Counter-Enlightenment

The Counter-Enlightenment refers to a loose collection of intellectual stances that arose during the European Enlightenment in opposition to its mainstream attitudes and ideals. The Counter-Enlightenment is generally seen to have continued from the 18th century into the early 19th century, especially with the rise of Romanticism. Its thinkers did not necessarily agree to a set of counter-doctrines but instead each challenged specific elements of Enlightenment thinking, such as the belief in progress, the rationality of all humans, liberal democracy, and the increasing secularisation of European society.

Scholars differ on who is to be included among the major figures of the Counter-Enlightenment. In Italy, Giambattista Vico criticised the spread of reductionism and the Cartesian method, which he saw as unimaginative and stifling creative thinking.[1] Decades later, Joseph de Maistre in Sardinia and Edmund Burke in Britain both criticised the anti-religious ideas of the Enlightenment for leading to the Reign of Terror and a totalitarian police state following the French Revolution. The ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Georg Hamann were also significant to the rise of the Counter-Enlightenment with French and German Romanticism respectively.

In the late 20th century, the concept of the Counter-Enlightenment was popularised by pro-Enlightenment historian Isaiah Berlin[2] as a tradition of relativist, anti-rationalist, vitalist, and organic thinkers stemming largely from Hamann and subsequent German Romantics.[3] While Berlin is largely credited with having refined and promoted the concept, the first known use of the term in English occurred in 1949 and there were several earlier uses of it across other European languages,[4] including by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

## Contents

* 1 Term usage
* 1.1 Early usage
* 1.2 Isaiah Berlin
* 1.3 Darrin McMahon
* 1.4 Graeme Garrard
* 1.5 James Schmidt
* 2 The French Revolution
* 3 Romanticism
* 4 Totalitarianism and Fascism
* 4.1 Totalitarianism as a product of the Enlightenment
* 4.2 Nazism and Fascism as products of the Counter-Enlightenment
* 5 Related
* 5.1 People
* 5.2 Ideologies
* 5.3 Works
* 6 Notes
* 7 References
* 8 Further reading
* 9 External links

## Term usage

Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre was one of the more prominent altar-and-throne counter-revolutionaries who vehemently opposed Enlightenment ideas.

### Early usage

Despite criticism of the Enlightenment being a widely discussed topic in twentieth- and twenty-first century thought, the term "Counter-Enlightenment" was slow to enter general usage. It was first mentioned briefly in English in William Barrett's 1949 article "Art, Aristocracy and Reason" in Partisan Review. He used the term again in his 1958 book on existentialism, Irrational Man; however, his comment on Enlightenment criticism was very limited.[2] In Germany, the expression "Gegen-Aufklärung" has a longer history. It was probably coined by Friedrich Nietzsche in "Nachgelassene Fragmente" in 1877.[5]

Lewis White Beck used this term in his Early German Philosophy (1969), a book about Counter-Enlightenment in Germany. Beck claims that there is a counter-movement arising in Germany in reaction to Frederick II's secular authoritarian state. On the other hand, Johann Georg Hamann and his fellow philosophers[who?] believe that a more organic conception of social and political life, a more vitalistic view of nature, and an appreciation for beauty and the spiritual life of man have been neglected by the eighteenth century.[2]

### Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin established this term's place in the history of ideas. He used it to refer to a movement that arose primarily in late 18th- and early 19th-century Germany against the rationalism, universalism and empiricism that are commonly associated with the Enlightenment. Berlin's essay "The Counter-Enlightenment" was first published in 1973, and later reprinted in a collection of his works, Against the Current, in 1981.[6] The term has been more widely used since.

Isaiah Berlin traces the Counter-Enlightenment back to J. G. Hamann (shown).

Berlin argues that, while there were opponents of the Enlightenment outside of Germany (e.g. Joseph de Maistre) and before the 1770s (e.g. Giambattista Vico), Counter-Enlightenment thought did not take hold until the Germans "rebelled against the dead hand of France in the realms of culture, art and philosophy, and avenged themselves by launching the great counter-attack against the Enlightenment." This German reaction to the imperialistic universalism of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, which had been forced on them first by the francophile Frederick II of Prussia, then by the armies of Revolutionary France and finally by Napoleon, was crucial to the shift of consciousness that occurred in Europe at this time, leading eventually to Romanticism. The consequence of this revolt against the Enlightenment was pluralism. The opponents to the Enlightenment played a more crucial role than its proponents, some of whom were monists, whose political, intellectual and ideological offspring have been terreur and totalitarianism.

### Darrin McMahon

In his book Enemies of the Enlightenment (2001), historian Darrin McMahon extends the Counter-Enlightenment back to pre-Revolutionary France and down to the level of "Grub Street". McMahon focuses on the early opponents to the Enlightenment in France, unearthing a long-forgotten "Grub Street" literature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries aimed at the philosophes. He delves into the obscure world of the "low Counter-Enlightenment" that attacked the encyclopédistes and fought to prevent the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas in the second half of the century. Many people from earlier times attacked the Enlightenment for undermining religion and the social and political order. It later became a major theme of conservative criticism of the Enlightenment. After the French Revolution, it appeared to vindicate the warnings of the anti-philosophes in the decades prior to 1789.

### Graeme Garrard

Rousseau is identified by Graeme Garrard as the originator of the Counter-Enlightenment.

Cardiff University professor Graeme Garrard claims that historian William R. Everdell was the first to situate Rousseau as the "founder of the Counter-Enlightenment" in his 1971 dissertation and in his 1987 book, Christian Apologetics in France, 1730–1790: The Roots of Romantic Religion.[7] In his 1996 article, "the Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity", in the American Political Science Review (Vol. 90, No. 2), Arthur M. Melzer corroborates Everdell's view in placing the origin of the Counter-Enlightenment in the religious writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, further showing Rousseau as the man who fired the first shot in the war between the Enlightenment and its opponents.[8] Graeme Garrard follows Melzer in his "Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment" (2003). This contradicts Berlin's depiction of Rousseau as a philosophe (albeit an erratic one) who shared the basic beliefs of his Enlightenment contemporaries. But similar to McMahon, Garrard traces the beginning of Counter-Enlightenment thought back to France and prior to the German Sturm und Drang movement of the 1770s. Garrard's book Counter-Enlightenments (2006) broadens the term even further, arguing against Berlin that there was no single "movement" called "The Counter-Enlightenment". Rather, there have been many Counter-Enlightenments, from the middle of the 18th century to the 20th century among critical theorists, postmodernists and feminists. The Enlightenment has opponents on all points of its ideological compass, from the far left to the far right, and all points in between. Each of the Enlightenment's challengers depicted it as they saw it or wanted others to see it, resulting in a vast range of portraits, many of which are not only different but incompatible.

### James Schmidt

The idea of Counter-Enlightenment has evolved in the following years. The historian James Schmidt questioned the idea of "Enlightenment" and therefore of the existence of a movement opposing it. As the conception of "Enlightenment" has become more complex and difficult to maintain, so has the idea of the "Counter-Enlightenment". Advances in Enlightenment scholarship in the last quarter-century have challenged the stereotypical view of the 18th century as an "Age of Reason", leading Schmidt to speculate on whether the Enlightenment might not actually be a creation of its opponents, but the other way round. The fact that the term "Enlightenment" was first used in 1894 in English to refer to a historical period supports the argument that it was a late construction projected back onto the 18th century.

## The French Revolution

Political thinker Edmund Burke opposed the French Revolution in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Edmund Burke was among the first of the Revolution's opponents to relate the philosophes to the instability in France in the 1790s. His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) identifies the Enlightenment as the principal cause of the French revolution. In Burke's opinion, the philosophes provided the revolutionary leaders with the theories on which their political schemes were based.[9]

Augustin Barruel's Counter-Enlightenment ideas were well developed before the revolution. He worked as an editor for the anti-philosophes literary journal, L'Année Littéraire. Barruel argues in his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797) that the Revolution was the consequence of a conspiracy of philosophes and freemasons.[10][11]

In Considerations on France (1797), Joseph de Maistre interprets the Revolution as divine punishment for the sins of the Enlightenment. According to him, "the revolutionary storm is an overwhelming force of nature unleashed on Europe by God that mocked human pretensions."[2]

## Romanticism

Main article: Philosophy:Romanticism

In the 1770s, the "Sturm und Drang" movement started in Germany. It questioned some key assumptions and implications of the Aufklärung and the term "Romanticism" was first coined. Many early Romantic writers such as Chateaubriand, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge inherited the Counter-Revolutionary antipathy towards the philosophes. All three directly blamed the philosophes in France and the Aufklärer in Germany for devaluing beauty, spirit and history in favour of a view of man as a soulless machine and a view of the universe as a meaningless, disenchanted void lacking richness and beauty. One particular concern to early Romantic writers was the allegedly anti-religious nature of the Enlightenment since the philosophes and Aufklärer were generally deists, opposed to revealed religion. Some historians, such as Hamann, nevertheless contend that this view of the Enlightenment as an age hostile to religion is common ground between these Romantic writers and many of their conservative Counter-Revolutionary predecessors. However, not many have commented on the Enlightenment, except for Chateaubriand, Novalis, and Coleridge, since the term itself did not exist at the time and most of their contemporaries ignored it.[2]

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, c. 1797, 21.5 cm × 15 cm. One of the most famous prints of Spaniard Francisco Goya

The historian Jacques Barzun argues that Romanticism has its roots in the Enlightenment. It was not anti-rational, but rather balanced rationality against the competing claims of intuition and the sense of justice. This view is expressed in Goya's Sleep of Reason, in which the nightmarish owl offers the dozing social critic of Los Caprichos a piece of drawing chalk. Even the rational critic is inspired by irrational dream-content under the gaze of the sharp-eyed lynx.[12] Marshall Brown makes much the same argument as Barzun in Romanticism and Enlightenment, questioning the stark opposition between these two periods.

By the middle of the 19th century, the memory of the French Revolution was fading and so was the influence of Romanticism. In this optimistic age of science and industry, there were few critics of the Enlightenment, and few explicit defenders. Friedrich Nietzsche is a notable and highly influential exception. After an initial defence of the Enlightenment in his so-called "middle period" (late 1870s to early 1880s), Nietzsche turned vehemently against it.

## Totalitarianism and Fascism

### Totalitarianism as a product of the Enlightenment

After World War II, the Enlightenment re-emerged as a key organizing concept in social and political thought and the history of ideas, often suggesting links between counter-enlightenment ideas and fascism.

There was also, conversely, new counter-enlightenment literature, blaming the 18th-century Age of Reason for totalitarianism. The locus classicus of this view is Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Adorno and Horkheimer take "enlightenment" as their target including the specifically 18th-century form, - i.e. "The Enlightenment". Dialectic of Enlightenment traces the degeneration of the general concept of enlightenment, from ancient Greece (epitomized by the cunning "bourgeois" hero Odysseus) to 20th-century fascism. Adorno and Horkheimer claim that The Enlightenment is epitomized by the Marquis de Sade. However, some philosophers have rejected Adorno and Horkheimer's claim that Sade's moral skepticism is actually coherent, or that it reflects Enlightenment thought.[13]

### Nazism and Fascism as products of the Counter-Enlightenment

Part of a series on

Fascism

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Many historians and other scholars have argued that fascism was a product of the Counter-Enlightenment itself. For example, Ze'ev Sternhell called fascism "an exacerbated form of the tradition of counter-Enlightenment": with fascism, "Europe created for the first time a set of political movements and regimes whose project was nothing but the destruction of Enlightenment culture."[14] Similar opinions were expressed by such historians as Georges Bensoussan and Enzo Traverso, who noted "Counter-Enlightenment tendencies, combined with industrial and technical progress, a state monopoly over violence, and the rationalisation of methods of domination" and "Counter-Enlightenment (Gegenaufklärung) and the cult of modern technology, a synthesis of Teutonic mythologies and biological nationalism" in Nazism, thus recognizing it as grounded on intellectual traditions of counter-Enlightenment, but mixing them with "instrumental reason" which allowed adopting "the methods of industrial production and scientific management were employed" for such irrational goals as racial extermination.[15][16] Prior to these historians, various philosophers described fascism as a "revolt against reason" and a force hostile to scientific objectivity and rational inqury, namely Umberto Eco, Bertrand Russell, Richard Wolin and Jason Stanley.[17]

## Related

### People

* Adam Müller
* Alasdair MacIntyre
* Aleksandr Dugin
* Alexander von Humboldt
* Ananda Coomaraswamy
* Augustin Barruel
* Charles Taylor
* Chateaubriand
* Darrin McMahon
* Edmund Burke
* Erik von Kühnelt-Leddihn
* Ernst Jünger
* Emil Cioran
* Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
* Friedrich Nietzsche
* Francis Parker Yockey
* Henri de Saint-Simon
* Panagiotis Kondylis
* Vincenzo Cuoco
* Monaldo Leopardi
* Giacomo Leopardi
* Giambattista Vico
* Graeme Garrard
* Jean-Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan
* Johann Gottlieb Fichte
* Johann Georg Hamann
* Johann Gottfried Herder
* John N. Gray
* Joseph de Maistre
* Martin Heidegger
* Walter Benjamin
* Lewis White Beck
* Leo Strauss
* Léon Bloy
* Louis de Bonald
* Louis Althusser
* Ludwig Klages
* Carl Schmitt
* Norbert Elias
* Novalis
* Nick Land
* Oswald Spengler
* Juan Donoso Cortés
* Søren Kierkegaard
* Voltaire
* Thomas Carlyle[18][lower-alpha 1]
* Theodor W. Adorno
* Julius Evola
* Jacques Derrida
* Gilles Deleuze
* Giorgio Agamben
* Georges Bataille
* Georges Sorel
* Pierre Klossowski
* Charles Maurras
* René Guénon
* Curtis Yarvin

### Ideologies

* Anti-intellectualism
* Antiscience
* Dark Enlightenment (Neo-reactionary movement)
* Natural philosophy
* Lebensphilosophie
* Reactionary politics

### Works

* Dialectic of Enlightenment

## Notes

1. ↑ It is difficult to label Carlyle's thought, but his famous concept of Hero-Worship as well as his somewhat critical analysis of the French Revolution links him with the Counter-Enlightenment.

## References

1. ↑ Bertland, Alexander. "Giambattista Vico (1668—1744)". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/vico/.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Garrard, Graeme (2006). Counter-enlightenments : from the eighteenth century to the present. Abingdon [England]: Routledge. ISBN 0203645669. OCLC 62895765.
3. ↑ Aspects noted by Darrin M. McMahon, "The Counter-Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France" Past and Present No. 159 (May 1998:77–112) p. 79 note 7.
4. ↑ listed by Henry Hardy in the second edition of Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Princeton University Press, 2013), p. xxv, note 1.
5. ↑ Nietzsche, Friedrich (1877). Werke: Kristische Gesamtausgabe. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 478.
6. ↑ "Archived copy". http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/ac/counter-enlightenment.pdf.
7. ↑ Garrard, Graeme (2003), Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment: A Republican Critique of the Philosophes, State University of New York Press, "To my knowledge, the first explicit identification of Rousseau as "founder of the "Counter-Enlightenment" appears in William Everdell's study of Christian apologetics in eighteenth-century France."
8. ↑ Melzer, Arthur M. (1996). "The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity". The American Political Science Review 90 (2): 344–360. doi:10.2307/2082889.
9. ↑ Church, Jeffrey (2010). "The Anti-Anti-Enlightenment Thinker". The Review of Politics (Cambridge University Press) 72 (4): 731–733. doi:10.1017/S0034670510000689.
10. ↑ Josephson-Storm, Jason (2017). The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 58. ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6. https://books.google.com/books?id=xZ5yDgAAQBAJ.
11. ↑ Gay, Peter (1995). The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism. Enlightenment an Interpretation. 1 (revised ed.). New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0393313026. https://books.google.com/books?id=jVsxAAAAQBAJ.
12. ↑ Linda Simon, The Sleep of Reason
13. ↑ Geoffrey Roche, "Much Sense the Starkest Madness: de Sade’s Moral Scepticism". Angelaki Volume 15, Issue 1 April 2010, pages 45 – 59.
14. ↑ The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right. Verso Books. 29 January 2019. ISBN 978-1-78873-049-5. https://books.google.com/books?id=TsNUDwAAQBAJ.
15. ↑ European Pack for Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum: Guidelines for Teachers and Educators. Council of Europe. January 2010. ISBN 978-92-871-6794-1. https://books.google.com/books?id=NMnjBOfUTMkC.
16. ↑ The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right. Verso Books. 29 January 2019. ISBN 978-1-78873-046-4. https://books.google.com/books?id=jmeBDwAAQBAJ.
17. ↑ Frege and Fascism. Taylor & Francis. 12 December 2024. ISBN 978-1-040-27116-2. https://books.google.com/books?id=0TcxEQAAQBAJ.
18. ↑ Young, B. W. (2018). "The Counter-Enlightenments of Thomas Carlyle". In Kerry, Paul E.; Pionke, Albert D.; Dent, Megan (eds.) Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence. Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 9781683930662.

## Further reading

* Barzun, Jacques. 1961. Classic, Romantic, and Modern. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226038520.
* Berlin, Isaiah, "The Counter-Enlightenment" in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ISBN 0-374-52717-2.
* Berlin, Isaiah, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder. (Henry Hardy, editor). Princeton University Press, 2003
* Everdell, William R. Christian Apologetics in France, 1730–1790: The Roots of Romantic Religion. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1987.
* Everdell, William R. “Complots, Côteries, Conspirations: L’origine de la ‘thèse Barruel’ dans le roman apologétique” (7/6/89) in L’Image de la Révolution française: Communications présentées lors du Congrès Mondial..., vol III, Paris, 1989. Actes du Congrès mondial, “L’Image de la Révolution francaise!, 6-12 juillet, 1989, Pergamon press, p. 1881-1885
* Everdell, William R. The Evangelical Counter-Enlightenment: From Ecstasy to Fundamentalism in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in the 18th Century. New York: Springer, 2021. ISBN 978-3-030-69761-7
* Garrard, Graeme, Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment: A Republican Critique of the Philosophes (2003) ISBN 0-7914-5604-8
* Garrard, Graeme, Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (2006) ISBN 0-415-18725-7
* Garrard, Graeme, "Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment" in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, ed. Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler (2003), ISBN 0-87169-935-4
* Garrard, Graeme, "The War Against the Enlightenment", European Journal of Political Theory, 10 (2011): 277–86.
* Garrard, Graeme, "Tilting at Counter-Enlightenment Windmills", Eighteenth-Century Studies, 49/ (2015): 77–82.
* Humbertclaude, Éric, Récréations de Hultazob. Paris: L'Harmattan 2010, ISBN 978-2-296-12546-9 (sur Melech August Hultazob, médecin-charlatan des Lumières Allemandes assassiné en 1743)
* Israel, Jonathan, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670-1752, Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-19-954152-2.
* Jung, Theo, "Multiple Counter-Enlightenments: The Genealogy of a Polemics from the Eighteenth Century to the Present", in: Martin L. Davies (ed.), Thinking about the Enlightenment: Modernity and Its Ramifications, Milton Park / New York 2016, 209-226 (PDF).
* Lehner, Ulrich L. The Catholic Enlightenment (2016)
* Lehner, Ulrich L. Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism (2017)
* Masseau, Didier, Les ennemis des philosophes:. l’antiphilosophie au temps des Lumières, Paris: Albin Michel, 2000.
* McMahon, Darrin M., Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity details the reaction to Voltaire and the Enlightenment in European intellectual history from 1750 to 1830.
* Norton, Robert E. "The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment," Journal of the History of Ideas, 68 (2007): 635–58.
* Schmidt, James, What Enlightenment Project?, Political Theory, 28/6 (2000), pp. 734–57.
* Schmidt, James, Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jacobins, British Hegelians and the Oxford English Dictionary, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64/3 (2003), pp. 421–43.
* Wolin, Richard, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton University Press) 2004, sets out to trace "the uncanny affinities between the Counter-Enlightenment and postmodernism."

## External links

* Isaiah Berlin,"The Counter-Enlightenment", in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (1973)
* Darrin M. McMahon, "The counter-Enlightenment and the low-life of literature in pre-Revolutionary France," from Past & Present, May 1998

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* Berlioz
* Bertin
* Berwald
* Busoni
* Brahms
* Bruch
* Bruckner
* Cherubini
* Chopin
* Czerny
* Félicien David
* Ferdinand David
* Donizetti
* Dvořák
* Elgar
* Fauré
* Field
* Franck
* Franz
* Glinka
* Grieg
* Gomis
* Halévy
* Hummel
* Joachim
* Kalkbrenner
* Liszt
* Loewe
* Mahler
* Marschner
* Masarnau
* Medtner
* Méhul
* Fanny Mendelssohn
* Felix Mendelssohn
* Méreaux
* Meyerbeer
* Moniuszko
* Moscheles
* Moszkowski
* Mussorgsky
* Niedermeyer
* Onslow
* Paganini
* Paderewski
* Prudent
* Rachmaninoff
* Reicha
* Rimsky-Korsakov
* Rossini
* Rubinstein
* Saint-Saëns
* Schubert
* Clara Schumann
* Robert Schumann
* Scriabin
* Sibelius
* Smetana
* Sor
* Spohr
* Spontini
* Richard Strauss
* Tchaikovsky
* Thalberg
* Verdi
* Voříšek
* Wagner
* Weber
* Wolf

Theologians and
philosophers

* Barante
* Belinsky
* Berchet
* Chaadayev
* Coleridge
* Constant
* Díaz
* Emerson
* Feuerbach
* Fichte
* Goethe
* Hazlitt
* Hegel
* Hunt
* Khomyakov
* Lamennais
* Larra
* Mazzini
* Michelet
* Müller
* Pellico
* Quinet
* Ritschl
* Rousseau
* Schiller
* A. Schlegel
* F. Schlegel
* Schleiermacher
* Senancour
* De Staël
* Tieck
* Wackenroder

Visual artists|

* Aivazovsky
* Bierstadt
* Blake
* Bonington
* Bryullov
* Chassériau
* Church
* Constable
* Cole
* Corot
* Dahl
* David d'Angers
* Delacroix
* Friedrich
* Fuseli
* Géricault
* Girodet
* Głowacki
* Goya
* Gude
* Hayez
* Janmot
* Jones
* Kiprensky
* Koch
* Lampi
* Leutze
* Loutherbourg
* Maison
* Martin
* Michałowski
* Palmer
* Porto-Alegre
* Préault
* Révoil
* Richard
* Rude
* Runge
* Saleh
* Scheffer
* Stattler
* Stroj
* Tidemand
* Todorović
* Tropinin
* Turner
* Veit
* Ward
* Wiertz

Related topics|

* German idealism
* Historical fiction
* Mal du siècle
* Medievalism
* Neo-romanticism
* Preromanticism
* Post-romanticism
* Sturm und Drang

« Age of Enlightenment

Realism »

* v
* t
* e

Age of Enlightenment

Topics

* Atheism
* Capitalism
* Civil liberties
* Counter-Enlightenment
* Critical thinking
* Deism
* Democracy
* Empiricism
* Encyclopédistes
* Enlightened absolutism
* Free markets
* Haskalah
* Humanism
* Human rights
* Liberalism
* Liberté, égalité, fraternité
* Methodological skepticism
* Nationalism
* Natural philosophy
* Objectivity
* Rationality
* Rationalism
* Reason
* Reductionism
* Sapere aude
* Science
* Scientific method
* Socialism
* Universality
* Weimar Classicism

Thinkers

| France|

* Jean le Rond d'Alembert
* René Louis d'Argenson
* Pierre Bayle
* Pierre Beaumarchais
* Nicolas Chamfort
* Émilie du Châtelet
* Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
* Marquis de Condorcet
* René Descartes
* Denis Diderot
* Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
* Claude Adrien Helvétius
* Baron d'Holbach
* Louis de Jaucourt
* Julien Offray de La Mettrie
* Georges-Louis Leclerc
* Gabriel Bonnot de Mably
* Sylvain Maréchal
* Jean Meslier
* Montesquieu
* Étienne-Gabriel Morelly
* Blaise Pascal
* François Quesnay
* Guillaume Thomas François Raynal
* Marquis de Sade
* Anne Robert Jacques Turgot
* Voltaire

|

Geneva|

* Firmin Abauzit
* Charles Bonnet
* Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui
* Jean-Louis de Lolme
* Pierre Prévost
* Jean-Jacques Rousseau
* Antoine-Jacques Roustan
* Horace-Bénédict de Saussure
* Jacob Vernes
* Jacob Vernet

Germany|

* Justus Henning Böhmer
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
* Johann Gottfried von Herder
* Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel
* Wilhelm von Humboldt
* Immanuel Kant
* Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
* Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
* Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
* Moses Mendelssohn
* Samuel von Pufendorf
* Friedrich Schiller
* Christian Thomasius
* Gabriel Wagner
* Christian Felix Weiße
* Christoph Martin Wieland
* Thomas Wizenmann
* Christian Wolff

Greece|

* Neophytos Doukas
* Theoklitos Farmakidis
* Rigas Feraios
* Theophilos Kairis
* Adamantios Korais

Ireland|

* Robert Boyle
* Edmund Burke
* John Toland

Italy|

* Cesare Beccaria
* Gaetano Filangieri
* Ferdinando Galiani
* Luigi Galvani
* Antonio Genovesi
* Francesco Mario Pagano
* Giovanni Salvemini
* Pietro Verri
* Giambattista Vico

Netherlands|

* Balthasar Bekker
* Pieter de la Court
* Petrus Cunaeus
* Hugo Grotius
* François Hemsterhuis
* Christiaan Huygens
* Adriaan Koerbagh
* Frederik van Leenhof
* Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
* Bernard Nieuwentyt
* Baruch Spinoza
* Jan Swammerdam
* Hendrik Wyermars

Poland|

* Tadeusz Czacki
* Hugo Kołłątaj
* Stanisław Konarski
* Ignacy Krasicki
* Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz
* Stanisław August Poniatowski
* Jędrzej Śniadecki
* Stanisław Staszic
* Józef Wybicki
* Andrzej Stanisław Załuski
* Józef Andrzej Załuski

Portugal|

* Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo

Romania|

* Ion Budai-Deleanu
* Dinicu Golescu
* Petru Maior
* Samuil Micu-Klein
* Gheorghe Șincai

Russia|

* Catherine II
* Denis Fonvizin
* Mikhail Kheraskov
* Mikhail Lomonosov
* Nikolay Novikov
* Alexander Radishchev
* Yekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova

Serbia|

* Dositej Obradović
* Avram Mrazović

Spain|

* José Cadalso
* Charles III
* Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro
* Leandro Fernández de Moratín
* Valentin de Foronda
* Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos
* Martín Sarmiento
* Diego de Torres Villarroel

United Kingdom
(Scotland)|

* Joseph Addison
* Francis Bacon
* James Beattie
* Jeremy Bentham
* George Berkeley
* Joseph Black
* Hugh Blair
* James Boswell
* James Burnett, Lord Monboddo
* Anthony Collins
* Adam Ferguson
* Edward Gibbon
* Robert Hooke
* David Hume
* Francis Hutcheson
* Samuel Johnson
* John Locke
* John Millar
* Isaac Newton
* William Ogilvie
* Richard Price
* Joseph Priestley
* Thomas Reid
* Shaftesbury
* Adam Smith
* Dugald Stewart
* Mary Wollstonecraft

United States|

* Benjamin Franklin
* Thomas Jefferson
* James Madison
* George Mason
* Thomas Paine

* Category

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