Critics of the Enlightenment

Out of the smoke and rubble following the French Revolution arose a new generation of thinkers: the critics of the Enlightenment and the principles and the practices to which it gave birth. In response to the Revolution’s assailments on Church, society, and family, the counter-revolutionaries championed piety, solidarity, and fidelity. To represent this movement, Christopher O. Blum has chosen selections from six of the leading figures of the French counter-revolutionary tradition: Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, Frederic Le Play, Emile Keller, and Rene de La Tour du Pin. Together, these thinkers exemplify continental conservative thought in the century after the demise of the Old Regime.With the same elegant translations featured in its first edition, now newly revised and introduced, the second edition of Critics of the Enlightenment serves as a marvelous overview of a much-neglected movement in Western history–a movement whose bold and principled enterprise is as relevant today as it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.