The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition [Hardcover]

This is a fine interpretive study with a distinct point of view covering a significant slice of modern political and social thought. Be aware, however, that you must have more than a passing interest in the Enlightenment and its opponents for the book to hold your attention. Zeev Sternhell explores the ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder and Edmund Burke (initially) and examines how certain of their themes were echoed by an array of men he deems to be Anti-Enlightenment thinkers, including, for instance, Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Carlyle, Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, Charles Maurras, Maurice Barrès, Oswald Spengler, Benedetto Croce, and Friedrich Meinecke. Toward the end he devotes nearly an entire chapter to Isaiah Berlin, whom he associates with this group (with Herder especially) and whom he robustly criticizes.

Sternhell ties these figures to a "second modernity," a political tradition based on the primacy of the community and the subordination of the individual to the collectivity. These men were averse to Rousseau, Kant, and the philosophes. They rejected the notion of universal natural rights and doubted that society might be re-made through the application of reason without fomenting disaster. Sternhell paints them as cultural relativists whose inclinations provided a conceptual framework for the European ethnic nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

One gets a good sense of what Sternhell objects to most in this tradition by his exclusion of Nietzsche, even though he credits the German with the invention of the term "Gegen-Aufklärung" and calls him "the greatest enemy of Enlightenment thought ever." Nietzsche stands apart from these others, the author believes, "owing to his violent antinationalism, his intense hostility to anti-Semitism, his unremitting cosmopolitanism, his aristocratic individualism, his attraction to France, [and] his admiration of Voltaire and Rousseau."

Sternhell's apparent primary purpose is to demonstrate the weaknesses, prejudices, contradictions, and ill consequences of the "second modernity," and at this he mostly succeeds. Though he is clearly an unabashed partisan, he gives less emphasis to defending the Enlightenment targets. Yet certain of the Anti-Enlightenment critiques exposed genuine soft spots in Enlightenment thought (unquestioned faith in reason on the part of some, for example). Sternhell does not dwell much on these vulnerabilities nor ponder where the Anti-Enlightenment critiques may perhaps have desirably tempered the principles he champions.

Sternhell's argument is clearly and forcefully presented and he does an admirable job of distilling the key ideas and inter-connections of the dozens of figures he covers. The text does not appear to have suffered from translation from the original French. Certain points are repeated often, but this seems partly unavoidable because of the need to compare each thinker to the others. A reader seeking to get the gist of Sternhell's message and also to learn a lot about a few of the principal antagonists could probably get by with only the 39 page introduction. Serious students of intellectual history will be further rewarded by going on from there.

The last chapter of this book contains a rather uncompromising critique of Isaiah Berlin. Even though Sternhell states that he is an ambiguous figure who can be read in different ways, he regards him as an heir to the equally complex Johann Gottfried Herder and to Edmund Burke, and thus as a true Anti-Enlightenment thinker. With his strong critique of many of the core values of the Enlightenment all that's left of his liberalism is what can be called a "blocked" liberalism, i.e. liberalism bereft of many of its main ingredients and in Sternhell's view roughly equivalent of today's neo-conservatism. One could also say that Berlin offered a caricature of the ideas of the Enlightenment as for example its alleged conviction that there is a single perfect goal to be attained by mankind. Susan Neiman has also pointed out that when Berlin stated that the Enlightenment conceived of a single abstract truth and that we therefore can find the right way of to act in every circumstance, he forgot to say which Enlightenment thinker actually held such a dim-witted view (Neiman 2008, p. 177). Outright spine-chilling is Berlin's statement that "Nationalism is an inflamed condition of national consciousness which can be, and has on occasion been, tolerant and peaceful." This was after WWII and here again Berlin neglected to specify when and where an "inflamed condition" could at the same time be "tolerant and peaceful" (Sternhell, p. 413). He embraced Herders organic nationalism - bonds of common descent, language, soil, collective experience - while at the same time managing to place himself within the liberal tradition. According to Sternhell, this is precisely why he has caused so much damage to the heritage of the Enlightenment. In this Anti-Enlightenment line of thought, he also places John Gray as being one of Berlin's "most enthusiastic disciples" .
Throughout the book, Sternhell stresses that the picture is far from black and white. Many of the thinkers on both sides expose a mixed array of ideas. Here a comparison to Jonathan Israel might be instructive - or perhaps complicate matters even more. Whereas Sternhell treats the Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment as both being modern, Israel makes a further distinction between radical Enlightenment and moderate Enlightenment. In his recent book, The Revolution of the Mind, Israel places Herder not only within the Enlightenment but in its radical faction (Israel 2010, p. 70). As an example he contrasts Herder's critique of the European colonial empires with Hume's much more conservative stance. Sternhell, on the other hand, emphasizes Voltaire's earlier and more extensive interest in foreign peoples and cultures. He also says that no unprejudiced reading of Herder can accept only one view. In his alas very short foreword to Ernst Cassirer's classic The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Peter Gay draws our attention to this apparent paradox. Cassirer says that when Herder parts company with his age, his conquest of the Enlightenment is a genuine self-conquest. "Herder's achievement is in fact one of the greatest intellectual triumphs of the philosophy of the Enlightenment" (Cassirer 1932, Princeton University Press 2009, p. 233).
Which ideas belong to which school of thought might thus sometimes be difficult to perceive. Nevertheless there is a distinct pattern to be discerned. For Sternhell there runs a straight line from the Anti-Enlightenment of Herder and Burke over Spengler and Schmitt to Kristol and Himmelfarb. The book also contains lengthy discussions of less familiar names such as Barrès, Renan and Taine. That this philosophical tradition, with its emphasis on antirationalism, relativism and nationalism, bears more responsibility for the horrors of the 20th century than the ideals of humanism, universal values and democracy, is for him beyond doubt. The Anti-enlightenment was not a countermodernity, but constitutes a different modernity in its revolt against rationality, the autonomy of the individual and natural rights. "It was this other modernity that brought about the twentieth century European catastrophe, " Sternhell states in his introduction. These thinkers were revolutionaries of a new kind; Burke was the first representative of Anti-Enlightenment modernity and invented revolutionary conservatism. Together with Herder he mobilized national sentiment and tradition against reason and the autonomy of the individual. "Despite appearances they were neither reactionary nor traditionalist nor conservative" (p. 292). In the first half of the twentieth century, this gave rise to the revolutionary Right and the conservative revolution.
Zeev Sternhell, born in 1935, is Professor Emeritus of Political Sciences at Hebrew University and a leading expert on fascism. If not exactly a page-turner, this book slowly gets you in its grip. Notwithstanding doubts about the translation and generally exhibiting a rather humourless style, it's hard to put down. You cannot argue about the scholarly effort either; the sheer magnitude of Sternhell's erudition is awe-inspiring. The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition is a book to come back to time and again for facts, references as well as for a wealth of ideas - some unquestionably controversial.

Did Mr. Hennessey in his balanced review above simply confuse the songsmith Irving with historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin? To be fair, anyone could make such a slip. It's the rest of the gentleman's review that's got me worried. Worried enough that I going to order Sternhell's book at once to help me locate the Counter-Enlightenment roots of the gentleman's right of Tea Party complaint. Would love to know his views incidentally on the Inquisition, Hochuth, Mel Gibson's Passion and remarks to a certain patrolman. You needn't be convinced by Sternhell but Calm down, man, no one's attacking the Church except for right-wing Evangelicals like Bob Jones and "W." The poor Jews cannot praise John XXIII enough for pardoning them. Go tell it to O'Hannity and Michael "Savage" Wiener.