The Question of Enlightenment - Theory and Practice in Eighteenth ...

The Question of Enlightenment 43
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See, for example, Robert E. Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1991) 8, 48, 54-55, 83 and the earlier exchanges between Berlin and Hans Aarsleff in the
London Review of Books 5-18 November 1981 6-7, 5-18 November 1981 7-8, 3-16 June, 1982 4-5. Berlin viewed
Herder as a peculiar case and characterized him as “not an enemy but a critic of the French Enlightenment,” see
“Reply to Hans Aarsleff,” London Review of Books, 5-18 November 1981, 7-8.
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See Arthur M. Melzer, “The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of
Sincerity,” American Political Science Review 90:2 (June 1996) 344-360 and Graeme Garrard, Rousseau’s Counter-
Enlightenment (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003). See also Darrin McMahon’s case for
including Catholic opponents of the philosophes – another group that Berlin excluded (see Against the Current 1) –
in his essay “The Real Counter-Enlightenment: The Case of France,” in Wokler and Mali, 91-104 and, at greater
length, in Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment : The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making
of Modernity (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
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Mark Lilla, “What is Counter-Enlightenment?” in Wokler and Mali, 4. See the even broader use of the
term in essays collected in Jochen Schmidt, ed., Aufklärung und Gegenaufklärung in der europaischen Literatur,
Philosophie, und Politik von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989).
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Garrard argues that “it makes little sense of refer to ‘the Counter-Enlightenment as though it were a single
movement” and suggests that it is ‘necessary to deconstruct ‘the Counter-Enlightenment’ into many different
Counter-Enlightenments,” Counter-Enlightenments 10. Likewise, Lilla observes that every Enlightenment seems to
have been “stalked by its own Counter-Enlightenment,” see “What is Counter-Enlightenment,” in Wokler and Mali
11.
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Horst Stuke, “Aufklärung,” in Geschichtlich Grundbegriffe
Reinhart Koselleck, “Begriffsgeschichte and Social History,” in Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics
of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985) 80. This project had rather disquieting origins. Otto
Brunner – Koselleck’s senior partner in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe – first formulated the notion of
Begriffsgeschichte in the latter part of the 1930s, inspired in part by critics of Weimar liberalism such as Carl