Critics of the Enlightenment

Product Description
Out of the smoke and rubble following the French Revolution arose a new generation of thinkers: the critics of the Enlightenment and the principles and the practices to which it gave birth. In response to the Revolution’s assailments on Church, society, and family, the counter-revolutionaries championed piety, solidarity, and fidelity. To represent this movement, Christopher O. Blum has chosen selections from six of the leading figures of the French counter-revolutionary tradition: François-René de Chateaubriand, Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, Frédéric Le Play, Émile Keller, and René de La Tour du Pin. Together, these thinkers exemplify continental conservative thought in the century after the demise of the Old Regime.With the same elegant translations featured in its first edition, now newly revised and introduced, the second edition of Critics of the Enlightenment serves as a marvelous overview of a much-neglected movement in Western history—a movement whose bold and principled enterprise is as relevant today as it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Review
As a new generation of thinkers sets out to reevaluate the liberal project, this book is simply essential. Worth the price of admission for Blum's illuminating introduction alone, it also grants access to the core texts in the French counter-revolutionary canon, all in lucid, beautiful translation.\n-Sohrab Ahmari,
The New York Post\nIn this bewildering age, when so many aspects of the Enlightenment--particularly its brand of political liberalism--are under attack from critics on both the left and right, it is crucial to reconsider the works of those who first confronted the vast transformation of society envisioned by Enlightenment intellectuals. Thanks to the expert guidance of Christopher O. Blum, we are able to bring the traditional insights of writers such as Chateaubriand, de Maistre, and Bonald to the debates of the current day.\n-Patrick Macfarlane, Providence College \nWe live during revolutionary times. American institutions that once functioned to maintain civil social order now foment radical ideologies aimed at complete social overhaul. Where can we go to find arguments and principles aimed at shoring up the foundations of society? The counter-revolutionary thinkers of France are one such source for a conservative tradition that can help us understand and stem the tide of ideological revolution. That makes this new edition of Christopher O. Blum's Critics of the Enlightenment indispensable reading and a welcome introduction to perennial conservative thought in the service of genuine social renewal.\n-Jeffrey O. Nelson, Intercollegiate Studies Institute\nThe most profound and compelling critics of the Enlightenment and Revolution were an outstanding ensemble of nineteenth-century French thinkers, men who had experienced and analyzed first-hand the corrosive religious, political, and social consequences of these movements. Drawing on the "wisdom of tradition," these insightful men articulated beneficial proposals for a true, organic restoration of society. In this new and updated edition of
Critics, Christopher Blum performs an invaluable service to an Anglophone audience by translating the key texts of these penetrating thinkers, most for the first time ever.\n-Joseph F.X. Sladky, PhD, Gregory the Great Academy\nAbout the Author
Christopher O. Blum is Professor of History and Philosophy in the Augustine Institute's Graduate School of Theology. He is the co-author, with Joshua P. Hochschild, of
A Mind at Peace (Sophia Institute, 2017), and the editor of
The Tears of Christ: Meditations for Lent, by St. John Henry Newman (Augustine Institute, 2019).