Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of ModernityCritics have long treated the most important intellectual movement of modern history--the Enlightenment--as if it took shape in the absence of opposition. In this groundbreaking new study, Darrin McMahon demonstrates that, on the contrary, contemporary resistance to the Enlightenment was a major cultural force, shaping and defining the Enlightenment itself from the moment of inception, while giving rise to an entirely new ideological phenomenon-what we have come to think of as the "Right." McMahon skillfully examines the Counter-Enlightenment, showing that it was an extensive, international, and thoroughly modern affair. |
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User Review - dhmontgomery - LibraryThingA surprisingly relevant intellectual history of an often-ignored group: the writers who opposed famous Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot. McMahon convincingly argues that ... Read full review
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Pour conférence de Millau
Contents
17 | |
55 | |
89 | |
121 | |
The Restoration Struggle against the Enlightenment | 153 |
Conclusion | 189 |
Notes | 205 |
Index | 251 |
Other editions - View all
Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the ... Darrin M. McMahon No preview available - 2001 |
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abbé altar Année anti anti-philosophes argued Assembly attack authority Barruel carried Catholic catholique cause charged Christian church Cited civil claim common conspiracy continued Counter-Enlightenment course criticism cultural danger defenders destroy discourse doctrine early eighteenth century emphasized enemies Enlightenment Europe example experience fact faith Figure final force formed France French Revolution hand Harpe human Ibid ideas important individual institutions Journal des débats king later Left letters liberalism littéraire livres London Louis March ment Mercure minds monarchy moral Napoleon natural observed Old Regime opinion opponents opposition Origins Paris past philosophes plot political present principles Protestant published radical reason religion religious respect response Restoration result revolutionary rhetoric Right Rousseau seemed siècle social society theories thought throne tion tolerance true truth vols Voltaire warned women writings
Popular passages
Page 196 - It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur: — like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence...
Page 113 - I have known myself, personally. five of your principal conspirators: and I can undertake to say from my own certain knowledge, that so far back as the year 1773, they were busy in the plot you have so well described. and in the manner, and on the principle you have so truły represented. — To this I can speak as a witness.
Page 113 - I cannot easily express to you," he wrote to the exiled French clergyman in May 1797, "how much I am instructed and delighted by the first Volume of your History of Jacobinism. The whole of the wonderful narrative is supported by documents and proofs with the most juridical regularity and exactness.
Page 69 - The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. This object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the propagators of some system of piety.
Page 232 - Whig republicanism see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), Gordon S.
Page 222 - ... au roi par monseigneur comte d'Artois, M. le prince de Conde, M. le duc de Bourbon, M. le duc d'Enghien et M.