THE COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT

I

Opposition to the central ideas of the French Enlight-

enment, and of its allies and disciples in other European

countries, is as old as the movement itself. The procla-

mation of the autonomy of reason and the methods

of the natural sciences based on observation as the sole

reliable method of knowledge, and the consequent

rejection of the authority of revelation, sacred writings

and their accepted interpreters, tradition, prescription,

and every form of nonrational and transcendent sources

of knowledge, was naturally opposed by the churches

and religious thinkers of many persuasions. But such

opposition, largely because of the absence of common



101



ground between them and the philosophers of theEnlightenment, made relatively little headway, saveby stimulating repressive steps against the spreadingof ideas regarded as dangerous to the authority ofChurch or State. More formidable was the relativistand skeptical tradition that went back to the ancientworld. The central doctrines of the progressive Frenchthinkers, whatever their disagreements among them-selves, rested on the belief, rooted in the ancient doc-trine of Natural Law, that human nature was funda-mentally the same in all times and places; that localand historical variations were unimportant comparedwith the constant central core in terms of which humanbeings could be defined as a species, like animals, orplants, or minerals; that there were universal humangoals; that a logically connected structure of laws andgeneralizations susceptible of demonstration andverification could be constructed and replace thechaotic amalgam of ignorance, mental laziness, guess-work, superstition, prejudice, dogma, fantasy, and,above all, the “interested error,” maintained by therulers of mankind and largely responsible for theblunders, vices, and misfortunes of humanity.

It was further believed that the methods similar to

those of Newtonian physics which had achieved such

triumphs in the realm of inanimate nature could be

applied with equal success to the fields of ethics,

politics, and human relationships in general, in which

little progress had been made; with the corollary that

once this had been effected, it would sweep away

irrational and oppressive legal systems and economic

policies the replacement of which by the rule of rea-

son would rescue men from political and moral in-

justice and misery and set them on the path of wis-

dom, happiness, and virtue. Against this, there

persisted the doctrine that went back to the Greek

Sophists, Protagoras, Antiphon, and Critias, that

beliefs involving value-judgments, and the institutions

founded upon them, rested not on discoveries of objec-

tive and unalterable natural facts, but on human opin-

ion, which was variable and differed between different

societies and at different times; that moral and political

values, and in particular justice and social arrange-

ments in general rested on fluctuating human conven-

tion. This was summed up by the Sophist quoted by

Aristotle who declared that whereas fire burned both

here and in Persia, human institutions change under

our very eyes. It seemed to follow that no universal

truths established by scientific methods, that is, truths

that anyone could verify by the use of proper methods,

anywhere, at any time, could in principle be estab-

lished in human affairs.

This tradition reasserted itself strongly in the writ-

ings of such sixteenth-century skeptics as Cornelius

Agrippa, Montaigne, and Pierre Charron whose influ-

ence is discernible in the sentiments of thinkers and

poets in the Elizabethan and Jacobean age. Such skep-

ticism came to the aid of those who denied the claims

of the natural sciences or of other universal rational

schemas and advocated salvation in pure faith, like the

great Protestant reformers and their followers, and the

Jansenist wing of the Roman Church. The rationalist

belief in a single coherent body of logically deduced

conclusions, arrived at by universally valid principles

of thought and founded upon carefully sifted data of

observation or experiment, was further shaken by

sociologically minded thinkers from Bodin (1530-96)

to Montesquieu (1689-1755). These writers, using the

evidence of both history and the new literature of

travel and exploration in newly discovered lands, Asia

and the Americas, emphasized the variety of human

customs and especially the influence of dissimilar natu-

ral factors, particularly geographical ones, upon the

development of different human societies, leading to

differences of institutions and outlook, which in their

turn generated wide differences of belief and behavior.

This was powerfully reinforced by the revolutionary

doctrines of David Hume, especially by his demon-

stration that no logical links existed between truths of

fact, and such a priori truths as those of logic or mathe-

matics, which tended to weaken or dissolve the hopes

of those who, under the influence of Descartes and his

followers, thought that a single system of knowledge,

embracing all provinces and answering all questions,

could be established by unbreakable chains of logical

argument from universally valid axioms, not subject

to refutation or modification by any experience of an

empirical kind.

Nevertheless, no matter how deeply relativity about

human values or the interpretation of social, including

historical, facts entered the thought of social thinkers

of this type, they, too, retained a common core of

conviction that the ultimate ends of all men at all times

were, in effect, identical: all men sought the satisfaction

of basic physical and biological needs, such as food,

shelter, security, and also peace, happiness, justice, the

harmonious development of their natural faculties,

truth, and, somewhat more vaguely, virtue, moral per-

fection, and what the Romans had called humanitas.

Means might differ in cold and hot climates, moun-

tainous countries and flat plains, and no universal for-

mula could fit all cases without Procrustean results, but

the ultimate ends were fundamentally similar. Such

influential writers as Voltaire, D'Alembert, and Con-

dorcet believed that the development of the arts and

sciences were the most powerful human weapons in

attaining these ends, and the sharpest weapons in the

fight against ignorance, superstition, fanaticism,



102



II

oppression, and barbarism which crippled human effortand frustrated men's search for truth and rational self-direction. Rousseau and Mably believed, on the con-trary, that the institutions of civilization were them-selves a major factor in the corruption of men and theiralienation from nature, from simplicity, purity of heartand the life of natural justice, social equality, andspontaneous human feeling; artificial man hadimprisoned, enslaved, and ruined natural man. Never-theless, despite profound differences of outlook, therewas a wide area of agreement about fundamentalpoints: the reality of Natural Law (no longer formu-lated in the language of orthodox Catholic or Prot-estant doctrine), of eternal principles by followingwhich alone men could become wise, happy, virtuous,and free. One set of universal and unalterable princi-ples governed the world for theists, deists, and atheists,for optimists and pessimists, puritans, primitivists,and believers in progress and the richest fruits of sci-ence and culture; these laws governed inanimate andanimate nature, facts and events, means and ends,private life and public, all societies, epochs, and civili-zations; it was solely by departing from them that menfell into crime, vice, misery. Thinkers might differabout what these laws were, or how to discover them,or who were qualified to expound them; that these lawswere real, and could be known, whether with certainty,or only probability, remained the central dogma of theentire Enlightenment. It was the attack upon this thatconstitutes the most formidable reaction against thisdominant body of belief.

A thinker who might have had a decisive role in

this counter-movement, if anyone outside his native

country had read him, was the Neapolitan philosopher

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). With extraordinary

originality Vico maintained, especially in the last work

of his life, Scienza nuova (1725; radically altered 1731),

that the Cartesians were profoundly mistaken about

the role of mathematics as the science of sciences; that

mathematics was certain only because it was a human

invention. It did not, as they supposed, correspond to

an objective structure of reality; it was a method and

not a body of truths; with its help we could plot reg-

ularities—the occurrence of phenomena in the external

world—but not discover why they occurred as they

did, or to what end. This could be known only to God,

for only those who make things can truly know what

they are and for what purpose they have been made.

Hence we do not, in this sense, know the external

world—Nature—for we have not made it; only God

who created it, knows it in this fashion. But since men

are directly acquainted with human motives, purposes,

hopes, fears which are their own, they can know human

affairs as they cannot know Nature.

