The politics of unreason and the spectre of the Enlightenment
A commentary on Enlightenment and Revolution
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11645654 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Pericles S Vallianos (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 8 |
| Pages | 1058-1068 |
| Publication date | 2021-08-27 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History of European Ideas (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0191-6599 • E-ISSN: 1873-541X |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/01916599.2021.1970472 |
| OpenAlex | W3198014427 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
The chief contribution of P. Kitromilides’ Enlightenment and Revolution is that it reconstructs the Modern Greek Enlightenment as a radical programme of social and political transformation. At the same time, it describes the petering out of the Enlightenment legacy in the newly independent Kingdom, whose public life was gradually infused with a romantic nationalism with mystical and religious overtones. During the twentieth century, this led to the decoupling of the Greek public mind from the idea of Europe, which had been the lodestar for the leaders of the eighteenth century Greek Enlightenment and the Revolution of 1821. The writers of the ‘Generation of the Thirties’ constructed a notion of ‘Neohellenism’ in conscious disjunction from the ‘rationalist’ legacy of the West. Still, the institutional legacy of the Enlightenment survives as the foundation of Modern Greek public life, and its resilience was successfully tested against the onslaught of the ‘politics of unreason’ in the teens of the present century
Enlightenment · Mysticism · Political science · Politics · Theology · Contemporary and Historical Greek Studies · History · Law · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |