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

Jun 24, 2024

Author Matthijs Lok discusses the roots of European ideas, contrasting conservative and Enlightenment views. They touch on counter-revolutionary authors defending Europe, opposition to revolutionary principles, and the evolution of European society. The podcast explores conservatism's rise globally, the dark side of Enlightenment values, and German theorists' views on Europe as diverse. It also delves into lesser-known Enlightenment figures, the concept of the European Republic, and European conservatism during the Vienna Order period.

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Intro

00:00 • 2min

Exploring the History of Conservatism and Liberalism in Europe and Globally

02:20 • 16min

Opposition to the Enlightenment and Adoption of Enlightenment Methods

18:00 • 4min

Exploring the Dark Side of Enlightenment Values and Counter-Revolutionary Ideas in the 18th Century

22:00 • 5min

Exploring Europe as a Diverse and Pluralist Continent through German Theorists

26:50 • 3min

Exploration of Lesser-Known Enlightenment Figures and the Evolution of the European Republic Concept

30:03 • 5min

European Conservatives and the Vienna Order

34:37 • 21min

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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