According to Vico, our lives and activities collec-

tively and individually are expressions of our attempts

to survive, satisfy our desires, understand each other

and the past out of which we emerge. A utilitarian

interpretation of the most essential human activities

is misleading. They are, in the first place, purely

expressive; to sing, to dance, to worship, to speak, to

fight, and the institutions which embody these activi-

ties, comprise a vision of the world. Language, religious

rites, myths, laws, social, religious, juridical institutions,

are forms of self-expression, of wishing to convey what

one is and strives for; they obey intelligible patterns,

and for that reason it is possible to reconstruct the life

of other societies, even those remote in time and place

and utterly primitive, by asking oneself what kind of

framework of human ideas, feelings, acts could have

generated the poetry, the monuments, the mythology

which were their natural expression. Men grow indi-

vidually and socially; the world of men who composed

the Homeric poems was plainly very different from

that of the Hebrews to whom God had spoken through

their sacred books, or that of the Roman Republic, or

medieval Christianity, or Naples under the Bourbons.

Patterns of growth are traceable.

Myths are not, as enlightened thinkers believe, false

statements about reality corrected by later rational

criticism, nor is poetry mere embellishment of what

could equally well be stated in ordinary prose. The

myths and poetry of antiquity embody a vision of the

world as authentic as that of Greek philosophy, or

Roman Law, or the poetry and culture of our own

enlightened age, earlier, cruder, remote from us, but

with its own voice, as we hear it in the Iliad or the

Twelve Tables, belonging uniquely to its own culture,

and with a sublimity which cannot be reproduced by

a later, more sophisticated culture. Each culture ex-

presses its own collective experience, each step on the

ladder of human development has its own equally

authentic means of expression.

Vico's theory of cycles of cultural development be-

came celebrated, but it is not his most original contri-

bution to the understanding of society or history. His

revolutionary move is to have denied the doctrine of

a timeless Natural Law the truths of which could have

been known in principle to any man, at any time,

anywhere. Vico boldly denied this doctrine which has

formed the heart of the Western tradition from

Aristotle to our own day. He preached the notion of

the uniqueness of cultures, however they might resem-

ble each other in their relationship to their antecedents

and successors, and the notion of a single style that

pervades all the activities and manifestations of



103



societies of human beings at a particular stage of de-velopment. Thereby he laid the foundations at once ofcomparative cultural anthropology and of compara-tive historical linguistics, aesthetics, jurisprudence;language, ritual, monuments, and especially mythology,were the sole reliable keys to what later scholars andcritics conceived as altering forms of collective con-sciousness. Such historicism was plainly not compat-ible with the view that there was only one standard oftruth or beauty or goodness, which some cultures orindividuals approached more closely than others, andwhich it was the business of thinkers to establish andmen of action to realize. The Homeric poems were anunsurpassable masterpiece, but they could only springfrom a brutal, stern, oligarchical, “heroic” society, andlater civilizations, however superior in other respects,did not and could not produce an art necessarily su-perior to Homer. This doctrine struck a powerful blowat the notion of timeless truths and steady progress,interrupted by occasional periods of retrogression intobarbarism, and drew a sharp line between the naturalsciences which dealt with the relatively unalteringnature of the physical world viewed from “outside,”and humane studies which viewed social evolutionfrom “inside” by a species of empathetic insight, forwhich the establishment of texts or dates by scientificcriticism was a necessary, but not a sufficient, condi-tion. Vico's unsystematic works dealt with many othermatters, but his importance in the history of the En-lightenment consists in his insistence on the pluralityof cultures and on the consequently fallacious characterof the idea that there is one and only one structure ofreality which the enlightened philosopher can see asit truly is, and which he can (at least in principle)describe in logically perfect language—a vision thathas obsessed thinkers from Plato to Leibniz, Condillac,Bertrand Russell and his more faithful followers. ForVico men ask different questions of the Universe, andtheir answers are shaped accordingly: such questions,and the symbols or acts that express them, alter orbecome obsolete in the course of cultural develop-ment; to understand the answers one must understandthe questions that preoccupy an age or a culture; theyare not constant nor necessarily more profound be-cause they resemble our own more than others thatare less familiar to us. Vico's relativity went furtherthan Montesquieu's. If his view was correct, it wassubversive of the very notion of absolute truths and ofa perfect society founded on them, not merely inpractice but in principle. However, Vico was littleread, and the question of how much influence he hadhad, before hiswas revived by Micheleta century after it was written, is still uncertain.

If Vico wished to shake the pillars on which the

Enlightenment of his times rested, the Königsberg

theologian and philosopher, J. G. Hamann, wished to

smash them. Hamann was brought up as a Pietist, a

member of the most introspective and self-absorbed of

all the Lutheran sects, intent upon the direct com-

munion of the individual soul with God, bitterly

antirationalist, liable to emotional excess, preoccupied

with the stern demands of moral obligation and the

needs for severe self-discipline. The attempt of

Frederick the Great in the middle years of the eight-

eenth century to introduce French culture and a degree

of rationalization, economic and social as well as

military, into East Prussia, the most backward part of

his provinces, provoked a peculiarly violent reaction

in this pious, semi-feudal, traditional Protestant society

(which also gave birth to Herder and Kant). Hamann

began as a disciple of the Enlightenment, but, after a

profound spiritual crisis, turned against it, and pub-

lished a series of polemical attacks written in a highly

idiosyncratic, perversely allusive, contorted, deliber-

ately obscure style, as remote as he could make it

from the, to him, detestable elegance, clarity, and

smooth superficiality of the bland and arrogant French

dictators of taste and thought. Hamann's theses rested

on the conviction that all truth is particular, never

general; that reason is impotent to demonstrate the

existence of anything and is an instrument only for

conveniently classifying and arranging data in patterns

to which nothing in reality corresponds; that to under-

stand is to be communicated with, by men or by God.

The universe for him, as for the older German mystical

tradition, is itself a kind of language. Things and plants

and animals are themselves symbols with which God

communicates with his creatures. Everything rests on

faith; faith is as basic an organ of acquaintance with

reality as the senses. To read the Bible is to hear the

voice of God, who speaks in a language which he

has given man the grace to understand. Some men

are endowed with the gift of understanding his ways.

of looking at the universe which is his book no less

than the revelations of the Bible and the Fathers and

saints of the Church. Only love—for a person or an

object—can reveal the true nature of anything. It

is not possible to love formulae, general propositions,

laws, the abstractions of science, the vast system of

concepts and categories—symbols too general to be

close to reality—with which the French lumières have

blinded themselves to concrete reality, to the real

experience which only direct acquaintance, especially

by the senses provide.

Hamann glories in the fact that Hume has success-

fully destroyed the rationalist claim that there is an

a priori route to reality, insisting that all knowledge

and belief ultimately rest on acquaintance with the



104



data of direct perception. Hume rightly supposes thathe could not eat an egg or drink a glass of water ifhe did not believe in their existence; the data ofbelief—what Hamann prefers to call faith—rest ongrounds and require evidence as little as taste or anyother sensation. True knowledge is direct perception ofindividual entities, and concepts are never, no matterhow specific they may be, wholly adequate to the full-ness of the individual experience. “” wrote Goethe to the physiognomist J. K.Lavater in the spirit of Hamann whom Goethe pro-foundly admired. The sciences may be of use in prac-tical matters; but no concatenation of concepts willgive one an understanding of a man, of a work of art,of what is conveyed by gestures, symbols, verbal andnonverbal, of the style, the spiritual essence, of a hu-man being, a movement, a culture; nor for that matterof the Deity which speaks to one everywhere if onlyone has ears to hear and eyes to see. What is real isindividual, that is, is what it is in virtue of its unique-ness, its differences from other things, events, thoughts,and not in virtue of what it has in common withthem, which is all that the generalizing sciences seekto record. “Feeling alone,” said Hamann, “gives toabstract terms... hands, feet, wings”; and again “Godspeaks to us in poetical words, addressed to the senses,not in abstractions for the learned,” and so must any-one who has something to say that matters, who speaksto another person.

