Review Article: Painters of Ruins and Prophets of the Past

I borrow the phrase from Allan Megill (1985 ) Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida . Berkeley: University of California Press.

This form of tyrannophilia is analyzed in Mark Lilla ( 2001) The Reckless Imagination: Intellectuals in Politics. New York: New York Review of Books.

It has often been the case that pessimism was equated with theories of decline that proved to be unsustainable or false. In reality, Dienstag writes, ‘while pessimists may posit a decline, it is the denial of progress, not an insistence on some eventual doom that marks out modern pessimism’ (p. 18). The link between pessimists and theorists of decline would have deserved additional consideration. In particular, Oswald Spengler’s once highly influential The Decline of the Western World should be of interest to students of pessimism, mainly because of its political influence in inter-war Europe. I also note in passing that Spengler (like Toynbee) illustrates the case of a systematic pessimist, whose style differs from that of masters of aphorism such as Nietzsche and Cioran.

Joshua Foa Dienstag ( 1997) Dancing in Chains: Narrative and Memory in Political Theory . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Quoted in Joshua F. Dienstag (2006) Pessimism: Philosophy. Ethic. Spirit, p. 121. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Simone Weil ( 1992) Lectures on Philosophy, p. 197. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.

See Karl Löwith ( 1949) Meaning in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Arthur Schopenhauer ( 1966) The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, pp. 634-5. New York: Dover.

E.M. Cioran ( 1995) Tears and Saints, p. 112. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dienstag (n. 5), pp. 30, 31. For a discussion of boredom in 19th-century France, see César Graña (1967) Modernity and its Discontents: French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 127-38. New York: Harper & Row. The link between time and the modern idea of decadence is explored in Matei Calinescu (1987) Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, 2nd edn, pp. 151-7. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

In other words, one can be an anti-modern without being a reactionary.

It is tempting to ask if a better term here would be ‘opponents and critics of the Revolution’ rather than ‘counter-revolutionaries’.

The very word ‘monarchiens’ did not exist in 1789. It was invented a year or so later by Jacobins, who opposed and denounced the moderation of the supporters of constitutional monarchy led by J.-J. Mounier (1758-1806), an admirer of Montesquieu and the English constitution. The other prominent members were Malouet (1740-1814), Lally-Tollendal (1751-1830), and Clermont-Tonnerre (1757-92). I discuss the monarchiens in my book Faces of Moderation (forthcoming, Princeton University Press).

Alexis de Tocqueville (2001 ) The Old Regime and the Revolution, vol. 2, tr. Alan S. Kahan , p. 89. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

It is ironic that the modernism of Montesquieu’s ideas was the outcome of an eulogy of the liberty of the nobles.

For a comprehensive account of ‘aristocratic liberalism’ see Alan Kahan (2001) Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville, 2nd edn. New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions Publishers.

Quoted in Antoine Compagnon (2005) Les Antimodernes: De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes, p. 40. Paris: Gallimard.

Oddly, the word belongs to Péguy who declared that ‘electoral prostitution is truly the degeneration of a great old love’, the profound love for the ideals of the Republic. See Compagnon (n. 17), p. 41.

Baudelaire (1957) The Intimate Journals of Charles Baudelaire, tr. Christopher Isherwood, p. 32. Boston: Beacon Press.

The word is, in fact, Burckhardt’s. For an analysis of his rejection of historical teleology, see the chapter on Burckhardt in Löwith (n. 7), pp. 20-32.

See Albert O. Hirschman (1991) The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

The definition of pessimism given in Littré’s Dictionary was the following: ‘Celui qui trouve tout mal. Se dit quelquefois de ceux qui, dans les temps de dissensions politiques, n’attendent ce qu’ils regardent comme le bien que de l’excès du mal’ (quoted in Compagnon (n. 17), p. 64). During the last decades of the 19th century, Compagnon notes, the deepest cause of the popularity of pessimism had to do with the Zeitgeist and people’s inability or unwillingness to embrace a new doctrine based on a genuine new belief.

