Comments on: Enlightenment, Yes!

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By: Tom Haig

Tom Haig — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 07:32:04 +0000

I’m not sure that Rousseau fits entirely within the Sternhell’s ‘good’ Enlightenment tradition either… sure he was a proponent of the social contract, but the romanticism that he promoted was readily co-opted by Robespierre and Saint-Just to justify The Terror.
As Simon Schama’s ‘Citizens’ makes clear, much of the modernising, Enlightenment programme of economic rationalism and technocracy/meritocracy was begun under the Ancien Regime, and in fact more interrupted than advanced by the Revolution.

By: Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:34:11 +0000

Sad to read the self-congratulatory lucubration’s of so large a gathering of undereducated rightists commentating and supporting their “arguments” by citing such worthies as Mrs Himmelfarb-a well documented right wing extremist.
Just to cite a flavour of their idiocies I cite “What this strange Israeli chap doesn’t seem to understand is that totalitarianism had its roots not in reaction to the French Revolution, but in the Revolution itself. It is the enlightenment thinkers who push the collective above the individual, not Burke.”
A French King said
L’Etat c’est moi- surely more foundational. The terror of the Inquisition founded by a Totalitarian Church is the modern foundation of totalitarianism

By: Idler

Idler — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:09:12 +0000

Rationalists love uniformity and hate variety, subtlety and individual independence. They seek to wrench humanity from its traditions, from the continuity of existence that constitutes identity, and subject humanity to their utopian fantasies. They believe that the hard rationalist method is the only species of meaningful inquiry. One can oppose this point of view without being hostile to progress (Burke certainly wasn’t) or science or reason.

I’m delighted to see comments here that call attention to the truth that the Enlightenment was not a monolithic intellectual enterprise, and that Burke belonged to it. There are indeed anti-Englightnment forces today whose danger lies not only in undermining ethical universalism (which Burke surely believed in) which actually elevates prejudice to the same level of legitimacy as the absolute — which Burke did not do, much as he did value the utility of prejudice. Burke demonstrated his belief in the rights of Americans, Irish and Indians as well as Englishmen. He simply saw the folly of philosophical rationalism (not to be confused with reason), and in doing so was able to predict its development into totalitarian tyranny.

The Terror of French Revolution flows out of Enlightenment rationalism, as does the Communism of Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot. Sternhell has apparently not read Michael Oakeshott, or if he has, he was just as bewildered by him as by Edmund Burke.

By: Chocolate

Chocolate — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:07:26 +0000

How many people would like to go back and live in the time of Edmund Burke? How many would like to live in America or Europe where only the rich and powerful had any power. Of course maybe we do.

By: Michael Phillips

Michael Phillips — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 22:37:53 +0000

As a Lefty, Sternhell is incapable of seeing that the Greens, the Global Warming activists and the EU and Arab jew-haters are also strongly anti-enlightenment.

By: Brian Switzer

Brian Switzer — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:55:21 +0000

Sternhall is amusingly as fanatical and one-sided as he claims are the so-called anti-Enlightenment thinkers. The real danger comes from the blind belief that democracy and mere analytical, problem-solving reason are self-evident absolute goods. Correct me if I am wrong, but did not this very reasoning produce soul-destroying consumerism, materialism, and environment-destroying products? One thinker not mentioned in this article is Rousseau. Where would he stand in Sternhall’s simplistic pantheon of Enlightenment/Anti-Enlightenment thinkers?

By: Don Phillipson

Don Phillipson — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:48:40 +0000

It looks as if Sternhell is unfamiliar with Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (2005) which to my eye demonstrates much better the differences between (say) Burke and Voltaire and Jefferson, and thus gives a better account (like Berlin) of persisting national differences in styles of thought.

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:59:04 +0000

The masses have the right to govern if, as Renan says, they know better than anyone else. And vice versa. Obviously. So does anyone know better than anyone else? No. Nobody does. Not even Sternhell, who doesn’t even know that Burke defends rights (in India, America, Ireland, England and France) and opposes the armed doctrines (and injustices and oppression and greed) that puts people’s rights at risk. Carlyle was a reactionary. But Burke? Clearly not.

By: Shalom Freedman

Shalom Freedman — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:59:16 +0000

Sternhall is portrayed here in far more favorable terms than he in my judgment merits. First of all, note the unfair presentation, the envious presentation of the work and thought of Isaiah Berlin. Berlin is one of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century. Perhaps more than any other thinker he showed the limitations of any absolute utopian ideal, and argued strongly for a kind of freedom and liberal democracy most suited to the well- being of mankind.
Also the excess worship of the Enlightentment fails to see the true picture. Voltaire and Diderot were not all about Liberation and Learning but rather very much about narrow petty spites and jealousies, small hatreds and grudges. Out of the Enlightentment came the extremes of the French Revolution and in a sense the ‘liberation’ which was Marxism.
In dealing with political opponents in Israel Sternhall tends to be a demonizer, one full of spite himself, in this sense a true heir of the worst of the Enlightentment.

By: Toryhere

Toryhere — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:25:05 +0000

Burke was just as much a product of the Enlightenment as any French intellectual, only cleverer.

What this strange Israeli chap doesn’t seem to understand is that totalitarianism had its roots not in reaction to the French Revolution, but in the Revolution itself. It is the enlightenment thinkers who push the collective above the individual, not Burke.

By: Marooned

Marooned — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 03:23:52 +0000

As important an examination as can be done in this time.

The current surge of anti-enlightenment activism, in the United States and many other societies, is too easily seen as very recent and without the roots that go back to the 17th-18th centuries. By better understanding the proponents of anti-enlightenment concept and thereby seeing the results of their ideas, we can better deal with present-day attempts to undo enlightenment understandings.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:13:17 +0000

This is another example of treating “Enlightenment” as a monolith (whether pro or con). Might I recommend to all the many volumes J.G.A. Pocock has written on Gibbon to see how Enlightenment took many and conflicting forms, and the same goes for all “reactions” to it (or them).

By: Stephen

Stephen — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 06:48:31 +0000

No enlightenment is perfect. Voltaire himself, whose name was nearly synonymous with the movement, was in fact virulently anti-Semitic. Societies adopt ideas and discard ideas over time with no apparent “path to perfection.” The French 18th c. Enlightenment carried several themes that continue to play out in modern culture, others have been replaced. There is nothing wholly unique about “the” (18th c.) Enlightenment that should make it stand out as the ultimate model of society.

By: Doug

Doug — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:06:30 +0000

What kind of “enlightenment” can we expect from someone who advised Palestinian terrorists: “You shouldn’t be killing us [I guess he meant the Israelis who live in the pre-1967 borders]; you should be killing the settlers”?

By: Joseph

Joseph — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:26:12 +0000

>For instance, he blasts Renan for writing that “the masses only have the right to govern if they know better than anyone else what is best,” a frankly elitist and anti-democratic notion.<

Did you expect differently from a man who demonizes anyone to the right of him, religiously or politically? Just google his name for all kinds of outrageous statements and accusations made by the good professor over the years.