Hamann took little interest in theories or specula-

tions about the external world; he cared only for the

inner personal life of the individual, and therefore only

for art, religious experience, the senses, personal rela-

tionships, which the analytic truths of scientific reason

seemed to him to reduce to meaningless ciphers. “God

is a poet, not a mathematician,” and it is men who,

like Kant, suffer from a “gnostic hatred of matter” that

provide us with endless verbal constructions—words

that are taken for concepts, and worse still, concepts

that are taken for real things. Scientists invent systems,

philosophers rearrange reality into artificial patterns,

shut their eyes to reality, and build castles in the air.

“When data are given you, why do you seek for ficta?”

Systems are mere prisons of the spirit, and they lead

not only to distortion in the sphere of knowledge, but

to the erection of monstrous bureaucratic machines,

built in accordance with the rules that ignore the

teeming variety of the living world, the untidy and

asymmetrical inner lives of men, and crush them into

conformity for the sake of some ideological chimera

unrelated to the union of spirit and flesh that consti-

tutes the real world. “What is this much lauded reason

with its universality, infallibility... certainty, over-

weening claims, but an ens rationis, a stuffed dummy

... endowed with divine attributes?” History alone

yields concrete truth, and in particular the poets de-

scribe their world in the language of passion and

inspired imagination. “The entire treasure of human

knowledge and happiness lies in images”; that is why

the language of primitive man, sensuous and imagina-

tive, is poetical and irrational. “Poetry is the native

language of mankind, and gardening is more ancient

than agriculture, painting than writing, song than

recitation, proverbs than rational conclusions, barter

than trade.” Originality, genius, direct expression, the

Bible or Shakespeare fashion the color, shape, living

flesh of the world, which analytical science, revealing

only the skeleton, cannot begin to do.

Hamann is first in the line of thinkers who accuse

rationalism and scientism of using analysis to distort

reality: he is followed by Herder, Jacobi, Möser who

were influenced by Shaftesbury, Young, and Burke's

anti-intellectualist diatribes, and they, in their turn,

were echoed by romantic writers in many lands. The

most eloquent spokesman of this attitude is Schelling,

whose thought was reproduced vividly by Bergson at

the beginning of this century. He is the father of those

antirationalist thinkers for whom the seamless whole

of reality in its unanalyzable flow is misrepresented

by the static, spatial metaphors of mathematics and

the natural sciences. That to dissect is to murder is

a romantic pronouncement which is the motto of an

entire nineteenth-century movement of which Hamann

was a most passionate and implacable forerunner.

Scientific dissection leads to cold political dehuman-

ization, to the straitjacket of lifeless French rules in

which the living body of passionate and poetical

Germans is to be held fast by the Solomon of Prussia,

Frederick the Great, who knows so much and under-

stands so little. The archenemy is Voltaire, whom

Herder called a “senile child” with a corrosive wit in

place of human feeling. The influence of Rousseau,

particularly of his early writings, on this movement in

Germany, which came to be called Sturm und Drang,

was profound. Rousseau's impassioned pleas for direct

vision and natural feeling, his denunciation of the

artificial social roles which civilization forces men to

play against the true ends and needs of their natures,

his idealization of more primitive, spontaneous human

societies, his contrast between natural self-expression

and the crippling artificiality of social divisions and

conventions which rob men of dignity and freedom,

and promote privilege, power, and arbitrary bullying

at one, and humiliating obsequiousness at the other,

end of the human scale, and so distorts all human

relations, appealed to Hamann and his followers. But

even Rousseau did not seem to them to go far enough.

Despite everything, Rousseau believed in a timeless set



105



of truths which all men could read, for they wereengraved on their hearts in letters more durable thanbronze, thereby conceding the authority of NaturalLaw, a vast, cold, empty abstraction. To Hamann andhis followers all rules or precepts are deadly; theymay be necessary for the conduct of day-to-day life,but nothing great was ever achieved by following them.English critics were right in supposing that originalityentailed breaking rules, that every creative act, everyilluminating insight, is obtained by ignoring the rulesof despotic legislators. Rules, he declared, are vestalvirgins: unless they are violated there will be no issue.Nature is capable of wild fantasy, and it is mere child-ish presumption to seek to imprison her in the narrowrationalist categories of “puny” and desiccated philos-ophers. Nature is a wild dance, and so-called practicalmen are like sleepwalkers who are secure and success-ful because they are blind to reality; if they saw realityas it truly is, they might go out of their minds.

Language is the direct expression of the historical

life of societies and peoples: “every court, every school,

every profession, every corporation, every sect has its

own language”; we penetrate the meaning of this

language by “the passion” of “a lover, a friend, an

intimate,” not by rules, imaginary universal keys which

open nothing. The French philosophes and their Eng-

lish followers tell us that men seek only to obtain

pleasure and avoid pain, but this is absurd. Men seek

to live, create, love, hate, eat, drink, worship, sacri-

fice, understand, and they seek this because they can-

not help it. Life is action. It is knowable only by those

who look within themselves and perform the “hell-

ride” (Höllenfahrt) of self-examination, as the great

founders of Pietism—Spener, Francke, Bengel—have

taught us. Before a man has liberated himself from the

deathly embrace of impersonal, scientific thought

which robs all it touches of life and individuality, he

cannot understand himself or others, or how or why

we come to be what we are.

While Hamann spoke in irregular, isolated flashes

of insight, his disciple J. G. von Herder (1744-1803),

attempted to construct a coherent system to explain

the nature of man and his experience in history. While

profoundly interested in the natural sciences and

eagerly profiting by their findings, particularly in biol-

ogy and physiology, and conceding a good deal more

to the French than the fanatical Hamann was willing

to do, Herder in that part of his doctrine which entered

into the texture of the thought of the movements that

he inspired, deliberately aimed against the sociological

assumptions of the French Enlightenment. He believed

that to understand anything was to understand it in

its individuality and development, and that this re-

quired a capacity which he called Einfühlung (“feeling

into”) the outlook, the individual character of an artistic

tradition, a literature, a social organization, a people,

a culture, a period of history. To understand the actions

of individuals, we must understand the “organic”

structure of the society in terms of which alone the

minds and activities and habits of its members can be

understood. Like Vico, he believed that to understand

a religion, or a work of art, or a national character, one

must “enter into” the unique conditions of its life:

those who have been storm-tossed on the waves of the

North Sea (as he was during his voyage to the West)

can fully understand the songs of the old Skalds as those

who have never seen grim northern sailors coping with

the elements never will; the Bible can truly be under-

stood only by those who attempt to enter into the

experience of primitive shepherds in the Judean hills.

