Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism

This book provides an overview of some of the most important critics of “Enlightenment rationalism.”  The subjects of the volume—including, among others, Burke, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, C.S. Lewis, Gabriel Marcel, Russell Kirk, and Jane Jacobs—do not share a philosophical tradition as much as a skeptical disposition toward the notion, common among modern thinkers, that there is only one standard of rationality or reasonableness, and that that one standard is or ought to be taken from the presuppositions, methods, and logic of the natural sciences.

 The essays on each thinker are intended not merely to offer a commentary on that thinker, but also to place that thinker in the context of this larger stream of anti-rationalist thought. Thus, while this volume is not a history of anti-rationalist thought, it may contain the intimations of such a history. 

Eugene Callahan teaches at New York University. He is the author of Economics for Real People (2002), Oakeshott on Rome and America (2012), and co-editor of Tradition v. Rationalism (2018).

 Kenneth B. McIntyre is Professor of Political Science at Sam Houston State University. He is the author of The Limits of Political Theory: Michael Oakeshott on Civil Association (2004) and Herbert Butterfield: History, Providence, and Skeptical Politics (2012).