The Counter-Enlightenment

Berlin's most original contribution to intellectual history was his recovery of the Counter-Enlightenment — a tradition of thinkers who, beginning in the late eighteenth century, challenged the Enlightenment's foundational conviction that human reason could discover universal truths applicable to all people in all places at all times. The Counter-Enlightenment thinkers — Giambattista Vico, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, and later in different and more dangerous ways Joseph de Maistre and the early Romantics — did not simply reject reason. Their challenge was more specific: the Enlightenment's conception of reason was too narrow, it failed to account for the ways human understanding is embedded in particular languages, cultures, histories, and forms of life, and the attempt to abstract universal principles from this particularistic ground inevitably distorts what it claims to illuminate. Berlin was not himself a Counter-Enlightenment thinker — he was a liberal who valued reason, toleration, and individual freedom — but he believed the tradition had identified something real that the Enlightenment's most