To grade the merits of cultural wholes, of the leg-

acy of entire traditions, by applying a collection of

dogmatic rules claiming universal validity, enun-

ciated by the Parisian arbiters of taste, is vanity and

blindness. Every culture has its own unique Schwer-

punkt (“center of gravity”) and unless we grasp it

we cannot understand its character or value. From

this spring Herder's passionate concern with the

preservation of primitive cultures which have a unique

contribution to make, his love of almost every ex-

pression of the human spirit, work of the imagination,

for simply being what it is. Art, morality, custom,

religion, national life grow out of immemorial tradi-

tion, are created by entire societies living an inte-

grated communal life. The frontiers and divisions

drawn between and within such unitary expressions

of collective imaginative response to common exper-

ience are nothing but artificial and distorting cate-

gorizations by the dull, dogmatic pedants of a later

age.

Who are the authors of the songs, the epics, the

myths, the temples, the mores of a people, the clothes

they wear, the language they use? The people itself,

the entire soul of which is poured out in all they are

and do. Nothing is more barbarous than to ignore or

trample on a cultural heritage. Hence Herder's con-

demnation of the Romans for crushing native civiliza-

tions, or of the Church (despite the fact that he was

himself a Lutheran clergyman) for forcibly baptizing

the Balts and so forcing them into a Christian mold

alien to their natural traditions, or of British mission-

aries for doing this to the Indians and other inhabit-

ants of Asia whose exquisite native cultures were being

ruthlessly destroyed by the imposition of alien social

systems, religions, forms of education that were not

theirs and could only warp their natural development.

Herder was no nationalist: he supposed that different

cultures could and should flourish fruitfully side by



106



side like so many peaceful flowers in the great humangarden; nevertheless, the seeds of nationalism are un-mistakably present in his fervid attacks on hollowcosmopolitanism and universalism (with which hecharged the French); they grew apaceamong his aggressive nineteenth-century disciples.

Herder is the greatest inspirer of cultural national-

ism among the nationalities oppressed by the Austro-

Hungarian, Turkish, and Russian empires, and ulti-

mately of direct political nationalism as well, much

as he abhorred it, in Austria and Germany, and by

infectious reaction, in other lands as well. He rejected

the absolute criteria of progress then fashionable in

Paris: no culture is a mere means towards another;

every human achievement, every human society is to

be judged by its own internal standards. In spite of

the fact that in later life he attempted to construct

a theory of history in which the whole of mankind,

in a somewhat vague fashion, is represented as devel-

oping towards a common Humanität which embraces

all men and all the arts and all the sciences, it is his

earlier, relativistic passion for the individual essence

and flavor of each culture that most profoundly influ-

enced the European imagination. For Voltaire,

Diderot, Helvétius, Holbach, Condorcet, there is only

universal civilization of which now one nation, now

another, represents the richest flowering. For Herder

there is a plurality of incommensurable cultures. To

belong to a given community, to be connected with

its members by indissoluble and impalpable ties of

common language, historical memory, habit, tradition,

and feeling, is a basic human need no less natural

than that for food or drink or security or procreation.

One nation can understand and sympathize with the

institutions of another only because it knows how much

its own mean to itself. Cosmopolitanism is the shedding

of all that makes one most human, most oneself. Hence

the attack upon what is regarded as the false me-

chanical model of mankind used by scientifically

minded French philosophes (Herder makes an excep-

tion for Diderot alone, with whose writings, wayward

and imaginative and full of sudden insights, he felt a

genuine affinity) who understand only machine-like,

causal factors, or the arbitrary will of individual kings

and legislators and commanders, sometimes wise and

virtuous and altruistic, at other times, self-interested

or corrupt or stupid or vicious. But the forces that

shape men are far more complex, and differ from age

to age and culture to culture and cannot be contained

in these simple cut-and-dried formulae. “I am always

frightened when I hear a whole nation or period

characterized in a few short words; for what a vast

multitude of differences is embraced by the word

'nation,' or 'the Middle Ages,' or 'ancient and modern

times.'” Germans can be truly creative only among

Germans; Jews only if they are restored to the an-

cient soil of Palestine. Those who are forcibly pulled

up by the roots wither in a foreign environment when

they survive at all: Europeans lose their virtue in

America, Icelanders decay in Denmark. Imitation of

models (unlike unconscious, unperceived, spontaneous

influences by one society on another) leads to arti-

ficiality, feeble imitativeness, degraded art and life.

Germans must be Germans and not third-rate French-

men; life lies in remaining steeped in one's own

language, tradition, local feeling; uniformity is death.

The tree of (science-dominated) knowledge kills the

tree of life.

So, too, Herder's contemporary, Justus Möser

(1720-94), the first historical sociologist, who wrote

about the old life of his native region of Osnabrück

in Western Germany, said that “every age had its own

style,” every war has its own particular tone, the affairs

of State have a specific coloring, dress and manner have

inner connections with religion and the sciences; that

Zeitstil and Volksstil are everything; that there is a

“local reason” for this or that institution that is not

and cannot be universal. Möser maintained that

societies and persons could be understood only by

means of “a total impression,” not by isolation of ele-

ment from element in the manner of analytical chem-

ists; this, he tells us, is what Voltaire had not grasped

when he mocked the fact that a law which applied

in one German village was contradicted by another

in a neighboring one: it is by such rich variety,

founded upon ancient, unbroken tradition that the

tyrannies of uniform systems, such as those of Louis

XIV or Frederick the Great, were avoided; it is so

that freedoms were preserved.

Although the influence was not direct, these are the

very tones one hears in the works of Edmund Burke

and many later romantic, vitalistic, intuitionist, and

irrationalist writers, both conservative and socialist,

who defend the value of organic forms of social life.

Burke's famous onslaught on the principles of the

French revolutionaries was founded upon the self-same

appeal to the “myriad strands” that bind human beings

into a historically hallowed whole, contrasted with the

utilitarian model of society as a trading company held

together solely by contractual obligations, the world

of “economists, sophisters, and calculators” who are

blind and deaf to the unanalyzable relationships that

make a family, a tribe, a nation, a movement, any

association of human beings held together by some-

thing more than a quest for mutual advantage, or by

force, or by anything that is not mutual love, loyalty,

common history, emotion, and outlook. This emphasis

in the last half of the eighteenth century on nonra-



107



tional factors, whether connected with specific religiousbeliefs or not, which stresses the value of the individ-ual, the peculiar (), the impalpable,and appeals to ancient historical roots and immemorialcustom, to the wisdom of simple, sturdy peasants un-corrupted by the sophistries of subtle “reasoners,” hasstrongly conservative and, indeed, reactionary implica-tions. Whether stated by the enthusiastic populistHerder with his acute dislike for political coercion,empires, political authority, and all forms of imposedorganization; or by Möser, moderate Hanoverian con-servative; or by Lavater, altogether unconcerned withpolitics; or by Burke, brought up in a different tradi-tion, respectful towards Church and State and the au-thority of aristocracies andsanctified by history,these doctrines clearly constitute a resistance to at-tempts at a rational reorganization of society in thename of universal moral and intellectual ideals.

