McMahon, Darrin

views updated

McMAHON, Darrin

PERSONAL: Male. Education: University of California, Berkeley, B.A., summa cum laude; Yale University, Ph.D., 1997.

ADDRESSES: Office—c/o Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016.

CAREER: Mellon fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, Columbia University, 1997-99; postdoctoral fellow, Remarque Institute, New York University, New York, 2000-01; postdoctoral fellow, Yale University, 2001—. Rockefeller junior visiting fellow at Institute für die Wissenschaften von Menschen, Vienna, 2001. New York director, Keythought LLC.; coproducer, writer, and researcher for PBS documentaries.

AWARDS, HONORS: Hans Gatzke prize.

WRITINGS:

Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

WORK IN PROGRESS: In Pursuit: A History of Happiness in the Modern West, Grove-Atlantic Press (New York, NY), forthcoming.

SIDELIGHTS: In Darrin McMahon's book Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity, Catholic opposition to the philosophy of Voltaire in the eighteenth century is consider as a forerunner of the modern American split between the political left and right, the "culture wars." McMahon's study runs counter to mainstream intellectual history by demonstrating the existence of substantial, vocal opposition to the philosophical movement called the Enlightenment. Those opposing Voltaire and the philosophes saw their influence as a threat to traditional values, especially the authority of the Church, and claimed that the philosophes could be as intolerant of dissidence as the authorities they condemned. McMahon suggests that the fears of Enlightenment opponents were born out in the French Revolution, when the idealism of revolutionaries gave way to violence.

In Enemies of the Enlightenment McMahon maintains that the force of the Counter-Enlightenment was influential in creating the course of Enlightenment thought; modern understanding of the Enlightenment is lacking without an awareness of the role of Counter-Enlightenment ideology. Moreover, McMahon suggests, the ideology of the Counter-Enlightenment did not disappear with the apparent triumph of the other side: factions in Europe and Latin America still evidence the currency of Counter-Enlightenment thought. More broadly, Counter-Enlightenment ideology has evolved into what political scientists term "the Right." As a reviewer for Publishers Weekly remarked, the book's "relevance to conservative-liberal tensions in the U.S. make it worthy of broad intellectual discussion."