Edited and translated by Christopher O. Blum

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.

The French Revolution put the Enlightenment’s principles to work and tore apart much of the social fabric of Europe.… The French critics of the Enlightenment stood athwart all this progress and called for a return to the salutary traditions of European civilization. (Christopher O. Blum)

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 (2017), and the editor of The Tears of Christ: Meditations for Lent, by St. John Henry Newman (2019).

Paperback: 218pp.

ISBN: 978-1952826160