Paul Bénichou ( 1992) L’École du desénchantement: Saint-Beuve, Nodier, Musset, Nerval, Gautier. Paris: Gallimard.

In this regard, see Balzac’s Le Médecin de campagne, a true anti-modern manifesto, drawing inspiration from Maistre’s political writings.

Ferdinand Brunetière (1885) ‘Le pessimisme dans le roman’, La Revue des Deux Mondes (1 July): 214-22; and (1886) ‘Les causes du pessimisme’, Revue Bleue (30 Jan.): 137-45; (1890) ‘La philosophie de Schopenhauer et les consequences du pessimisme’, La Revue des Deux Mondes (1 Nov.): 210-21; and (1879) ‘Le pessimisme au XIXe siècle’, Revue des Deux Mondes (15 Jan.): 478-80.

See Paul Bourget (1885) ‘Le pessimisme de la jeune génération’, Journal des Débats (16 June).

Graña (n. 11), p. 75.

Charles Baudelaire (1961) Œuvres Complètes, p. 1263. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. For an English translation, see Baudelaire (n. 19), esp. pp. 20-3.

Baudelaire (n. 19), p. 41.

Quoted in Graña (n. 11), p. 77.

Baudelaire (n. 19), p. 29.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1986) Recollections , ed. J. P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr , tr. G. Lawrence , p. 67. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

On this issue, see Tony Judt (1992) Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956. Berkeley: University of California Press.

See Dienstag (n. 5), p. 271.

See e.g. Dienstag (n. 5), pp. 71-2.

For an example of this ambiguity, see the following statement: ‘Pessimism envisions a democracy of moments for an individual who can neither escape time but is not imprisoned in it either’ (Dienstag (n. 5), p. 41).

A similar point was made by Céline Surprenant in her review of Compagnon’s book (2006) ‘Against the New’, TLS (28 June): 12. On the modernism of Baudelaire and the theory of ‘the two modernities’, see Calinescu (n. 10), pp. 41-58. For an analysis of the concept of ‘counter-modernity’, see Peter Berger (1979) The Heretical Imperative. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Marc Fumaroli (2003) Chateaubriand: Poésie et terreur. Paris: Éditions de Fallois.

Zeev Sternhell (1997) La droite révolutionnarire, 1885-1914, 2nd edn. Paris: Gallimard. To the list of his own anti-moderns, Sternhell included Arthur de Gobineau and Hippolyte Taine.

Calinescu (n. 10), p. 156. For another interpretation of the ambiguity surrounding the idea of decadence, see Richard Gilman (1979) Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet. New York: Farar, Straus & Giroux.

On Vico’s anti-modernism, see Mark Lilla (1991) G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lilla argued that Vico’s anti-modern stance is nowhere more visible than in connection with his stance on historical inevitability, the limits of rationalism, and his anti-modern theological metaphysics. Yet, in some important respects, Vico, too, was a modern. According to Lilla, ‘an important part of Vico’s legacy to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is his discovery that a modern social science can serve anti-modern political and religious ends’ (p. 234).

Quoted in Löwith (n. 7), p. 24.

On Burckhardt’s pessimism in perspective, see Kahan (n. 16), pp. 119-25. For a comprehensive study of Burckhardt’s political and social thought emphasizing his skepticism rather than his pessimism, see Richard Sigurdson (2004) Jacob Burckhardt’s Social and Political Thought. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Dienstag’s focus on Rousseau’s early period can be criticized for underplaying the importance of later works such as Emile and The Social Contract. This is all the more important since Dienstag sees Rousseau as ‘the patriarch of pessimism’ (p. 49) who insisted the increase of knowledge and civilization since the Renaissance have created a society of excessive pride, hypocrisy, vanity, and decadence. The reader might disagree with Dienstag’s claim that ‘Rousseau sought a polity fortified against the ravages of time’ (p. 76). What Rousseau wanted to avoid, one might argue, was vice and decadence rather than the ravages of time.

Isaiah Berlin ( 1994) ‘Introduction’, to Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, ed. and tr. Richard Lebrun. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. On Sternhell , see n. 39 above.

Quoted in Sigurdson (n. 43), p. 219.