ABSTRACT

This chapter suggests that the utopian element within calls for progress owed much to the religious impulse, or what Eric Voegelin has termed the immanentisation of the eschaton. A key part of antimodernism is that it sees no real need to justify itself. The elements upon which it is based are merely accepted as self-evident. Arthur Versluis points to several different forms of antimodernism, which can be sorted into two broad categories. De Maistre provided a critique of the modern, including the preference for the scientific method and rationalism over intuition and providence. De Maistre was a critic of what he saw as the burgeoning atheism of the post-Enlightenment period, with its denigration of the place of the Church and Papal authority. Richard Lebrun, in his biography of de Maistre, suggests that: Much of the strength of a traditional society lies in the fact that its structure and values are unquestioned indeed unquestionable.