Table Of ContentThe Reasoning of Unreason
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The Reasoning of Unreason
Universalism, Capitalism and Disenlightenment
John Roberts
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First published in Great Britain 2018
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Hereticism, Faith and the Antinomies of Reason 21
2 Writing Enlightenment–Disenlightenment in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries 57
3 Bourgeois Universalism in the Age of Enlightenment
and Nationalism 101
4 The Reasoning of Unreason as Anti-philosophy: Post-war
Capitalism, Emancipatory Universalism and Radical Particularism 155
Conclusion 211
Notes 221
Bibliography 246
Index 261
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Meena Dhanda, Stefano Pippa, Angela Dimitrakaki, Ray Brassier
and Kim Charnley for their comments on the text and to Chris Gomersall for
his editorial work. Thanks also to Alexei Penzin for the many conversations on
the topics contained in this book, and to Frankie Mace at Bloomsbury for her
support of the project.
Introduction
The imagination works harder in darkness than it does in bright light.
Immanuel Kant
Beyond the ‘eclipse of reason’
This book is concerned with what I call the ‘reasoning of unreason’: the
philosophical (or anti-philosophical) defence of disenlightenment. However,
this is not a book about the death of reason (Georg Luká cs), the decline of
Enlightenment values (the ‘present crisis of reason’)1 (Max Horkheimer) or the
rise of mass delusion (Sigmund Freud), as if reason is something given, held
onto and then lost, through the forces of reaction; nor is it about Enlightenment
‘abstraction’ and ‘universalism’ being the insidious ‘black’ supplements of reason,
as in John Gray’s anti-Enlightenment screed Black Mass.2 It certainly touches
on these narratives of crisis and their long-term forensics of power and social
agency, but I do not reach out for the evidence and metaphors of catastrophe to
explain its continuities. Rather, my argument is at once both philosophical and
politically dialectical, insofar as the reasoning of unreason is invariably a form
of hypostatized radical particularism, and, as such, it is the various political
and cultural expressions of radical particularism that historically shape and
direct the forces of disenlightenment in the premodern and modern periods.
Indeed, here, I establish a link between particularism, reason and reaction as
the triangulated ideology of both capitalist rationalization and premodern,
feudal tradition. In turn, therefore, far from the reasoning of unreason being the
symptom of extended post-Enlightenment decline, my focus is the ever-present
material and political struggle between the contingent truth-claims of radical
particularism and the substantive truth-claims of an emancipatory universalism.
Thus, my aim is not to see a defence of radical particularism as the work of
an abstract unreason or reaction, but, invariably, as that which is attached to
the enforcement of political conservatism or religious dogmatism, or more
dramatically, the pursuit of an explicit counter-revolutionary ideology. This is
why we should be clear from the beginning that my concept of the ‘reasoning of
2 The Reasoning of Unreason
unreason’ is not identifiable solely with the notion of radical evil. Thus, although
‘radical evil’ comes into my later account of particularism and the universal,
overall, the reasoning of unreason here is theorized as the non-pathological
supplement of a reason defined against reason, and, therefore, operates as a
political and epistemological problem and not as a free-floating pathogen or as
an egoistic voice of Nietzschian type ressentiment.
Consequently, I theorize radical particularism from the fifteenth-century
internal to the epochal changes of early modernity: the reason of the counter-
Reformation and, then, the reason of the counter-Enlightenment. These two
periods of reaction and regression produce a fertile continuum of theism and
dogmatic metaphysics upon which the critique of the ‘false reason’ of secular
universalism is built and rebuilt under early modernity, in turn providing the
conditions for the religio-political reasoning of Thermidorian unreason after
the French Revolution. Hence, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger’s Malleus
Maleficarum (1486), Joseph de Maistre’s Considerations sur le France (1796),
the Abbé Barruel’s History of Jacobinism (1798), Arthur de Gobineau’s The
Inequality of the Human Races (1855), Ernst Haeckel’s History of Creation (1868),
Alfred R. Wallace’s Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1871),
Ludwig Gumplowicz’s La Lutte des races (1893), Otto Ammon’s Die naturliche
auslese beim menschen (1893), Eugen Fischer’s racist ethnography, in particular,
Deutsche Kö pfe nordischer Rasse: 50 Abbildungen mit Geleitwarten (with H.F.K
Gü nther) (1927), Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925–6), Sayyid Qutb’s Ma’alim
fi’l Tariq (1964) down to the German fascist and ex-Red Army Faction member
Horst Mahler (the ‘German people remain at war with the Jewish people’)3
and recently the fascist Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik’s
(Andrew Berwick’s) 1,500-page racist manifesto 2083: A European Declaration
of Independence (2011)4 all share a family resemblance: They all identify radical
particularism with the critique or destruction or the forces of secular revolution,
and as such with the persecution of the other or ‘cleansing’ of humanity as a
defence of reason (for de Maistre, Barruel, Gobineau, Wallace, Gomplowicz and
Ammon: Enlightenment intellectuals; for Hitler: Jews, Marxists and left-wing
intellectuals; for Qutb: Western secularists, Jews, Christians and ‘sexualized’
women; for Mahler: Jews and American imperialism; for Breivik: Muslims,
Marxists and left-wing intellectuals). Each of these texts is figured and driven
by the threat of disorder and the loss of identity (national, sexual, familial,
religious, state) that are held to invite the dissolution of traditional allegiances,
hierarchies and mores.5 Indeed, in the modern period, the reasoning of
Introduction 3
unreason derives precisely from the identification of revolution and equality
with the loss or abandonment of reason. Thus, the critical hypostatization of
this reified reason in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, for
all its political denaturalization of liberal capitalism, actually depoliticizes the
‘crisis of reason’ by introducing too rigid an identity between fascism and late
capitalism, unreason and reason, as if fascism and late capitalism have finally
seen Enlightenment and reason off. This is because, written at the height of the
seeming ineluctable power of the Nazis in 1944, Dialectic of Enlightenment sees
fascism too easily as the culmination of the deranged myth of Enlightenment
progress, and therefore overdetermines the collapse of reason into unreason.6
The persistence of fascism and the politics (and phantasy) of national
revolution will certainly play a part in my analysis, but only insofar as they
represent the continuing advocacy and mobilization of radical particularism for
self-rationalizing, disenlightened ends. Disenlightenment, then, is the political,
cultural and philosophical defence and valorization of the perspectival and
partial as a rationalization of being, politics and history. Hence the reasoning of
unreason or ‘black reason’ is not simply that which Adorno and Horkheimer refer
to as the ‘black writers of the bourgeoisie’,7 writers who hopelessly harmonize
what cannot be harmonized and try to reconstruct what cannot be reconstructed
– such as de Maistre and Edmund Burke. Rather, it is the perspectival
made intellectually persuasive and politically amenable. Consequently, the
reasoning of unreason is not post-Enlightenment thinking generally, the rise of
administered abstraction in the interests of capitalist technocracy, reactionary
and racist thinking per se, but more precisely, the attack of radical particularism
on, and destruction of, the claims of emancipatory universalism. Or, in a more
dialectical mode, it is the name we shall give to the appropriation of a false
universalism for particularist, exclusionary and hierarchical ends. For it is the
false universalisms of such radical particularisms that produce and sustain the
reasoning of unreason. This makes the radical particularism of the reasoning
of unreason quite distinct from the radical particularisms of its antipode: the
contemporary liberal and leftist legacy of anti-Enlightenment. Here, radical
particularism becomes, so to speak, the ‘white unreason’8 of a post-universalist
project, under the name of postmodernism, difference and critique of Western
instrumental reason, foundationalism and teleology.
This book’s critique of radical particularism does not cover this territory; the
critique of postmodern post-universalism is not my subject here in any specific
sense, given the fact that philosophically its limitations and depredations
