Zeev Sternhell, born in Przemyl, Poland, in 1935. Ph.D. from the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris. Léon Blum Professor of Political Science at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Fellow (1 September 1997 – 30 June 1998)
My work at NIAS examined the continuous development of the political tradition of the anti-Enlightenment, from the end of the eighteenth century to the present.
My work will analyse four main trends of anti-Enlightenment from Hamman, Herder, Burke, Maistre and Chateaubriand to Isaiah Berlin, Michel Foucault and various trends of postmodernism. Taken as a whole, this work constitutes first, a search for the common factor to all the trends of anti-Enlightenment, second, it is a reflection on the nature of the good society and ultimately, it is a reflection on the reasons of the European catastrophe of the twentieth century. This work is also an investigation of the attraction exercised by anti-Enlightenment ideas and by movements nourished by these ideas: it wants to ask whether this fascination exerted by the varieties of anti-Enlightenment has anything to tell us about our civilisation?