Joseph de Maistre and His European Readers ─ From Friedrich von Gentz to Isaiah Berlin

Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) has been seen by many as an archetypal example of Catholic and monarchical reaction to the French Revolution and even as the philosophical father of fascism, but according to Armenteros (U. of Groningen, the Netherlands) and Lebrun (emeritus, U. of Manitoba, Canada), the combination of a resurgence of religious factors in contemporary global politics and new scholarship about Maistre should prompt a reconsideration of this perspective that addresses the ways Maistre's ideas were utilized by a diverse posterity of thinkers, only a few of whom were in the fascist camp. They present nine papers that discuss how Maistre's fascist reputation was solidified by Isaiah Berlin and then consider the ways in which the thinking of Maistre was taken up by such figures as Auguste Comte (1798-1857), Jules-Amedee Barbey D'Aurevilly (1808-89), Friedrich von Gentz (1764-1832), Freidrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), Franz von Baader (1765-1841), Walter Benjamin (1894-1942), and Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). Contributors also discuss how Maistre has been received by Italian philosophers of ontology and by historians of the French Revolution. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Carolina Armenteros is a Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the University of Groningen and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. She has published on Maistre in the Journal of the History of Ideas and History of Political Thought. With Richard Lebrun, she has co-edited The New enfant du siecle: Joseph de Maistre as a Writer (St Andrews, 2010) and Joseph de Maistre and the Legacy of Enlightenment (Oxford, 2011).Richard Lebrun is Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of two monographs on Maistre, the translator and editor of two volumes of essays on Maistre, and of two other volumes of essays co-edited with Carolina Armenteros. He has published English translations of many of Maistre’s works.