Editorial: Conservative dispositions in continental thought

Abstract

[Excerpt] In his 1973 essay “The Counter-Enlightenment”, Isaiah Berlin outlines the history of attacks against the universalism of the French Enlightenment and its key idea that nature, society, and individual lives are governed by “one set of universal and unalterable principles” (Berlin, 1998, pp. 245–246). For Berlin, the history of the CounterEnlightenment is essentially the history of modern cultural relativism and historicism, from the Italian Giambattista Vico, through Germans such as J. G. Hamann, J. G. Herder, and Justus Möser, up to the pessimistic French conservatism of Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald. What these thinkers share is an emphasis on the finitude of human reason - in contrast to divine perfection, but also as opposed to faith and affectivity - and its dependence on local context: community, tradition, and language. While Berlin acknowledges that the Romantic Counter-Enlightenment had its revolutionary left wing in figures like Lord Byron and George Sand, he sees its pessimism regarding human perfectibility and the applicability of rational universal standards as ultimately fostering authoritarian conservatism à la Maistre and inspiring nationalism, imperialism, and, later, fascism.