What is Counter-Enlightenment?

This article counters recent suggestions that there was no such thing as a ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ or ‘Counter-Enlightenments’, and that such terms ought thus to be abandoned. While acknowledging inevitable difficulties with the terms, the article argues that there can be no doubting the reality. European countries faced a variety of vehement and self-conscious movements that defined themselves precisely through their opposition to what they took to be the corrosive effects of the Enlightenment. In the process, they defined the main terms of an enduring vision of the world that we now associate with the right.