What do you think?
Rate this book
Ο αντι-διαφωτισμός: Από τον 18ο αιώνα ως τον Ψυχρό Πόλεμο
Ο αντι-διαφωτισμός εμφανίζεται στα τέλη του 18ου αιώνα. Με τον όρο αυτό, τον οποίο επινόησε ο Νίτσε για να περιγράψει ένα κίνημα εναντίον του ορθολογισμού και της οικουμενικότητας, χαρακτηρίζεται το νέο πολιτιστικό φαινόμενο που αναδύθηκε εκείνη την εποχή. Η ιδεολογία αυτή αμφισβητεί την ικανότητα των ατόμων να επηρεάζουν τον κόσμο εντός του οποίου ζουν. Τον 19ο αιώνα οι ιδέες που κληρονομήθηκαν από τον Herber και τον Burke συνδυάζονται με στοιχεία του πολιτιστικού ντετερμινισμού και του κοινωνικού δαρβινισμού. Ο Carlyle, ο Taine και ο Renan εκπροσωπούν αυτό το δεύτερο κύμα αποδόμησης της σκέψης του Διαφωτισμού. Ο αντι-ορθολογισμός, ο σχετικισμός και ο εθνικιστικός κοινοτισμός αποτελούν τους τρεις πυλώνες της νέας φιλοσοφίας. Ο 20ός αιώνας τελειοποιεί αυτό το σύστημα σκέψης το οποίο εμπεριέχει το σπέρμα της μεγάλης ευρωπαϊκής καταστροφής. Σύμφωνα με τους αντι-διαφωτιστές, ο ορθολογισμός είναι η ρίζα κάθε κακού: οδηγεί στον υλισμό, στην ανόσια ιδέα ότι ο άνθρωπος μπορεί να αλλάξει τον κόσμο, θανατώνει τα ένστικτα και τη ζωτική ορμή, καταστρέφει τους δεσμούς βάσει των οποίων συγκροτούνται οι εθνικές κοινότητες. Ο αντι-διαφωτισμός θα γεννήσει σε όλη την Ευρώπη αυταρχικά ή φασιστικά καθεστώτα.
Το βιβλίο του κορυφαίου ιστορικού Zeev Sternhell αποτελεί πολύτιμο οδηγό για την κατανόηση ενός σκοτεινού κεφαλαίου της ευρωπαϊκής ιστορίας, αλλά και για τη διερεύνηση ορισμένων επικίνδυνων τάσεων και ιδεολογικών ρευμάτων της σύγχρονης εποχής.
Το βιβλίο του κορυφαίου ιστορικού Zeev Sternhell αποτελεί πολύτιμο οδηγό για την κατανόηση ενός σκοτεινού κεφαλαίου της ευρωπαϊκής ιστορίας, αλλά και για τη διερεύνηση ορισμένων επικίνδυνων τάσεων και ιδεολογικών ρευμάτων της σύγχρονης εποχής.
640 pages, Paperback
First published April 19, 2006
13 people are currently reading
337 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 21, 2021
A Genealogy of Moralizing History?
From ethnopluralism to widespread cultural relativism
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. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau's Social Contract).
Zeev Sternhell introduces major proponents of this 'Anti-Enlightenment tradition' such as:
Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France), Johann Gottfried von Herder, Giambattista Vico, Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Carlyle, Hippolyte Taine (Les Origines De La France Contemporaine, Tome 1), Ernest Renan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustave Le Bon (The Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind), Oswald Spengler, Georges Sorel, Benedetto Croce, Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, Friedrich Meinecke, Jacob Talmon, Isaiah Berlin, François Furet (La 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 Anti-Enlightemnment 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, anti-utopianism, 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:
1) Identity between freedom and the law (legal positivism)
My opinion about 'The Anti-Enlightenment 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 'two-column' 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 Anti-Enlightenment Tradition' proves an authoritative complement to Albert Camus' The 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 counter-revolutionary danger from England?
see: La 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 The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition:
De L'esprit Des Lois, Tome 1
De L'esprit Des Lois, Tome 2
The Social Contract
An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?
