Inventing the "Counter-Enlightenment": Liberalism, Nihilism, and Totalitarianism

Questioned about the origins of the term “Counter-Enlightenment,” Isaiah Berlin responded “I don’t know who invented the concept …. Someone must have said it. Could it be myself? I should be somewhat surprised.”  While it has been known for some time that the term had, in fact, appeared as early as the June 1949 in an article in Partisan Review by the philosopher William Barrett, both the particular circumstances of the term’s coining and its relationship to Berlin’s later use of the term remain unexplored.  This paper will examine the political context that Barrett addressed – an ongoing set of debates about the meaning of “liberalism” in which Lionel Trilling played a prominent role – and trace the issues at stake to earlier discussions of the alleged linkages between science, liberalism, nihilism, and the rise of National Socialism.  It will show how, with the advent of the Cold War, these accounts of the alleged moral deficiencies of modern liberal societies were refashioned into a critique of the political legacy of the Enlightenment by J. L. Talmon, John Hallowell, Michael Oakeshott, and others. It will argue that it was in this context that Isaiah Berlin framed his earliest account of what he saw as the shortcomings of “Enlightenment rationality,” an account that would later serve as the foil for understanding of the “the Counter-Enlightenment.”