At the same time abhorrence of scientific expertise

inspired radical protest in the works of William Blake,

of the young Schiller, and of populist writers in East-

ern Europe. Above all, it contributed to unpolitical

turbulence in Germany in the second third of the

eighteenth century: the plays of such leaders of the

Sturm und Drang as J. M. R. Lenz, F. M. von Klinger,

H. W. von Gerstenberg, and J. A. Leisewitz are out-

bursts against every form of organized social or po-

litical life. What provoked them may have been the

asphyxiating philistinism of the German middle class,

or the cruel injustices of the small and stuffy courts of

stupid and arbitrary German princelings, but what they

attacked with equal violence was the entire tidy order-

ing of life by the principles of reason and scientific

knowledge advocated by the progressive thinkers of

France, England, and Italy. Lenz regards nature as a

wild whirlpool into which a man of feeling and tem-

perament will throw himself if he is to experience the

fullness of life; for him, for C. F. D. Schubart, and

for Leisewitz art and, in particular, literature are pas-

sionate forms of self-assertion which look on all

acceptance of conventional forms as but “delayed

death.” Nothing is more characteristic of the entire

Sturm und Drang movement than Herder's cry “I am

not here to think, but to be, feel, live!”, or “heart!

warmth! blood! humanity! life!” French reasoning is

pale and ghostly. It is this that inspired Goethe's reac-

tion in the seventies to Holbach's Système de la nature

as a repulsive, “Cimmerian, corpse-like” treatise,

which had no relation to the marvellous, inexhaustibly

rich vitality of the Gothic cathedral at Strasbourg, in

which, under Herder's guidance, he saw one of the

noblest expressions of the German spirit in the Middle

Ages, of which the critics of the Augustan age under-

stood nothing. J. J. W. Heinse in his fantasy Ardinghello

und die glückseligen Inseln (1787; trans. as Ardinghello;

or an Artist's Rambles in Sicily, 1839), leads his central

characters after a bloodstained succession of wild ex-

periences of more than “Gothic” intensity, to an island

where there is total freedom in personal relations, all

rules and conventions have finally been flung to the

winds, where man in an anarchist-communist society

can at last stretch himself to his full stature as a sub-

lime creative artist. The inspiration of this work is a

violent, radical individualism, which represents an

early form, not unlike the contemporary erotic fan-

tasies of the Marquis de Sade, of a craving for escape

from imposed rules and laws whether of scientific

reason or of political or ecclesiastical authority, royal-

ist or republican, despotic or democratic.

By an odd paradox, it is the profoundly rational,

exact, unromantic Kant, with his lifelong hatred of

all forms of Schwärmerei, who is in part, through

exaggeration and distortion of at least one of his doc-

trines, one of the fathers of this unbridled individ-

ualism. Kant's moral doctrines stressed the fact that

determinism was not compatible with morality, since

only those who are the true authors of their own acts,

which they are free to perform or not perform, can

be praised or blamed for what they do. Since respon-

sibility entails power of choice, those who cannot freely

choose are morally no more accountable than stocks

and stones. Thereby Kant initiated a cult of moral

autonomy, according to which only those who act and

are not acted upon, whose actions spring from a deci-

sion of the moral will to be guided by freely adopted

principles, if need be against inclination, and not from

the inescapable causal pressure of factors beyond their

control—physical, physiological, psychological (such as

emotion, desire, habit)—can properly be considered to

be free or, indeed, moral agents at all. Kant acknowl-

edged a profound debt to Rousseau who, particularly

in the “profession of faith of the Savoyard vicar” in

the fourth book of his Émile, spoke of man as an active

being in contrast with the passivity of material nature,

a possessor of a will which makes him free to resist

the temptations of the senses. “I am a slave through

my vices and free through my remorse”; it is the active

will, made known directly by “feeling,” which for

Rousseau is “stronger than reason [i.e. prudential argu-

ment] which fights against it,” that enables man to

choose the good; he acts, if need be, against “the laws

of the body,” and so makes himself worthy of hap-

piness. But although this doctrine of the will as a

capacity not determined by the causal stream is

directed against the sensationalist positivism of Helvé-

tius or Condillac, and has an affinity to Kant's free

moral will, it does not leave the objective framework

of Natural Law which governs things as well as per-



108



sons, and prescribes the same immutable, universalgoals to all men.

This emphasis upon the will at the expense of con-

templative thought and perception, which function

within the predetermined grooves of the categories of

the mind that man cannot escape, enters deeply into

the German conception of moral freedom as entailing

resistance to nature and not harmonious collusion with

her overcoming of natural inclination, and rising to

Promethean resistance to coercion, whether by things

or by men. This, in its turn, led to the rejection of

the doctrine that to understand is to accept the view

that knowledge demonstrates the rational necessity and

therefore the value of what, in his irrational state, may

have seemed to man mere obstacles in his path. This

conception opposed as it is to reconciliation with

reality, in its later, romantic form, favored the un-

ending fight, at times ending in tragic defeat, against

the forces of blind nature, which cares nothing for

human ideals, and against the accumulated weight of

authority and tradition—the vast incubus of the un-

criticized past, made concrete in the oppressive in-

stitutions of the present. Thus, when William Blake

denounces Newton and Locke as the great enemies,

it is because he accuses them of seeking to imprison

the free human spirit in constricting, intellectual ma-

chines; when he says “Robin Redbreast in a cage/

Sets all Heaven in a rage,” the cage is none other

than Newtonian physics that crushes the life out of

the free, spontaneous life of the untrammeled human

spirit. “Art is the Tree of Life, Science is the Tree of

Death”; Locke, Newton, the French raisonneurs, the

reign of cautious, pragmatic respectability and Pitt's

police were all, for him, parts of the same nightmare.

There is something of this, too, in Schiller's early

play DieRäuber (1781), where the violent protest of

the tragic hero Karl Moor, which ends in failure,

crime, and death, cannot be averted by mere know-

ledge, by a better understanding of human nature or

of social conditions or of anything else; knowledge is

not enough. The doctrine of the Enlightenment that

we can discover what men truly want and can provide

technical means and rules of conduct for their greatest

permanent satisfaction and that this is what leads to

wisdom, virtue, happiness is not compatible with Karl

Moor's proud and stormy spirit which rejects the

ideals of his milieu, and will not be assuaged by the

reformist gradualism and belief in rational organization

advocated by, say, the Aufklärung of the previous

generation. “Law has distorted to a snail's pace what

could have been an eagle's flight” (The Robbers, Act I,

Scene 2). Human nature is no longer conceived of as,

in principle, capable of being brought into harmony

with the natural world: for Schiller some fatal Rous

seauian break between spirit and nature has occurred,

a wound has been inflicted on humanity which art

seeks to avenge, but knows it cannot fully heal.

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, a mystical metaphysician

deeply influenced by Hamann, cannot reconcile the

demands of the soul and the intellect: “The light is

in my heart: as soon as I try to carry it to my intellect,

it goes out.” Spinoza was for him the greatest master

since Plato of the rational vision of the universe; but

for Jacobi this is death in life: it does not answer the

burning questions of the soul whose homelessness in

the chilly world of the intellect only self-surrender to

faith in a transcendent God will remedy.

Schelling was perhaps the most eloquent of all the

philosophers who represented the Universe as the self-

development of a primal, nonrational force that can

be grasped only by intuitive powers of men of

imaginative genius—poets, philosophers, theologians,

or statesmen. Nature, a living organism, responds to

questions put by the man of genius, while the man

of genius responds to the questions put by nature, for

they conspire with each other; imaginative insight

alone, no matter whose—an artist's, a seer's, a think-

er's—becomes conscious of the contours of the future,

of which the mere calculating intellect and analytic

capacity of the natural scientist or the politician, or

any other earthbound empiricist has no conception.

