the Anti-Enlightenment 'tradition'

[Mark Kohut]

review by Adam Kirsch, generally a good reader, who, however, wrote one of the worst 'didn't get it at all' reviews of Against the Day.IMO.

What’s missing from Sternhell’s book is any sense of why the anti-Enlightenment flourished in the first place and how it produced thinkers of the stature of Burke and Herder. Sternhell takes for granted that the Enlightenment is mankind’s only hope, so that its opponents cannot seem other than perverse and malevolent. Yet it was not just these thinkers who felt that the advance of science and liberalism was making the world less happy. The same intuition can be found in almost all the literature of the 19th century, from Wordsworth to Dostoevsky. And it was not just conservatives like Carlyle who attacked the dehumanizing effects of modern life. Liberals and socialists like Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and William Morris all felt the same way. When such thinkers looked back to a more organic and religious past, it was not because they were enemies of the human spirit, but because they felt that the spirit was starving in modern conditions.

http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/23084/enlightenment-yes/