Although Joseph de Maistre has long been regarded as characterising the Counter-Enlightenment, his intellectual relationship to eighteenth-century philosophy remains unexplored. In this first comprehensive assessment of Joseph de Maistre’s response to the Enlightenment, a team of renowned scholars uncover a writer who was both the foe and heir of the philosophes.
While Maistre was deeply indebted to thinkers who helped to fashion the Enlightenment – Rousseau, the Cambridge Plato...