Enemies of the Enlightment

"Critics have long treated the most important intellectual movement of modern history - the Enlightenment - as if it took shape in the absence of opposition. This groundbreaking study demonstrates that contemporary resistance to the Enlightenment was a major cultural force, shaping and defining the Enlightenment itself from the moment of its inception and giving rise to an entirely new ideological phenomenon - what we have come to think of as the "Right." Born in France, but spread throughout Europe and the New World in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Counter-Enlightenment was neither a rarefied current in the history of ideas nor an atavistic relic of the past, but an extensive, international, and thoroughly modern affair." "Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Darrin M. McMahon shows that well before the French Revolution, enemies of the Enlightenment were warning that the secular thrust of modern philosophy would give way to horrors of an unprecedented kind. Greeting 1789, in turn, as the realization of their worst fears, they fought the Revolution from its onset, profoundly affecting its subsequent course. The radicalization - and violence - of the Revolution was as much the product of militant resistance as any inherent logic."--BOOK JACKET.