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No one in the eighteenth century used the term "Counter-Enlightenment." So why should we? This is not some kind of anarchic nominalist suggestion meant to pick apart terminology and the anachronistic use (or absence) of words. No one spoke of "gender," either, in the eighteenth century, which certainly should not prevent us from applying this extremely useful category to the societies of the past. Rather, I mean to pose deeper questions about how historians divide things up. In what way does it make sense to imply that an organized an ontologically verifiable Counter-Enlightenment existed in the eighteenth century? To what does the term "Counter-Enlightenment" actually correspond? But moreover, what use is a Counter-Enlightenment-what does it do for us as historians? What assumptions are hidden within this binaried view of the Enlightenment? It is not entirely obvious that a coherent and identifiable Counter-Enlightenment even existed in the eighteenth century, and if historians are to continue using the term, there needs to be a clearer sense of why it is good to think it.
Indeed, the historiography surrounding the Counter-Enlightenment has become increasingly divided in the past decade. I do not mean to suggest the existence of a hardened division, nor do I seek to put forth a straw man argument, but one can identify a fairly clear separation between those who continue to assume the ontological reality (or at least conceptual utility) of a Counter-Enlightenment and those who do not. The luminary of the former group is Isaiah Berlin, whose "The Counter-Enlightenment" and Three Critics of Enlightenment did much to cement the Counter-Enlightenment as a viable historical category.1 A similar kind of adherence to the term, albeit with much greater nuance, appears in more recent works on the Counter-Enlightenment by Darrin McMahon, Didier Masseau, Olivier Ferret, Jacques Marx, Graeme Garrard, and many others who tend to divide things up intellectually between philosophes and anti-philosophes, and who tend to use the Counter-Enlightenment as an historical explanator for the Counter-Revolution in the years after 1789.2 On the other side stands a series of historians who have systematically chipped away at the concept of Counter-Enlightenment. In different ways, Helena Rosenblatt, Mark Curran, Robert E. Norton, and James Schmidt have all argued that we need to jettison the simplistic division...