ABSTRACT
The retreat from the Enlightenment is fashionable but far from original. In fact, the Counter-Enlightenment followed right on the heels of the Enlightenment, it was revived less than a century ago, it triumphed briefly with Nazism, and it is fashionable again under the headings of Counterculture and Postmodernism. This chapter examines the "postmodern" reaction in the field of social studies. To begin with, Rousseau—often regarded as the first Romantic—was politically progressive but philosophically obscurantist, for exalting feeling over reason and for holding that science had a pernicious influence on society. Notwithstanding these important legacies of Hegelianism, original Marxism was on the whole anti-Romantic. The second Romantic wave came roughly one century after the birth of the first. The third Romantic wave, called neo-Romanticism, overlapped partially with the second. The chapter looks at two neo-Romantic schools of social studies: critical theory and phenomenological sociology.
