Enlightenment and counter-enlightenment in nineteenth-century Russian culture

The author attempts to look at the history of Russian culture from the perspective of the confrontation between the two intellectual movements of the New Age, viz., the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment. These two concepts are interpreted in the special sense given to them by Isaiah Berlin (Russian-English thinker, a classic of political philosophy in the twentieth century). The philosophical foundations of the Counter-Enlightenment were laid by G. Vico, J.G. Hamann and the German Romantics, who shook the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment: trust in reason, objectivity and the universality of the laws of history. Here, too, lies the source of the contemporary debate on “Modernity”.