Joseph de Maistre and the Legacy of Enlightenment (review)

Maistre's writings have long divided opinion and are likely to do so for the foreseeable future, despite the best efforts of Richard Lebrun, over many years, and Carolina Armenteros, more recently, to make them better understood and appreciated. The Introduction, Conclusion and back cover to this volume form part of their broader charm offensive, presenting a Maistre in relatively patient and nuanced dialogue with the legacy of the Enlightenment. Attempts have been made before to broker a peace between Maistre and his various bêtes noires: the Saint-Simonians hoped to find a way of reconciling Maistre's ideas with those of Voltaire; Comte wished to reconcile Maistre's view of history with that of Condorcet. No one seems to have suspected, however, at least in the nineteenth century, that Maistre might, in his works, have been attempting to reconcile himself with his antagonists in order to produce his own synthesis of Enlightenment and tradition, order and progress. Instead, it was accepted then, and has mostly been accepted since, that these works were conceived as savage attacks on the legacy of the Enlightenment, not least because, from Maistre's point of view, the Enlightenment's principal legacy had turned out to be the French Revolution, of which he disapproved. This consistently engaging collection offers plenty of nuance and context, but rarely succeeds in overturning such a seemingly well-founded consensus; nor does it provide the comprehensive assessment of Maistre's response to the Enlightenment promised on the back cover. Instead, it presents the diverse proceedings of a conference held at Jesus College, Cambridge, in 2008. Most of the contributions aim to situate Maistre's writings precisely within their historical context, in the process frequently challenging, modifying, or qualifying the critical narratives that have tended to define the Savoyard: for instance, Maistre as blood-thirsty champion of throne and altar, Maistre as Isaiah Berlin's proto-fascist, Owen Bradley's modern Maistre (of these, the last narrative is by far the most appealing and productive). Armenteros's excellent discussion of Maistre's relationship with Rousseau proves the exception in making an intriguing case for Maistre as at once foe and heir to a major Enlightenment figure, albeit one whom she identifies, after Graeme Garrard, as a founder of the Counter-Enlightenment. Otherwise, committed Maistreans, as well as the more generally curious, will happily make do with what are perceptive and scholarly essays on topics such as Maistre's views on genius (Darrin M. McMahon), America (Joseph Eaton), and political order (Jean-Yves Pranchère); the relationship between his thought and that of the Cambridge Platonists (Philippe Barthelet) and of Schopenhauer (Yannis Constantinidès); and his engagement with sacrifice (Douglas Hedley), ultramontanism (the late Émile Perreau-Saussine), deism and Neoplatonism (Aimée E. Barbeau), and pedagogy (Élcio Verçosa Filho). Hedley's article (in part a response to Bradley) provides a particularly valuable reassessment of the central place of sacrifice in Maistre's thought.