Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of

Critics have long treated the most important intellectual movement of modern hstory - the Enlightenment - as if it took shape in the absence of opposition.In this ground-breaking new study, Darrin McMahon demonstrates that, on the contrary, contemporary resistance to the Enlightenment was a major cultural force, shaping and defining the Enlightenment from the moment of its inception, while giving rise to an entirely new ideological phenomenon - what we have come to think of as the "Right".Born in France, but spread throughout Europe and the New World in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Counter-Enlightenment was neither a rarified current in the history of ideas nor an atavistic relic of the past, but an extensive, international, and thoroughly modern affair. Drawing on a range od primary sources, McMahon shows that well before the French Revolution, enemies of the Enlightenment were warning that the secular thrust of modern philosophy would give way to horrors of an u