This faith in a peculiar, intuitive, spiritual faculty

which goes by various names—reason, understanding,

primary imagination—but is always differentiated from

the critical analytic intellect favored by the Enlighten-

ment, the contrast between it and the analytic faculty

or method that collects, classifies, experiments, takes

to pieces, reassembles, defines, deduces, and establishes

probabilities, becomes a commonplace used thereafter

by Fichte, Hegel, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Goethe,

Carlyle, Schopenhauer, and other antirationalist

thinkers of the nineteenth century, culminating in

Bergson and later antipositivist schools.

This, too, is the source of that stream in the great

river of romanticism which looks upon every human

activity as a form of individual self-expression, and on

art, and indeed every creative activity, as a stamping

of a unique personality, individual or collective, con-

scious or unconscious, upon the matter or the medium

in and upon which it functions, seeking to realize

values which are themselves not given but generated

by the process of creation itself. Hence the denial, both

in theory and in practice, of the central doctrine of

the Enlightenment according to which the rules in

accordance with which men should live and act and

create are pre-established, dictated by nature herself.

For Joshua Reynolds, for example, “The Great Style”

is the realization of the artist's vision of eternal forms,



109



prototypes beyond the confusions of ordinary experi-ence, which his genius enables him to discern andwhich he seeks to reproduce, with all the techniquesat his command, on his canvas or in marble or bronze.Suchor copying from ideal patterns, is, forthose who derive from the German tradition of revoltagainst French classicism, not true creation. Creationis creation of ends as well as means, of values as wellas their embodiments; the vision that I seek to translateinto colors or sounds is generated by me, and peculiarto me, unlike anything that has ever been, or will be,above all, not something that is common to me andother men seeking to realize a common, shared, uni-versal, because rational, ideal. The notion that a workof art (or any other work of man) is creation in accord-ance with rules dictated by objective nature, andtherefore binding for all practitioners of it, as Boileauor the Abbé Batteux had taught, is rejected in toto.Rules may be an aid here or there, but the least sparkof genius destroys them, and creates its own practice,which uncreative craftsmen may imitate and so besaying nothing of their own. I create as I do, whetherI am an artist, a philosopher, a statesman, because thegoal that I seek to realize is my own, not because itis objectively beautiful, or true, or virtuous, orapproved by public opinion or demanded by majoritiesor tradition, but because it is my own.

What this creative self may be differs according to

doctrine. Some regard it as a transcendent entity to

be identified with a cosmic spirit, a divine principle

to which finite men aspire as sparks do to the great

central flame; others identify it with their own individ-

ual, mortal, flesh and blood selves, like Byron, or Hugo,

or other defiantly romantic writers and painters.

Others, again, identified the creative self with a super-

personal “organism” of which they saw themselves as

elements or members—nation, or church, or culture, or

class, or History itself, a mighty force of which they

conceived their earthly selves as emanations. Aggres-

sive nationalism, self-identification with the interests

of the class, the culture or the race, or the forces of

progress—with the wave of a future-directed dynamism

of history, something that at once explains and justifies

acts which might be abhorred or despised if committed

from calculation of selfish advantage or some other

mundane motive—this family of political and moral

conceptions is so many expressions of a doctrine of

self-realization based on defiant rejection of the central

theses of the Enlightenment according to which what

is true, or right, or good, or beautiful, can be shown

to be valid for all men by the correct application of

objective methods of discovery and interpretation,

open to anyone to use and verify. In its full romantic

guise, this attitude is an open declaration of war upon

the very heart of the rational and experimental method

which Descartes and Galileo had inaugurated, and

which for all their doubts and qualifications even such

sharp deviationists as Montesquieu, or Hume and

Rousseau and Kant, fully and firmly accepted. For the

truly ardent opponents of classicism, values are not

found but made, not discovered but created; they are

to be realized because they are mine, or ours, whatever

the nature of the true self is pronounced to be by this

or that metaphysical doctrine.

The most extravagant of the German romantics,

Novalis or Tieck, looked on the Universe not as a

structure that can be studied or described by whatever

methods are most appropriate, but as a perpetual

activity of the spirit and of nature which is the selfsame

spirit in a dormant state; of this constant upward

movement the man of genius is the most conscious

agent who thus embodies the forward activity that

advances the life of the spirit most significantly. While

some, like Schelling and Coleridge, conceive this

activity as the gradual growth into self-consciousness

of the world spirit that is perpetually moving towards

self-perfection, others conceive the cosmic process as

having no goal, as a purposeless and meaningless

movement, which men, because they cannot face this

bleak and despair-inducing truth, seek to hide from

themselves by constructing comforting illusions in the

form of religions that promise rewards in another life,

or metaphysical systems that claim to provide rational

justification both for what there is in the world and

for what men do and can do and should do; or scientific

systems that perform the task of appearing to give

sense to a process that is, in fact, purposeless, a form-

less flux which is what it is, a brute fact, signifying

nothing. This doctrine, elaborated by Schopenhauer,

lies at the root of much modern existentialism and of

the cultivation of the absurd in art and thought, as

well as of the extremes of egoistic anarchism driven

to their furthest lengths by Max Stirner and, in some

of his moods, by Nietzsche, Kierkegaard (Hamann's

most brilliant and profound disciple), and modern

irrationalists.

The rejection of the central principles of the

Enlightenment—universality, objectivity, rationality,

and the capacity to provide permanent solutions to all

genuine problems of life or thought, and (not less im-

portant) accessibility of rational methods to any thinker

armed with adequate powers of observation and

logical thinking—occurred in various forms, conserva-

tive or liberal, reactionary or revolutionary, depend-

ing on which systematic order was being attacked.

Those, for example, like Adam Müller or Friedrich

Schlegel, and in some moods, Coleridge or William

Cobbett, to whom the principles of the French Revolu-



110



tion or the Napoleonic organization came to seem themost fatal obstacles to free human self-expression,adopted conservative or reactionary forms of irrational-ism and at times looked back with nostalgia towardssome golden past, such as the prescientific ages offaith, and tended (not always continuously or con-sistently) to support clerical and aristocratic resistanceto modernization and the mechanization of life byindustrialism and the new hierarchies of power andauthority. Those who looked upon the traditionalforces of authority or hierarchical organization as themost oppressive of social forces—Byron, for example,or George Sand, or, so far as they can be calledromantic, Shelley or Georg Büchner—formed the “leftwing” of the romantic revolt. Others despised publiclife in principle, and occupied themselves with thecultivation of the inner spirit. In all cases the organiza-tion of life by the application of rational or scientificmethods, any form of regimentation or conscription ofmen for utilitarian ends or organized happiness, wasregarded as the philistine enemy.

What the entire Enlightenment has in common is

denial of the central Christian doctrine of original sin,

believing instead that man is born either innocent and

good, or morally neutral and malleable by education

or environment, or, at worst, deeply defective but

capable of radical and indefinite improvement by ra-

tional education in favorable circumstances, or by a

revolutionary reorganization of society as demanded,

for example, by Rousseau. It is this denial of original

sin that the Church condemned most severely in

Rousseau's Émile, despite its attack on materialism,

utilitarianism, and atheism. It is the powerful reaffir-

mation of this Pauline and Augustinian doctrine that

is the sharpest single weapon in the root and branch

attack on the entire Enlightenment by the French

counterrevolutionary writers, de Maistre, Bonald, and

Chateaubriand, at the turn of the century.

