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For many philosophers of the twentieth century, the "Enlightenment"--the eighteenth-century intellectual movement that upheld reason over prejudice, rights over privileges, nature over tradition--actually contained the seeds of great evil and enslavement. Communism under Stalin and Fascism under Mussolini and Hitler worked out the internal logic of the ruthlessly efficient instrumental rationality of the Enlightenment, according to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Isaiah Berlin saw in these same regimes the Enlightenment celebration of the rule of the uniform, rational, general will over our benighted particular, empirical selves. Many scholars have since come to the defense of the Enlightenment against these criticisms, in part by complicating the notion of what the Enlightenment is, or by revealing that Enlightenment thinkers' views of reason, history, and morality were more varied and nuanced than the criticisms suggest. Professor Zeev Sternhell's learned and spirited tome represents the latest in this resurgence of Enlightenment defenders.
Sternhell's strategy is to turn the tables on the Enlightenment's discontents, a group of philosophers he identifies as constituting the "tradition" of his title. He argues that it was not the Enlightenment, but the Anti-Enlightenment--and the "eruption or irrationality" it gave rise to--that was responsible for the terrors of the twentieth century (443). The term "Anti-Enlightenment" was coined late by Friedrich Nietzsche, Sternhell admits, but as an ideological tradition it emerges a century before Nietzsche in the works of J. G. Herder and Edmund Burke (3). This unlikely pair, unified in their opposition to the main Enlightenment views, inspired the thought of their many epigoni in the nineteenth century (Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Carlyle, Hippolite Taine, Jules Michelet, Ernest Renan, Georges Sorel) and the twentieth century (Oswald Spengler, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Charles Maurras, Isaiah Berlin). Sternhell's immense erudition is apparent in every chapter...