Reflections on the Revolution in France
De la Démocratie en Amérique, tome I
De la Démocratie en Amérique, tome II
Les Origines De La France Contemporaine, Tome 1
La Révolution Française
Revolutions and Nationalism:
La Révolution française déclare la guerre à l'Europe : L'embrasement de l'Europe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle
Bonaparte: 1769-1802
La création des identités nationales. Europe, XVIIIe-XXe siècle
L'URSS. De la révolution à la mort de Staline (1917-1953)
Le Japon en guerre 1931-1945
About Enlightenment, Kantian ethics, natural rights, non-contingent values:
The Rebel
L’été
Portrait D'un Juif
Common Sense
On Liberty
Redistributive economics :
Capital et idéologie
Criticism of democratical politics, equalitarianism:
The Law
Beyond Good and Evil
The Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind
Le crépuscule de l'occident - Chronique de la décadence
Bureaucracy
Interventionism: An Economic Analysis
Critic of anthropocentric rationalism :
Le Déclin du courage
Critic of irrational anthropocentrism:
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
Epistemological and ethical questions posed by ideology-driven scientific research:
Nos ancêtres les Germains : les archéologues au service du nazisme
On cultural relativism, and how cultural borrowings invalidate these views:
Tristes Tropiques
The Tears of the White Man: Compassion As Contempt
Sagesses Barbares
The Theft of History
Musée de la Compagnie des Indes, Musée d'art et d'histoire de la ville de Lorient
Le goût de l'Inde
Anti-liberal-democracy literature:
Contes cruels
Le Désespéré
Exégèse Des Lieux Communs
Voyage au bout de la nuit
Mort à crédit
Runaway Horses
Anti-nationalist/anti-totalitarian literature:
The Good Soldier Švejk
All Quiet on the Western Front
Brave New World Revisited
The Joke
Matin Brun
On certain failings of the job market under neoconservative and neoliberal politics
Down and Out in Paris and London
Factotum
Convention collective nationale des hôtels, cafés restaurants
A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember
À la ligne
Soundtrack:
In Germany Before the War - Andy Newman
From ethnopluralism to widespread cultural relativism
'To prevent the 21st-century 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 Anti-Enlightenment 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. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau's Social Contract).
Zeev Sternhell introduces major proponents of this 'Anti-Enlightenment tradition' such as:
Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France), Johann Gottfried von Herder, Giambattista Vico, Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Carlyle, Hippolyte Taine (Les Origines De La France Contemporaine, Tome 1), Ernest Renan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustave Le Bon (The Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind), Oswald Spengler, Georges Sorel, Benedetto Croce, Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, Friedrich Meinecke, Jacob Talmon, Isaiah Berlin, François Furet (La 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 Anti-Enlightemnment 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, anti-utopianism, 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:
1) 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. 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 injury--an 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.2) The all-important freedom of association, trusting, and participation to public politics (Tocqueville).
- I. Kant, Perpetual peace
My opinion about 'The Anti-Enlightenment 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 'two-column' 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 Anti-Enlightenment Tradition' proves an authoritative complement to Albert Camus' The 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 counter-revolutionary danger from England?
see: La 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 The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition:
De L'esprit Des Lois, Tome 1
De L'esprit Des Lois, Tome 2
The Social Contract
An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?
Reflections on the Revolution in France
De la Démocratie en Amérique, tome I
De la Démocratie en Amérique, tome II
Les Origines De La France Contemporaine, Tome 1
La Révolution Française
Revolutions and Nationalism:
La Révolution française déclare la guerre à l'Europe : L'embrasement de l'Europe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle
Bonaparte: 1769-1802
La création des identités nationales. Europe, XVIIIe-XXe siècle
L'URSS. De la révolution à la mort de Staline (1917-1953)
Le Japon en guerre 1931-1945
About Enlightenment, Kantian ethics, natural rights, non-contingent values:
The Rebel
L’été
Portrait D'un Juif
Common Sense
On Liberty
Redistributive economics :
Capital et idéologie
Criticism of democratical politics, equalitarianism:
The Law
Beyond Good and Evil
The Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind
Le crépuscule de l'occident - Chronique de la décadence
Bureaucracy
Interventionism: An Economic Analysis
Critic of anthropocentric rationalism :
Le Déclin du courage
Critic of irrational anthropocentrism:
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
Epistemological and ethical questions posed by ideology-driven scientific research:
Nos ancêtres les Germains : les archéologues au service du nazisme
On cultural relativism, and how cultural borrowings invalidate these views:
Tristes Tropiques
The Tears of the White Man: Compassion As Contempt
Sagesses Barbares
The Theft of History
Musée de la Compagnie des Indes, Musée d'art et d'histoire de la ville de Lorient
Le goût de l'Inde
Anti-liberal-democracy literature:
Contes cruels
Le Désespéré
Exégèse Des Lieux Communs
Voyage au bout de la nuit
Mort à crédit
Runaway Horses
Anti-nationalist/anti-totalitarian literature:
The Good Soldier Švejk
All Quiet on the Western Front
Brave New World Revisited
The Joke
Matin Brun
On certain failings of the job market under neoconservative and neoliberal politics
Down and Out in Paris and London
Factotum
Convention collective nationale des hôtels, cafés restaurants
A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember
À la ligne
Soundtrack:
In Germany Before the War - Andy Newman
July 22, 2017
De Frans-Israëlische auteur Zeev Sternhell bespreekt in dit lijvige werk de typerende kenmerken van een schare invloedrijke filosofen en denkers die zich sinds de 18e eeuw hebben afgezet tegen de idealen van wat hij de 'Franco-Kantiaanse' 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 & 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 de 20ste 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 ruim 2 eeuwen 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.
