Review article: The war against the Enlightenment

Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich (eds) (1981) The Enlightenment in National Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

For a very good overview of this literature, see chapter 2 of Dorinda Outram (1995) The Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Isaiah Berlin ( 1979) ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’, in H. Hardy (ed.), Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. London: Hogarth Press. This essay was first published in (1973) Dictionary of the History of Ideas , vol. 2, pp. 1-12. New York: Scribner’s. Sternhell incorrectly identifies the first use of ‘counter-Enlightenment’ in English as occurring in William Barrett (1962) Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, p. 274. New York: Doubleday. In fact, Barratt used it in (1949) ‘Art, Aristocracy and Reason’, Partisan Review 16(6): 663-4, a decade earlier than the 1st edn (1958) of his book. Zeev Sternhell (2010) The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, p. 446 n. 4. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Zeev Sternhell ( 2006) Anti-Lumières: Du XVIIIe siècle à la guerre froide. Paris: Fayard .

Isaiah Berlin (1981) ‘Reply to Hans Aarsleff ’, London Review of Books 20(3) (5-18 Nov. 1981): 7-8.

Graeme Garrard ( 2006) Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present. London: Routledge.

Garrard (n. 6), pp. 7-8. Despite Sternhell’s firm rejection of the idea of a plurality of Enlightenments, he refers throughout his book to ‘the Franco-Kantian Enlightenment’, ‘the British Enlightenment’, ‘the Scottish Enlightenment’, and ‘the French Enlightenment’.

Garrard (n. 6), p. 4.

Peter Gay ( 1969) The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2, The Science of Freedom, p. 192. London: Wildwood House.

Steven Lestition (2007) ‘Countering, Transposing, or Negating the Enlightenment? A Response to Robert Norton’, Journal of the History of Ideas 68(4) (Oct.): 680.

Ibid. p. 680.

C.P. Courtney (1975) ‘Edmund Burke and the Enlightenment’, in A. Whiteman et al. (eds) Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants, p. 311. Oxford: Clarendon.

Tzvetan Todorov (2009) In Defence of the Enlightenment, tr. Gila Walker. London: Atlantic Books.

See Graeme Garrard (2007) ‘Strange Reversals: Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment’, in R. Wokler and G. Crowder (eds) The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin . Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books .