Review Article: Painters of Ruins and Prophets of the Past
| Author | Aurelian Craiutu |
| Published date | 01 January 2010 |
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885109349409 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
112
Painters of Ruins and Prophets
of the Past
The School of Disenchantment and Its
Charms
Aurelian Craiutu
Indiana University, Bloomington
Joshua F. Dienstag Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006. ISBN: 978–0691125527 (hbk), 320 pp., $35.00.
Antoine Compagnon Les Antimodernes: De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes. Paris:
Gallimard, 2005. ISBN: 978–2070772230 (pbk), 464 pp., E29.50.
Lucidity is the only vice which makes us free – free in a desert. (E. M. Cioran)
Two devastating world wars and ideologies that justied the murder of more than a
hundred million people in the name of more or less dubious ideals, mass-scale terror,
forced labor, and abominable extermination camps: that is the dark side of the century
which has just ended. The seeds of destruction had been planted long before. In the wake
of the Paris Commune, Rimbaud proclaimed: ‘Voici le temps des assassins!’ Who could
deny today that we are heirs to an epoch that produced Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot,
whose hubris far surpassed the lust for power of prior tyrants? For all the great and undeni-
able achievements of the last century – the rise of the average human life expectancy, the
eradication of many illnesses, the conquest of the space, the outlawing of various forms of
discrimination – the two totalitarianisms that originated in Europe constituted a new form
of barbarism with a modern face that cast a long shadow on the entire world. Confronted
with these distressing facts and numbers, even Voltaire’s Candide would have paused for a
moment to question the idea of progress.
Was it democracy’s fault that these leaders managed to wreak so much havoc in such
a short amount of time? Weren’t the real culprits the true enemies of democracy, those
who despised its values, did not believe in its principles, and repudiated them in the name
of other dubious ideals? Even when they refrained from claiming that we live in the best
possible world, some of the most optimistic political theorists fell under the sway of grand
schemes of social and political improvement. Others, like Spengler, Heidegger, Cioran,
Foucault, and Derrida, felt increasingly alienated in modern society and often spoke as
review article
Contact address: Aurelian Craiutu, Department of Political Science, Indiana University,
210 Woodburn Hall, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
E-mail: acraiutu@indiana.edu
EJPT
European Journal of Political Theory
9(1) 112–128
© The Author(s), 2010
Reprints and permission: http://www.
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885109349409]
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Craiutu: The School of Disenchantment and Its Charms
113
‘prophets of extremity’,1 in search for radical cures to the ills of modernity. Some of them,
such as Heidegger and Spengler, took to task the legacy of the Enlightenment, while
others, like Foucault and Derrida, spoke in the name of the ideas of the Enlightenment
and used them in order to diagnose the malaise in our political and social institutions. A
few others like Ernst Jünger and Heidegger gave up politics altogether and retreated into
their own mythical Castalias, or withdrew into their hermitages of pure thought, usually
on the top of a magic mountain, far away from the sound and fury of the world, preparing
themselves for the appearance of the last gods. Finally, many others (like Sartre) followed
Plato’s example and went to their own ‘Syracuse’ (Moscow, Berlin, Havana, Beijing, and
Tehran) or visited ‘Syracuse’ in their own restless imagination. They willingly offered
their services to tyrants, defended the indefensible, and deantly ignored the lessons of
history, often choosing authenticity, radicalism, and adventure over humility, decency,
and moderation.2
Joshua Foa Dienstag’s Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit and Antoine Compagnon’s
Les Antimodernes: De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes invite us to reect on the prac-
tical consequences of the disenchantment with the values and principles of the modern
age. These books offer us a timely opportunity to rethink the legacy of a long tradition
of disenchantment with modernity that brings together pessimists, anti-moderns, coun-
ter-revolutionaries, and critics of the Enlightenment. Both volumes focus on the critics
of those theories that interpret history as following a logic of inevitable and indenite
progress, in which apparent breaks and relapses are seen as necessary stages in a longer
historical pattern. Dienstag and Compagnon believe that modernity is unthinkable with-
out taking into account its critics or detractors who courageously opposed its values or
denounced its paradoxes. There is much to admire in these two books, especially their
ambitious scope and original choice of characters. Most of the authors discussed in these
two volumes, from Leopardi, Unamuno, and Cioran to Bloy, Péguy, and Thibaudet, do
not belong to the canon and are overlooked by political theorists.
Far from being an attack on the pessimistic spirit, Dienstag’s book is a balanced appraisal
and a nuanced endorsement of a long tradition in modern thought, that attempts to re-
frame the history of political thought so that pessimism becomes one of its major strands.
This is arguably easier said than done. Dienstag is right to claim that the idea of a pessimis-
tic political theory has not been seriously entertained, or it has been too easily dismissed.
He nds it awkward that an entire pessimistic tradition has gone missing from our standard
histories of political theory. In Dienstag’s view, while many of the ideas of prominent
pessimists such as Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud, and Schopenhauer are well-known, ‘the
nature of their common project (indeed, the very idea that they have a common project)
has been obscured’ (p. 3). Moreover, other major pessimists such as Leopardi, Unamuno,
and Cioran have been ignored by political theorists mainly because of their pessimism,
which, Dienstag notes, is too often seen as a exible term of abuse. Once a respectable
philosophy, pessimism has become so despised in our culture that the very word ‘pessi-
mist’ is often used today in a pejorative sense. Dienstag laments the fact that pessimism is
dismissed before serious debate begins and seeks to rescue this concept from the undue
oblivion into which it has fallen.3
Because pessimism has often been perceived more as a disposition or a state of mind
rather than a theory or philosophy, pessimists have rarely been seen as constituting a con-
tinuous and coherent tradition of thought. To study pessimism well, Dienstag notes, we
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