Reading List for the Counter-Enlightenment

Primary Works

Johann Georg Hamann

Writings on Philosophy and Language
Socratic Memorabilia
Relational Metacriticism

In particular, start with these essays:

Aesthetica in Nuce
Socratic Memorabilia

Johann Gottfried von Herder

Philosophical Writings
Selected Writings on Aesthetics
Another Philosophy of History

In particular, start with these essays:

On Thomas Abbt’s Writings
On Cognition and Sensation, the Two Main Forces of the Human Soul
A Monument to Baumgarten
Do We Still have the Fatherland of the Ancients?

Joseph de Maistre

Against Rousseau
Considerations on France
Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon: Wherein Different Questions of Rational Philosophy Are Treated

Enlightenment

David Hume

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
Discourse on Inequality
The Social Contract

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Philosophical and Theological Writings

Immanuel Kant

Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Critique of Pure Reason

Denis Diderot

Philosophical Thoughts
Letter on the Blind

Voltaire

History of Charles XII
Political Writings

Moses Mendelssohn

Philosophical Writings

Related Works

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

Main Philosophical Writings

Novalis

Philosophical Writings

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

Friedrich Hölderlin

Hyperion
Essays and Letters
Poems and Fragments

In particular, study the Pindar Fragments

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science

Carl Schmitt

Land and Sea

Ernst Jünger

The Worker

Preliminary Works

Francis Bacon

New Organon

Giambattista Vico

The New Science

George Berkeley

Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous

Secondary Literature

Dieter Henrich

Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism

John R. Betz

After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann

Isaiah Berlin

Three Critics of the Enlightenment

James C. O'Flaherty

The Quarrel of Reason With Itself: Essays on Hamann, Michaelis, Lessing
Johann Georg Hamann

Panagiotis Kondylis

Die Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus