Critics of the Enlightenment

by Christopher O. Blum (Editor/Translator)

Out of the smoke and rubble following the French Revolution arose a new generation of thinkers: the critics of the Enlightenment and the principles and the practices to which it gave birth. To represent this movement, Christopher O. Blum has chosen selections from six of the leading figures of the French counter-revolutionary tradition: François-René de Chateaubriand, Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, Frédéric Le Play, Émile Keller, and René de La Tour du Pin.

With the same elegant translations featured in its first edition, now newly revised and introduced, the second edition of Critics of the Enlightenment serves as a marvelous overview of a much-neglected movement in Western history—a movement whose bold and principled enterprise is as relevant today as it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Politics, Nonfiction

218 pages, Paperback

Published July 31, 2020

Reviews

[Paul]

Everyone knows Chateaubriand but I'd never heard of some of the other fellows. Sometimes their style is a bit too bombastic for my taste but the essays helped illustrate the thought of the too often forgotten resistance to the Enlightenment and its heirs in the French Revolution.

[Luca]

An excellent collections of essays and a very useful introduction to French Catholic traditionalist thought during the 19th century with some of the included works being otherwise fairly difficult to find. While most are fairly good with de Maistre and De Bonald's work in particular standing out and some of their points still being applicable to this day Chateaubriand's one while well written was more of an anti Bonaparte propaganda pamphlet and felt out of place in the serious criticisms of modernity and the whig view of history while Kellers work aged incredibly poorly considering the liberals subsequent anticlericalism.

Otherwise highly recommended

[Dvdlynch]

A nice collection of essays outlining the primary streams of reactionary thought in the wake of the French revolution. While valuable for providing several lesser know figures in English translation, it could do with a fuller introduction and footnotes to more fully elucidate the historical context of the essays and to demonstrate their continuing relevance to our current situation.

[Giovanni Del Piero]

Excellent read. Pulls from a lot of different works for a wide variety of topics.