Experience The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition Presented By Zeev Sternhell Exhibited In Leaflet
on The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition
Genealogy of Moralizing History
From ethnopluralism to widespread cultural relativism
'To prevent thestcentury man from sinking into a new icy age of conformity and resignation, the prospective vision created by the Enlightenment of the individual actor of his present, even his future, remains irreplaceable.
'
Zeev Sternhell, The AntiEnlightenment Tradition
The point:
This essay deals mostly with schools of thought opposed to the values of the Enlightenment, that is, rationalism, individualism, legal positivism, emancipation of mankind from tutelage cf.
sitelinkAn Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau's Social Contract,
Zeev Sternhell introduces major proponents of this 'AntiEnlightenment tradition' such as:
Edmund Burke sitelinkReflections on the Revolution in France, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Giambattista Vico, Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Carlyle, Hippolyte Taine sitelinkLes Origines De La France Contemporaine, Tome, Ernest Renan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustave Le Bon sitelinkThe Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind, Oswald Spengler, Georges Sorel, Benedetto Croce, Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, Friedrich Meinecke, Jacob Talmon, Isaiah Berlin, François Furet sitelinkLa Révolution Française, along with contemporary neoconservatives and members of the "totalitarian school".
The totalitarian school as introduced by Zeev Sternhell correlates the advent of fascism and totalitarian regimes with the implementation of the values inherited from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
'The AntiEnlightemnment Tradition' achieves a sort of genealogy of these thinkers, along with their key concepts: historism, organicism, communitarianism taking societies as families, or living organisms, bound by biological rules inherited solely from history, tradition, prejudice aka prescription, cultural pluralism, that is, relativism entailing differentialism, nationalism, and both cultural and ethnical determinism, opposition to natural rights and to legal positivism, antiutopianism, social darwinism, decadentism and the moralizing of history at large, containment, "blocked liberalism" and in particular the distinction between positive freedom freedom to and negative freedom freedom from/harm principle.
Sternhell shows the limits of this restrictive view of liberty negative freedom professed by neoconservatives and
libertarians, putting forth two main arguments against it:
Identity between freedom and the law legal positivism
Juridical and hence external freedom cannot be defined, as is usual, by the privilege of doing anything one wills so long as he does not injure another.The allimportant freedom of association, trusting, and participation to public politics Tocqueville,
For what is a privilege It is the possibility of an action so far as one does not injure anyone by it, Then the definition would read: Freedom is the possibility of those actions by which one does no one an injury, One does another no injury he may do as he pleases only if he does another no injuryan empty tautology, Rather, my external juridical freedom is to be defined as follows: It is the privilege to lend obedience to no external laws except those to which I could have given consent.
I. Kant, Perpetual peace
My opinion about 'The AntiEnlightenment Tradition':
As you can see from what I've stated above, this work has much more of the history of philosophy in it than philosophy proper, in my opinion.
Outviews are paralleled some giving the individual priority over the state, other giving the state priority over the individual and repeated throughout, However, a terse analysis of both parts is never reached and Sternhell never challenges the legitimacy of the collectivist point of view or the individualist point of view at that as much as I would have liked him to.
I would have preferred more of a systematic discussion of both, backed by more examples drawn from the development of the Glorious Revolution, United States Revolution and the early stages of the French Revolution, and less of this 'twocolumn' approach.
What's more, Sternhell fails to address how the Enlightenment values adopted during the first stages of the French Revolution have come to be perverted or replaced under the Convention, the Terror, the Directorate, Napoléon Bonaparte.
. . Perhaps this is due to the radical opposition Sternhell seeks to document and prove in his work between the Enlightenment tradition and their opponents, leading him to downplay the historical factor in places
For the author, the only feature these intellectuals seem to share with the Enlightenment is their pretense to be liberal, part of the Enlightenment.
. . For instance Burke insisting on being part of the whig tradition, whereas he is viewed by many as one of the forefathers of reactionary conservatism and neoconservatism, The same goes for Isaiah Berlin and other neoconservatives,
On the other hand, 'The AntiEnlightenment Tradition' proves an authoritative complement to Albert Camus' sitelinkThe Rebel, both works dealing with Hegelianism, Marxism, and other forms of teleology/determinism.
However I wouldn't list Camus among the defenders of pure rationalism either,
At the end of the day, I come out of this book with more questions than answers:
How much Edmund Burke was listened to and followed, and as a result how much the measures taken by the Convention answered to a real counterrevolutionary danger from England
see: sitelinkLa Révolution française déclare la guerre à l'Europe : L'embrasement de l'Europe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle
How can property rights ever predate the institution of society In general more questions about the theoretical groundwork of neoconservatism and libertarianism Locke's natural rights, Mill's harm principle.
. . and the relations between individual freedom and the powers of the State,
More works about the same topics:
Works quoted and discussed in sitelinkThe AntiEnlightenment Tradition:
sitelinkDe L'esprit Des Lois, Tome
sitelinkDe L'esprit Des Lois, Tome
sitelinkThe Social Contract
sitelinkAn Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment
sitelinkReflections on the Revolution in France
sitelinkDe la Démocratie en Amérique, tome I
sitelinkDe la Démocratie en Amérique, tome II
sitelinkLes Origines De La France Contemporaine, Tome
sitelinkLa Révolution Française
Revolutions and Nationalism:
sitelinkLa Révolution française déclare la guerre à l'Europe : L'embrasement de l'Europe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle
sitelinkBonaparte:
sitelinkLa création des identités nationales.
