Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism Revisited

Reviews / Votes

"This 'sequel' to Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism contains all the virtues of the first volume. It includes essays that not only provide an overview of many (more) critics of the Enlightenment, but also engage deeply and thoughtfully with their criticisms so as to provoke reflection on the similarities and differences among these critics across the centuries. In addition, this collection adds to the first volume by including voices from novelists, sociologists, economists, and philosophers that greatly contribute to our understanding of the tradition of the modern skepticism of rationalism."

- Jeffrey Church , Professor and Chair of Political Science, University of Houston, USA

"Gene Callahan's and Ken McIntyre's second volume of essays, like the first, covers a wide variety of anti-rationalist intellectuals. The collection is even more eclectic than the first volume. The eighteen essays range from analyses of the anti-rationalism of Blaise Pascal in the seventeenth century and Giambattista Vico in the eighteenth, and then on through a diverse group of literary, sociological, political, economic, and philosophical writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (including, perhaps surprisingly, George Eliot and J.R.R. Tolkien), and ends with studies of two contemporary philosophers, the late Roger Scruton and John Gray. Readers of both volumes will recognize the editorial wisdom in adopting such a broad conception of Enlightenment Rationalism, a conception similar to Oakeshott's idea of modern rationalism, with its seeds sown by Bacon and Descartes in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This broad conception allows them to explore opposition strategies to the complex, multilayered contours of an intellectual fashion whose inexorable progress over the past four centuries has done so much to render contemporary public culture the arid wasteland it often seems to be. But one of the many positive messages that readersmight usefully take away from the very eclectic sources examined in these volumes is the fact that so many of the thinking classes (as they used to be called) have always rejected with powerful arguments the dull mediocrity and simplistic, self-destructive ideas of our contemporary equivalents of mere sophists, economists, and calculators."

-Martyn P. Thompson , Professor of Political Science, Tulane University, USA

"What recommends this volume is not merely the quality of the contributions but its breadth. The variety of authors, subjects, fields, themes, and reflections here testify to the fact that reaction to Enlightenment rationalism was afoot across a spectrum of thoughtful individuals. Anyone interested in exploring insightful and lively critiques that there is a science, or a 'correct' response to the human condition, will want to read these essays."

-Eric S. Kos , Professor of Political Science, SienaHeights University, USA