One of the darkest of the reactionary forms of the

fight against the Enlightenment, as well as one of the

most interesting and influential, is to be found in the

doctrines of Joseph de Maistre and his followers and

allies who formed the spearhead of the counterrevolu-

tion in the early nineteenth century in Europe. De

Maistre held the Enlightenment to be one of the most

foolish, as well as the most ruinous, forms of social

thinking. The conception of man as naturally disposed

to benevolence, cooperation, and peace, or, at any rate,

capable of being shaped in this direction by appro-

priate education or legislation, is for him shallow and

false. The benevolent Dame Nature of Hume, Holbach,

and Helvétius is an absurd figment. History and zool-

ogy are the most reliable guides to Nature: they show

her to be a field of unceasing slaughter. Men are by

nature aggressive and destructive; they rebel over

trifles—the change to the Gregorian calendar in the

mid-eighteenth century, or Peter the Great's decision

to shave the boyars' beards, provoke violent resistance,

at times dangerous rebellions. But when men are sent

to war, to exterminate beings as innocent as themselves

for no purpose that either army can grasp, they go

obediently to their deaths and scarcely ever mutiny.

When the destructive instinct is evoked men feel

exalted and fulfilled. Men do not come together, as the

Enlightenment teaches, for mutual cooperation and

peaceful happiness, when history makes it clear that

they are never so united as when given a common altar

upon which to immolate themselves. This is so because

the desire to sacrifice themselves or others is at least

as strong as any pacific or constructive impulse. De

Maistre felt that men are by nature, evil, self-destruc-

tive animals, full of conflicting drives, who do not know

what they want, want what they do not want, do not

want what they want, and it is only when they are

kept under constant control and rigorous discipline by

some authoritarian elite—a church, a state, or some

other body from whose decisions there is no appeal—

that they can hope to survive and be saved. Reasoning,

analysis, criticism shake the foundations and destroy

the fabric of society. If the source of authority is

declared to be rational, it invites questioning and

doubt; but if it is questioned it may be argued away;

its authority is undermined by able sophists, and this

accelerates the forces of chaos, as in France during

the reign of the weak and liberal Louis XVI. If the

State is to survive and frustrate the fools and knaves

who will always seek to destroy it, the source of

authority must be absolute, so terrifying, indeed, that

the least attempt to question it must entail immediate

and terrible sanctions: only then will men learn to

obey it. Without a clear hierarchy of authority—awe-

inspiring power—men's incurably destructive instincts

will breed chaos and mutual extermination. The su-

preme power—especially the Church—must never

seek to explain or justify itself in rational terms; for

what one man can demonstrate, another may be able

to refute. Reason is the thinnest of walls against the

raging seas of violent emotion: on so insecure a basis

no permanent structure can ever be erected. Irra-

tionality, so far from being an obstacle, has historically

led to peace, security, and strength, and is indispens-

able to society: it is rational institutions—republics,

elective monarchies, democracies, associations founded

on the enlightened principles of free love—that col-

lapse soonest; authoritarian churches, hereditary

monarchies and aristocracies, traditional forms of life,

like the highly irrational institution of the family

founded on lifelong marriage—it is they that persist.

111



The philosophes proposed to rationalize communi-

cation by inventing a universal language free from the

irrational survivals, the idiosyncratic twists and turns,

the capricious peculiarities of existing tongues; if they

succeed, this would be disastrous, for it is precisely the

individual historical development of a language that

belongs to a people that absorbs, enshrines, and

incapsulates a vast wealth of half-conscious, half-

remembered collective experience. What men call

superstition and prejudice are but the crust of custom

which by sheer survival has showed itself proof against

the ravages and vicissitudes of its long life; to lose it

is to lose the shield that protects men's national exist-

ence, their spirit, the habits, memories, faith that

have made them what they are. The conception of

human nature which the radical critics have promul-

gated and on which their whole house of cards rests

is an infantile fantasy. Rousseau asks why it is that man

who was born free is nevertheless everywhere in

chains; one might as well ask, says de Maistre, why

it is that sheep who are born carnivorous, nevertheless

everywhere nibble grass. Men are not made for free-

dom, nor for peace. Such freedom and peace as they

have had was obtained only under wisely authoritarian

governments that have repressed the destructive criti-

cal intellect and its socially disintegrating effects. Sci-

entists, intellectuals, lawyers, journalists, democrats,

Jansenists, Protestants, Jews, atheists, these are the

sleepless enemy that never ceases to gnaw at the vitals

of society. The best government the world has ever

known was that of the Romans: they were too wise

to be scientists themselves: for this purpose they hired

the clever, volatile, politically incapable Greeks.

Not the luminous intellect, but dark instincts govern

man and societies; only elites which understand this,

and keep the people from too much secular education

that is bound to make them over-critical and discon-

tented, can give to men as much happiness and justice

and freedom as, in this vale of tears, men can expect

to have. But at the back of everything, must lurk the

potentiality of force, of coercive power.

In a striking image de Maistre says that all social

order in the end rests upon one man, the executioner.

Nobody wishes to associate with this hideous figure,

yet on him, so long as men are weak, sinful, unable

to control their passions, constantly lured to their doom

by evil temptations or foolish dreams, rests all order,

all peace, all society. The notion that reason is sufficient

to educate or control the passions is ridiculous. When

there is a vacuum, power rushes in; even the blood-

stained monster Robespierre, a scourge sent by the

Lord to punish a country that had departed from the

true faith, is more to be admired—because he did hold

France together and repelled her enemies, and created

armies that, drunk with blood and passion, preserved

France—than liberal fumbling and bungling. Louis

XIV ignored the clever reasoners of his time, sup-

pressed heresy, and died full of glory in his own bed.

Louis XVI played amiably with subversive ideologists

who had drunk at the poisoned well of Voltaire, and

died on the scaffold. Repression, censorship, absolute

sovereignty, judgments from which there is no appeal,

these are the only methods of governing creatures

whom de Maistre described as half men, half beasts,

monstrous Centaurs at once seeking after God and

fighting Him, longing to love and create, but in per-

petual danger of falling victims to their own blindly

destructive drives, held in check by a combination of

force and traditional authority and, above all, a faith

incarnated in historically hallowed institutions that

reason dare not touch. Nation and race are realities;

the artificial creations of constitution-mongers are

bound to collapse. “Nations,” said de Maistre, “are

born and die like individuals.... They have a common

soul, especially visible in their language.” And since

they are individuals, they should endeavor to remain

“of one race.” So, too, Bonald regrets that the French

nation has abandoned its ideal of racial purity, thus

weakening itself. The question of whether the French

are descended from Franks or Gauls, whether their

institutions are Roman or German in origin, with the

implication that this could dictate a form of life in the

present, although it has its roots in political contro-

versies in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eight-

eenth centuries, now takes the color of mystical

organicism which transcends, and is proof against, all

forms of discursive reasoning. Natural growth alone is

real. Only time, only history, can create authority that

men can worship and obey: mere military dictatorship,

a work of individual human hands, is brutal force

without spiritual power: he calls it bâtonocratie, and

predicts the end of Napoleon. His closest intellectual

ally was Bonald, who in similar strain denounced indi-

vidualism whether as a social doctrine or an intellectual

method of analyzing historical phenomena. The inven-

tions of man, he declared, are precarious aids compared

to divinely ordained institutions that penetrate man's

very being, language, family, the worship of God. By

whom were they invented? Whenever a child is born

there are father, mother, family, God; this is the basis

of all that is genuine and lasting, not the arrangements

of men drawn from the world of shopkeepers, with their

contracts, or promises, or utility, or material goods.