Europe, XVIIIeXXe siècle
sitelinkL'URSS, De la révolution à la mort de Staline
sitelinkLe Japon en guerre
About Enlightenment, Kantian ethics, natural rights, noncontingent values:
sitelinkThe Rebel
sitelinkLété
sitelinkPortrait D'un Juif
sitelinkCommon Sense
sitelinkOn Liberty
Redistributive economics :
sitelinkCapital et idéologie
Criticism of democratical politics, equalitarianism:
sitelinkThe Law
sitelinkBeyond Good and Evil
sitelinkThe Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind
sitelinkLe crépuscule de l'occident Chronique de la décadence
sitelinkBureaucracy
sitelinkInterventionism: An Economic Analysis
Critic of anthropocentric rationalism :
sitelinkLe Déclin du courage
Critic of irrational anthropocentrism:
sitelinkPale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
sitelinkAstrophysics for People in a Hurry
Epistemological and ethical questions posed by ideologydriven scientific research:
sitelinkNos ancêtres les Germains : les archéologues au service du nazisme
On cultural relativism, and how cultural borrowings invalidate these views:
sitelinkTristes Tropiques
sitelinkThe Tears of the White Man: Compassion As Contempt
sitelinkSagesses Barbares
sitelinkThe Theft of History
sitelinkMusée de la Compagnie des Indes, Musée d'art et d'histoire de la ville de Lorient
sitelinkLe goût de l'Inde
Antiliberaldemocracy literature:
sitelinkContes cruels
sitelinkLe Désespéré
sitelinkExégèse Des Lieux Communs
sitelinkVoyage au bout de la nuit
sitelinkMort à crédit
sitelinkRunaway Horses
Antinationalist/antitotalitarian literature:
sitelinkThe Good Soldier Švejk
sitelinkAll Quiet on the Western Front
sitelinkBrave New World Revisited
sitelinkThe Joke
sitelinkMatin Brun
On certain failings of the job market under neoconservative and neoliberal politics
sitelinkDown and Out in Paris and London
sitelinkFactotum
sitelinkConvention collective nationale des hôtels, cafés restaurants
sitelinkA Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember
sitelinkÀ la ligne
Soundtrack:
sitelinkIn Germany Before the War Andy Newman De FransIsraëlische auteur Zeev Sternhell bespreekt in dit lijvige werk de typerende kenmerken van een schare invloedrijke filosofen en denkers die zich sinds dee eeuw hebben afgezet tegen de idealen van wat hij de 'FrancoKantiaanse' Verlichtingsdenkers noemet.
Het werk van figuren als Vico, Herder, Burke, De Maistre, Taine, Spengler, Croce en tot slot Isaiah Berlin wordt uitgebreid geanalyseerd en gekaderd binnen de context van een brede beweging die tegen de aspiraties van Verlichtingsdenkers als Kant, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu of een nazaat als de Tocqueville.
De discussie draait daarbij telkens weer rond thema's als de de hang naar vernieuwing en indviduele autonomie vs, het vasthouden aan religie amp traditie, een sterk vertrouwen in de ratio vs, een afkeer voor een té uitgesproken rationalisme, een gematigd vooruitgangsoptimisme vs, cultureel pessimisme en een pleidoor voor de notie 'mensenrechten' vs, het vasthouden aan historisch verworven rechten,
Sternhells uitvoerige en vaak onmiskenbaar polemisme bespreking resulteert niet enkel in een stevig naslagwerk over deze thematiek, maar biedt tegelijk een solide kritiek op de argumentatie die de grote verschrikkingen van deste eeuw fascisme, nazisme, stalinisme.
. . wil toeschrijven aan een gebrek in het de Verlichtingsdenken zelf, Door het ideologische discours achter deze stromingen terug te plaatsen binnen de context van een ruimeeuwen durende strijd tégen de Verlichting maakt hij, wat mij betreft overtuigend, duidelijk in welke mate deze visie onzinnig blijkt.
Sternhell knoopt in de epiloog op zijn studie aan bij het hedendaagse neoconservatisme, voornamelijk dan binnen de Amerikaanse context van na de eeuwwisseling, Daarmee onderstreept hij de blijvende actualiteit van de filosofische 'strijd' die hij zo nauwgezet heeft geanalyseerd en beschreven, Hoewel dit boek veelal ingaat op intellectuele debatten van enkele eeuwen terug leest het dan ook als een werk met een manifeste onmiddellijke actualiteit,
Zeer sterk aanbevolen voor eenieder met interesse in het politieke denken van de Moderne Tijd binnen de Europese context, Great subject, but terribly boring presentation due to an excessive amount of repetitions and tirades combined with an annoying fixation on erudition display through name dropping typical of most French scholarship.
The editor could have cutpages without impacting the few points Sternhell makes,
This could have been a much better book,
There's an alternative available: "Les Antimodernes, De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes" by Antoine Compagnon, I haven't read it yet, though, In this masterful work of historical scholarship, Zeev Sternhell, an internationally renowned Israeli political scientist and historian, presents a controversial new view of the fall of democracy and the rise of radical nationalism in the twentieth century.
Sternhell locates their origins in the eighteenth century with the advent of the AntiEnlightenment, far earlier than most historians,
The thinkers belonging to the AntiEnlightenment a movement originally identified by Friederich Nietzsche represent a perspective that is antirational and that rejects the principles of natural law and the rights of man.
Sternhell asserts that the AntiEnlightenment was a development separate from the Enlightenment and sees the two traditions as evolving parallel to one another over time, He contends that J. G. Herder and Edmund Burke are among the real founders of the AntiEnlightenment and shows how that school undermined the very foundations of modern liberalism, finally contributing to the development of fascism that culminated in the European catastrophes of the twentieth century.
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