Between Conservatism and Reaction (Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition) (Book Review)

Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition, edited and translated by Christopher Olaf Blum with a Foreword by Philippe Beneton, Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2004. 357 pp. DEMOCRACY IS THE uncontested value at the heart of contemporary political life. Throughout the twentieth century, even totalitarians genuflected before the altar of the "rights of man," claiming to embody democratic emancipation more completely and effectively than their liberal bourgeois antagonists. This surreal identification of totalitarianism with liberty was of course utterly mendacious, but it confirmed the fundamentally democratic character of all modern politics. To be undemocratic is to be, ipso facto, illegitimate, and we can now scarcely imagine a world not shaped by the dual imperatives of human rights and democratic self-rule.