“Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.” (“For knowledge itself is power.”)
FRANCIS BACON, MEDITATIONES SACRAE (1597)
A deep contradiction lies at the heart of much contemporary American political rhetoric: anti-republican and anti-Enlightenment intellectual structures, originally forged by Counter-Revolution thinkers, are routinely deployed to defend the Constitution, the Founders, and republican liberty itself.
“Counter-Enlightenment” is Isaiah Berlin’s term for the reaction against universal reason, progress, and social-contract thinking in favor of tradition, authority, particularism, and the irrational. This movement is associated with figures such as Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, Edmund Burke, Johann Georg Hamann, and Giambattista Vico, who rejected the rationalist, individualist, and republican premises of the 17ᵗʰ-18ᵗʰ century revolutions in favor of throne, altar, hierarchy, and mythic national spirit. De Maistre, for instance, argued in Considerations on France (1797) in his section “Can the French Republic Last,” that large republics must collapse because they vest too much authority in fallible human reason rather than in stable, hierarchical order. De Maistre’s argument that large republics are doomed to collapse because they give mankind too much authority instead of stable hierarchical or monarchical order that approximates divine rule has returned as an argument among the oligarchs.
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