De discussie draait daarbij telkens weer rond thema's als de de hang naar vernieuwing en indviduele autonomie vs. het vasthouden aan religie & 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 de 20ste 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 ruim 2 eeuwen 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.
November 5, 2014
It's unclear whom this book is for. If you're as familiar with the historiography as Sternhell assumes you are, then the historical content itself isn't going to be very groundbreaking, and if you aren't, you aren't going to have much context for it. The most I can say I got from it is that it seems to definitively refute Ishay Landa's charge in "The Apprentice's Sorcerer" (which, if you're interested in the subject matter here, I highly recommend) that the political aim of Sternhell's earlier work in "Neither Left nor Right" is part of the old liberal tradition of lumping all its enemies together (totalitarianism, horseshoe theory, &c.) since he wants to uphold Rousseau and the French Revolution and assimilate Berlin and the totalitarian school into the hated, titular tradition.
So if you're interested in some rather disorganized arguments and jeremiads about who Sternhell thinks is a good guy or bad guy, this is the place to look. For a comprehensive story about the development of right-wing thought you'll have to look elsewhere, although at the moment I couldn't tell you a one-title place that could be.
So if you're interested in some rather disorganized arguments and jeremiads about who Sternhell thinks is a good guy or bad guy, this is the place to look. For a comprehensive story about the development of right-wing thought you'll have to look elsewhere, although at the moment I couldn't tell you a one-title place that could be.
November 29, 2014
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 cut 200 pages 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.
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.
July 8, 2023
Sternhell è riccamente acculturato, ma il saggio è dispersivo. La divisione per capitoli dovrebbe essere inizialmente tematica, ma poi diventa cronologica. La stessa divisione tematica è opinabile: Sternhell continua a girare attorno agli stessi temi (ed allo stesso individuo, Herder) per tutto il tempo, saltando da un autore all'altro. D'altronde, stando alla sua tesi, Carlyle, Burke, Taine, Renan etc. han detto tutti la stessa cosa, motivo per cui si può saltare da un fiore all'altro senza problemi. Eppure questo provoca un certo mal di testa, soprattutto se si cerca di individuare le differenze tra i suddetti, la cui biografia spesso diventa anche oscura, rendendo complesso il comprendere chi è venuto prima e chi dopo. Sternhell, inoltre, è palesemente di parte. Importante, comunque, assieme a Losurdo nella storia del liberalismo degli ultimi due secoli.
September 7, 2024
Les Anti-Lumières est un livre que les gents férus de la politique ou de la philosophie politique devraient lire, car il montre d'une manière très claire et efficace les idées des penseurs qui ont trouvé les Lumières et la Revolution Française, avec ses changements politiques et sociaux y compris, comme les pires évenements que l'Europe avait subit dans son histoire. Zeev Sternhell fait un formidable travail en transmettant les idées de ces penseurs (surtout Burke, Herder, de Maistre, Nietzsche, Spengler, et Berlin) et l'analyse qu'il en fait aide à comprendre le developpment de ce type de pensée, soit conservatrice soit rèactionaire, et comment elle débouche sur le fascisme du XXe siècle.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews