The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment

Abstract

Use of the word "Counter-Enlightenment" has become increasingly frequent in scholarly and journalistic writing. The word was almost certainly invented by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin, and it is owing to his enormous prestige and on-going influence that it has gained its current familiarity. In Berlin's view, two of the most important sources of the supposed Counter-Enlightenment are J. G. Hamann and J. G. Herder. But as I show, Berlin's numerous accounts of their thought are profoundly flawed and reflect not Herder's or Hamann's own thought, but rather that of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German historians, who wished to legitimate their own anti-democratic, and hence anti-Enlightenment, ideology through the construction of a false historical genealogy.