Matthijs Lok, "Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Jan 12, 2026

Matthijs Lok, a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Amsterdam, dives into his book exploring conservatism and Enlightenment. He traces the historical 'decline of Europe' trope to its political roots in the 18th century. Lok defines 'historical Europeanism' and profiles counter-revolutionaries like François-Xavier de Fela, highlighting their paradoxical use of Enlightenment tools. He discusses nationalism's evolution and the Vienna Order as a peace project, all while offering cautionary insights on today's political polarization.

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INSIGHT

Europe Decline Is A Recurrent Political Claim

The trope of European decline is centuries old and often tied to political agendas calling for regeneration.
Early counter-revolutionaries blamed the Enlightenment for moral decline and proposed concrete solutions like national renewal.

INSIGHT

Historical Europeanism Was Politically Engineered

Counter-revolutionaries around 1800 invented the idea of Europe as an "old continent" shaped by slow historical development.
They saw the French Revolution as an interruption that destroyed gradual institutional progress.

INSIGHT

Enlightenment Ideas Can Serve Opposite Agendas

Enlightenment concepts were contested and repurposed by both revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries.
Lok shows conservatives adopted Enlightenment forms while condemning its radical manifestations.

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Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and counter-enlightened conservative nationalists extolling the virtues of homelands threatened by globalised elites and mass migration.

Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past (Cambridge UP, 2023) seeks to uncover the roots of historically informed ideas of Europe, while at the same time underlining the fundamental differences between the writings of the older counter-revolutionary Europeanists and their self-appointed successors and detractors in the twenty-first century. In the decades around 1800, the era of the French Revolution, counter-revolutionary authors from all over Europe defended European civilisation against the onslaught of nationalist revolutionaries, bent on the destruction of the existing order, or so they believed. In opposition to the new revolutionary world of universal and abstract principles, the counter-revolutionary publicists proclaimed the concept of a gradually developing European society and political order, founded on a set of historical and - ultimately divine - institutions that had guaranteed Europe's unique freedom, moderation, diversity, and progress since the fall of the Roman Empire. These counter-revolutionary Europeanists drew on the cosmopolitan Enlightenment and simultaneously criticized its alleged revolutionary legacy. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these ideas of European history and civilisation were rediscovered and adapted to new political contexts, shaping in manifold ways our contested idea of European history and memory until today.

Matthijs Lok, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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