Abstract
ABSTRACTIn his influential work on German Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin suggested that Edmund Burke'sReflections on the Revolution in France(1790) catalysed the growth of the nineteenth-century counter-Enlightenment. This causal thesis, however, ignored the extent to which theReflections' German translator, Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832), altered the meaning of the text to suit his own philosophical agenda. Although Burke saw rationalism and revolution as natural allies, Gentz – a student of Immanuel Kant – used theReflectionsto articulate a conservative form of rationalism that, he believed, could stand up to thephilosophes' radicalism. Through his selective translation, numerous in-text annotations, and six long interpretive essays, Gentz pressed Burke'sReflectionsinto a Kantian epistemological paradigm – carving out a space for a priori right in the logic of the text, and demoting traditional knowledge from a normative to a prudential role. In Gentz's translation, Burke thus appeared as a champion, not a critic, of Enlightenment.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
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