5. Conclusion
Throughout the nineteenth-century, the leading representatives of the Counter Enlightenment opposed the social contract theory and its implications with a distinctly familialist conception of the nature and structure of society. This entailed the idea that the family, primarily the nuclear family, but secondarily also the extended family, and not the individual, is the most basic and foundational unit of human society. The consistent prevalence of this theme throughout the polemic writings of leading Counter-Enlightenment theorists from a wide variety of contexts in Germany, France, the Netherlands and the United States against the liberal social ontology of the Enlightenment is quite remarkable. The notion of familialism as propounded by these leading figures associated with the nineteenth-century Counter-Enlightenment furthermore firmly and distinctly stands in the Christian ontological tradition that had characterized pre-modern Western thought. This does not imply that the social ontology of the Counter-Enlightenment can be reduced to some romantic longing for a long-gone status quo ante, however. On the contrary, the familialist ideas embodied in the writings of prominent CounterEnlightenment thinkers such as Herder, De Bonald, Dabney, and Groen van Prinsterer were both very practically orientated towards their nineteenth-century historical contexts and also represented an unprecedented development in the history of ideas.
The familialism of these leading traditionalist-conservative thinkers
associated with the Counter-Enlightenment amounted to a reaction against what it identified as the socially disruptive social ontological impact of the individualizing tendencies inherent to the social contract theory as proposed by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. In countering what they saw as the atomizing of the individual, leaving him vulnerable to the rising power of the centralized state, they proposed a relationship-orientated ontological positioning of the individual as socially situated within the context of blood relationships. Their view of society and the role of the individual marked a distinctly theocentric reaction to the anthropocentric implications of Enlightenment social ontology. In terms of their understanding of the nature, structure and properties of human society, the Counter-Enlightenment advocated a relationship- and status-orientated social order rooted in the creational and providential ordinances of a God who is ultimately sovereign over human society. Their central argument is that by virtue of the Enlightenment’s rebellion against this social order, the organic order and structure of society is disrupted, with devastating consequences even for the very individual the Enlightenment claims to have elevated: by virtue of the atomization of the individual, he is isolated from those social relationships in which he is naturally imbedded by virtue of divine providence—relationships which provide the necessary protective social structures which are inescapable for the flourishing of humanity.
This principle that society as fundamentally shaped by divinely-ordained
social structures as opposed to being an aggregate of sovereign individuals
is principally based in the Counter-Revolutionaries’ Christian conviction
regarding the sovereignty of God with regard to providentially ordaining
the state and nature of all human existence—with the unit of the family
forming the most basic and vital divinely-ordained social structure. To the
philosophers of the Counter-Enlightenment, the family is the most essential and most basic unit providing structure and vitality to all of human society, with the recognition of its socially constitutive properties being absolutely key to any orthodox social ontology as reflection of divinely-ordained reality.
In this way the Counter-Enlightenment’s social ontology should certainly
be historically linked to the traditional ideas of the family as basic social
unit as advocated by the likes of Aquinas and Althusius prior to the age
of Enlightenment, yet at the same time their notion of familialism marks
a profound and distinctly modern development in terms of the history of
ontological ideas, in particular given their polemic strategies and rhetorical emphasis on the centrality of this concept in terms in countering the individualizing and atomizing tendencies of Enlightenment’s social ontology.
The nineteenth-century Counter-Enlightenment’s emphasis on familialism in its social ontology is therefore a particularly interesting and noteworthy phenomenon in the history of ideas, namely as a distinctly modern movement of theoretical resistance against the central ideas of the prevailing liberal social ontology which has historically shaped modern Western democracies.