Liberal individualism inspired by the insolent self-

confidence of mutinous intellectuals has led to the in-

human competition of bourgeois society in which the

strongest and the fastest win and the weak go to the

wall. Only the Church can organize a society in which



112



the ablest are held back so that the whole of societycan progress and the weakest and least greedy alsoreach the goal.

These gloomy doctrines became the inspiration of

monarchist politics in France, and together with the

notion of romantic heroism and the sharp contrast

between creative and uncreative, historic and unhis-

torical individuals and nations, duly inspired national-

ism, imperialism, and finally, in their most violent and

pathological form, fascist and totalitarian doctrines in

the twentieth century.

The failure of the French Revolution to bring about

the greater portion of its declared ends marks the end

of the French Enlightenment as a movement and a

system. Its heirs and counter-movements that, to some

degree, they stimulated and affected in their turn,

romantic and irrational creeds and movements, political

and aesthetic, violent and peaceful, individualist and

collective, anarchic and totalitarian, and their impact,

belong to another page of history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford and

New York, 1953). R. Ayroult, la genèse du romantisme

allemand, 2 vols. (Paris, 1961). M. Beyer-Froelich, Die

Entwicklung des deutschen Selbstzeugnisse: Vol. 7, Pietismus

und Rationalismus (Leipzig, 1933), Vol. 9, Empfindsamkeit,

Sturm und Drang (Leipzig, 1936). H. Brunschwig, la crise

de l'état prussien à la fin du XVIIIe siècle et la genèse de

la mentalité romantique (Paris, 1947). L. G. A. de Bonald,

Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1859). A. Cobban, Edmund Burke

and the Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century (London,

1929). Lester G. Crocker, Nature and Culture (Baltimore,

1963), Ch. 6. Joseph de Maistre, Les soirées de Saint-

Pétersbourg, 2 vols. (Paris, 1821); idem, Considérations sur

la France (Paris, 1821); idem, Lettres et opuscules (Paris,

1861); idem, Oeuvres complètes, 14 vols. (Lyons, 1884-87);

idem, The Works of Joseph de Maistre, trans. J. Lively

(London, 1965). J. G. Fichte, DieBestimmung des Menschen

(1800), ed. F. Medicus (Leipzig, 1921), trans. William Smith

as The Vocation of Man (LaSalle, Ill., 1906); idem, Reden

an die deutsche Nation (1807-08; Leipzig, 1921), trans.

R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull as Addresses to the German

Nation (Chicago, 1922); on Fichte: Xavier Léon, Fichte et

son temps, 2 vols. (Paris, 1922-24; 1954-59). J. C. Hamann,

Werke, ed. J. Nadler, 6 vols. (Vienna, 1949-57); idem,

Briefwechsel, ed. W. Ziesemer and A. Henkel, 8 vols.

(Wiesbaden, 1955—); works on Hamann: W. M. Alexander,

Johann Georg Hamann (The Hague, 1966); J. Blum, la vie

et l'oeuvre de J. G. Hamann (Paris, 1912); R. Knoll, J. G.

Hamann und F. H. Jacobi (Heidelberg, 1963); W. Leibrecht,

Gott und Mensch bei J. G. Hamann (Güttersloh, 1958), trans.

J. H. Stam and M. H. Bertram as God and Man in the

Thought of Hamann (Philadelphia, 1966); P. Merlan, “From

Hume to Hamann,” The Personalist, 32 (1859); idem, “Parva

Hamanniana,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 9 (1948),

380-84, 10 (1949), 567-74; idem, “Hamann et les dialogues

de Hume,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 59 (1954);

J. Nadler, J. G. Hamann (Salzburg, 1949); J. C. O'Flaherty,

Hamann's Socratic Memorabilia (Baltimore, 1967); idem,

Unity and Language. A Study in the Philosophy of Johann

Georg Hamann (Chapel Hill, 1952); R. Unger, Hamann und

die Aufklärung, 2 vols. (Halle, 1925; Tübingen, 1963). Hiram

Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York, 1950; 1960).

J. G. von Herder, Sämtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan, 33 vols.

(Berlin, 1877-1913). F. H. Jacobi, Jacobis Werke, ed. F. Roth,

6 vols. (Leipzig, 1812-25); idem, Briefwechsel, ed. F. Roth,

2 vols. (Bern, 1825-27); on Jacobi: L. Lévy-Bruhl, la phi-

losophie de F. H. Jacobi (Paris, 1894). H. Kindermann,

Entwicklung der Sturm- und Drangbewegung (Vienna, 1925);

idem, J. M. R. Lenz und die deutsche Romantik (Vienna,

1925); idem, Von deutscher Art und Kunst, Deutsche Litera-

tur, Irrationalismus, Vol. 6 (Leipzig, 1935). A. Koyré, La

philosophie de Jacob Boehme (Paris, 1929). A. O. Lovejoy,

The Reason, the Understanding, and Time (Baltimore, 1961).

F. Meinecke, DieEntstehung des Historismus, 2 vols.

(Munich and Berlin, 1936), trans. J. E. Anderson as Histo-

rism (London, 1972). E. Neff, The Poetry of History (New

York, 1947; 1971). R. Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang

(Manchester, 1951). M. Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos

(Philadelphia, 1965). K. J. Pinson, Modern Germany, Its

History and Civilization (New York, 1954; 2nd ed. 1966).

J. Roos, Aspects littéraires du mysticisme philosophique

(Blake, Novalis, Ballanche), (Strasbourg, 1951). F. Schlegel,

Lucinde (Jena, 1807). F. Schleiermacher, >Vertraute Briefe

über Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde (Berlin, 1807). C. Schmitt-

Dorotic, Politische Romantik (Munich and Leipzig, 1925).

Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm

(London, 1708); idem, The Moralists (London, 1708); idem,

Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711),

ed. J. M. Robertson (London, 1900). E. Spenle, la pensée

allemande de Luther à Nietzsche, 4th ed. (Paris, 1949). J.

Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, la transparence et

l'obstacle (Paris, 1957). A. Viatte, Les sources occultes du

romantisme, 2 vols. (Paris, 1928). G. B. Vico, Opere, one-

volume ed., F. Nicolini (Milan and Naples, 1953); idem,

la Scienza nuova (1725; rev. 1730, 1744), trans. T. H. Bergin

and M. H. Fisch as The New Science (Ithaca, 1948; New

York, 1961); see the collections entitled Omaggio a Vico

(Naples, 1968) and Giambattista Vico, ed. G. Tagliacozzo

and H. V. White (Baltimore, 1969).

See also the collections Sturm und Drang: Kritische

Schriften (Heidelberg, 1962; 1963), and Sturm und Drang:

Dramatische Schriften, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1958).

ISAIAH BERLIN

Enlightenment;

Ro-

manticism;

[See alsoIrrationalism; Organicism;