing social critic of Los Caprichos a piece of drawing chalk. Even the rational critic is inspired by irrational dream content under the gaze of the sharp-eyed lynx. Marshall Brown makes much the same argument as Barzun in Romanticism and Enlightenment, questioning the stark opposition between these two periods.
By the middle of the 19th century, the memory of the French Revolution was fading, and so was the influence of Romanticism. In this optimistic age of science and industry, there were few critics of the Enlightenment, and few explicit defenders. Friedrich Nietzsche is a notable and highly influential exception. After an initial defence of the Enlightenment in his so-called 'middle period' (late 1870s to early 1880s), Nietzsche turned vehemently against it.
Variants
Maistreanism/Theological Counter-Enlightenment
Joseph de Maistre saw the follow-ups of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the subsequent Reign of Terror, as a natural consequence of the abandonment of God and Christian morality, in fact viewing them as divine punishment for the hubris of man. He explicitly condemned secular rationalism as a concept upon which governments cannot be built upon, as they would inevitably fall to internal conflict. In his view, the Catholic faith should serve as the foundation for all authority and government. However, while De Maistre was an 
anti-humanist, he did justify some humanist principles from a religious perspective.
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and 
individualism, clandestine literature, 
paganism, 
idealization of nature, 
suspicion of science and 
industrialization, and glorification of the past with a strong preference for the 
medieval rather than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalisation of nature. It was embodied most strongly in visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education, chess, and the social/natural sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing 
conservatism, 
liberalism, 
radicalism, and 
nationalism.
Personality
There are two possible depictions of Counter-Enlightenment. The first one is coded to 
Romanticism and its artistic figures and characters from the period's works, being poetic, mystical, and idealistic.
The second depiction is as a 
stereotypical medieval executioner and torturer. He is a 
religious fundamentalist and is extremely cruel and unfeeling to his victims, envisioning himself as God's executioner. May be drawn with props such as tongs, red hot pokers, saws, knives, and any number of other torture devices from the Dark Ages.
Due to this mismatch Counter-Enlightenment is canonically
schizophrenic.
Stylistic Notes
Counter-Enlightenment ought to have the mannerisms and behaviour of Duke Volpe "The Wolf" from Stronghold, see here for his voicelines
How to Draw
- Draw a ball
- Fill it with dark blue
- Draw a circle in a darker blue
- Draw a circle inside that circle in a yet darker blue
- Draw another, yet darker, circle inside that circle
- Inside that circle, draw a circle darker than the previous one
- Add the eyes and you're done
| Color Name | HEX | RGB | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dark Blue | #2C2786 | rgb(44, 39, 134) | |
| Darker Blue | #2C2967 | rgb(44, 41, 103) | |
| Even Darker Blue | #24224E | rgb(36, 34, 78) | |
| Still Darker Blue | #131236 | rgb(19, 18, 54) | |
| Darkest Blue | #050429 | rgb(5, 4, 41) | |
Relations
Extinguishers
Reactionaryism - A good son that carries on my work.
Monarchism - I thank you for employing me, Your Majesty.
Catholic Theocracy 
- And I thank you, my Lord Cardinal. Why did you stop employing me?
Protestant Theocracy - Back in ye olden days, you recognised the severe flaws of humanism and of that thought process, some of your ideas are very neat.
Puritan Theocracy - Much like the above but more consistent, now... Time to set the nooses.
Feudalism and 
Mercantilism - Ahhh... The good olden days...
Classical Conservatism - Thou hast the right mindset!
Crusadism - Deus Vult!
Christian Theocracy - There shan't be a separation of church and state!
Reactionary Socialism - Thou art the only good socialist, for thy pills art as red as thou art.
Byzantine Model - You are everything I ever loved, and are also a fan of mutilating political enemies!
Authoritarian Conservatism and 
Francoism - Let us commit 
white terror against the promoters of false light!
Black Hundredism - Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.
Chinese Theocracy, 
Neo-Ottomanism, 
Jihadism and 
The Shogunate - Good to see that the East held out a bit longer and resisted the false light.
Khomeinism - One of the few good republics. Bring on the white terror.
Reactionary Modernism - Who says that technology is incompatible with the rejection of the Enlightenment?
Morally Gray
Hobbesianism - While thou may be an enlightenment philosopher, your Leviathan is a neat idea. But thy lack of importance in thy faith leaves a lot to be desired...
Reactionary Liberalism - Pardon? Well, I'm glad you did the dirty work for me in 
France.
Conservative Liberalism - Even more moderate than the above, but 
Edmund Burke is pretty good.
National Liberalism - Liberalism and Nationalism are both deplorable, but you like the two above, plus Lafayette is also pretty good.
Reactionary Libertarianism - I quite like your ideas, but isn't libertarianism an unholy spawn of the Enlightenment?
Neoreactionaryism - Are you sure that you are a reactionary? You seem to have a lot of... Enlightenment inspirations.
Anti-Humanism - Human rights are an unholy joke that places man above God and all that is holy! That being said, I despise thy modern variants. And man is still made in the image of God, we are not just animals.
Illuminatism - Enlightenment occultist! However, we are both obscurantists (just in different ways), and we both like Consiglio dei Dieci.
Kraterocracy - Yes, rejection of "human rights" and stalwartism are blessed, but I believe that straying away from God is a false path to false strength.
Can you not see that this "God" you follow imposes rules on you that limit you in your conquest against degeneracy? Tell me again, what is your "God's" 5th commandment?
Avaritionism - I can warm your desire to fight for money and do godless actions as long as you help me and those whom I represent. However, capitalism and anarchism are products of the enlightenment.
Romantic Nationalism - While Nationalism is a product of the Enlightenment, you are most certainly preferable to classical nationalism.
False Light
Enlightenment Thought - Your time on the Earth is limited. You better say your prayers.
- No, your time of relevancy draws to a close. The light is shining across the world.
Voltaire - "The ungodly Arch-Villain Voltaire has died like a dog! I have always had God before my eyes, friends who have no religion cannot long be my friends." As the youth would say, rest in piss bozo, thou shalt not be missed.
Neo-Enlightenment - Unlike thy father, you will be forgotten, buried, never achieving the legacy you wish to claim.
Enlightened Absolutism - DAMN THEE BOY! I will have my revenge...
Fascism and 
Marxism - Godless Hegelians!
Nazism - I wish I were the one to have killed thy revolutionary nationalist state, instead of 
them...- Marxism-Leninism - Fortunately, I was the one to kill you.
Pope Saint John Paul II ended you rightly. 
Neo-Marxism and 
Frankfurt School - You claiming to hate the enlightenment does not matter. All of your influences come from it, and your ideas are inherently in line with its teachings.
Classical Liberalism - The punishment for treason is the breaking wheel.
Queer Anarchism - And the pyre for sodomy... Well, actually... I might have had something more apt in mind.
Homoconservatism - Ah yes... One screams rebellion against order, and the other twists it from within; both of you deserve but one outcome.
Homofascism - Come one, come all, there's enough red hot glass rods to shove up all of you!
Jacobinism - I hope to find thy severed jaw and preserve it for future generations to spit on.
Girondism and 
La Plaineism - Your revolution ate you before we could get to you, like 
Saturn devouring his children.
Nationalism - All of your ideas are modernist, it just so happens you were abandoned by the mob as they have moved on to the next thing.
Progressivism - I will beat you with barbed whips for saying things like that!
- We won't give up our hard-earned progress without a fight! *gets hit with barbed whip* OW
Revolutionary Progressivism - Dark theatres are best reserved for dark deeds. *Gouges out eyes with a red hot poker*
Esoteric Fascism - Dirty Satanic occultist! "Servant of the demiurge"? Me? That's gnostic talk, heathen...
Satanic Theocracy - Had you not displeased God, he wouldn't have sent me, child.
Secular Satanism - Blasphemy deserves no mercy, thou shalt be crushed to death.
Illegalism - Ah, the marauder has finally been caught. God truly is just, as now I will inflict misery that you brought into this world upon your flesh, tenfold!
State Liberalism - Little tyrant, lost your mandate and your strength, now you lie before me, begging for thy death. Sweet release I tend to grant, but as for you... You'll wish the Devil your soul had.
Fordism - Wait, you WHAT? I'll have to think of even worse devices to do your crimes justice.
Further Information
For overlapping political theory see:
Reactionaryism, 
Reactionary Modernism, 
NeoreactionaryismWikipedia
Gallery
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- ↑ "Мракобесие" - "Obscurantist insanity" or "Darkness obsession". Literally translated as "obscurantism".
- ↑ "I am a Bourbonist out of honour, a monarchist out of reason, and a republican out of taste and temperament"
- ↑ "The Enlightenment turned us away from truth and toward a darkling weakening horizon, sad and grey to see. The afterglow of Christianity is near gone now, and a stygian silence lurks in wait."
