The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment
Why the right learned the postmodern lesson better than its teachers — and what comes after
In 1637, René Descartes set out to do something almost absurdly ambitious: doubt everything, systematically, until he found one thing that couldn’t be doubted, and rebuild knowledge from there. He succeeded, in the sense that the Discourse on Method became the founding gesture of modern philosophy. He failed, in a more interesting sense: the tool he built to secure certainty became, in the hands of Spinoza and the philosophes who came after him, the lever that blew up the very edifice he wanted to protect. Descartes wanted a foundation. He delivered an explosive. That’s the first thing worth knowing about attempts to settle the truth question once and for all: they tend to produce exactly the opposite of what they intend.
Three and a half centuries later, something structurally similar happened to a very different tradition — and we are still living with the fallout.
The isomorphism nobody wants to name
There’s a satisfying story about where today’s authoritarian populism gets its disregard for truth: Trump, Netanyahu, the European sovereigntist right, all learned it from the postmodernists. Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard handed the tools of relativism to a generation of graduate students, and somewhere along the way the far right picked those same tools off the floor and ran. It’s a clean genealogy. It’s also too clean to be true, and believing it lets everyone off the hook too easily.
What actually happened is closer to an isomorphism than a transmission. Postmodern critique and reactionary populism are not parent and child. They are two organisms that evolved independently to survive the same environmental collapse. Call it convergent evolution rather than inheritance. Lyotard, in 1979, called incredulity toward metanarratives: the loss of legitimacy of the great justificatory systems — Reason, History, Progress — that had held the Enlightenment project together. Lyotard was describing a fact, not prescribing a program. But facts, once they enter public circulation as vocabulary, become available to anyone, regardless of who first diagnosed them.
The contemporary right didn’t read Lyotard. Most of them, anyway. But they learned to do exactly what Lyotard’s diagnosis made possible without anyone needing to contradict themselves: if every truth-claim is ultimately a power-claim, then dismissing an inconvenient truth-claim is simply exposing power — which sounds like critique, and functions as immunity. When Trump calls an investigation a “witch hunt” run by a corrupt expert class, he isn’t proposing an alternative truth. He’s emptying the space where verification could happen. When Netanyahu rejects an International Court of Justice ruling as “institutionalized antisemitism,” he’s doing something different: asserting an absolute tribal truth that excludes, by definition, any outside tribunal. One move is nihilist, the other is tribalist. Both disable the same thing: the platform from which power can be challenged.
This is the move critical theory handed the world for free: every truth claim is a power claim; exposing it is itself a political act. In the hands of the critical tradition, that move liberated the dominated. In the hands of the contemporary right, the identical move protects the dominant from scrutiny. Same structure, opposite function. As the Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris put it, after making the journey himself from poststructuralism back to realism: without shared standards of knowledge, what’s left isn’t interpretive freedom — it’s just the power of whoever can make their story stick.
A case study the critical tradition still hasn’t metabolized
Michel Foucault went to Iran in the autumn of 1978 as a correspondent for an Italian newspaper. He went twice, filed seven dispatches, met movement leaders, and came back enthusiastic. What he saw looked, through his own theoretical lens, like exactly what his philosophy predicted should be liberating: a mass uprising against a Western-backed Shah, refusing both capitalism and socialism, the two dominant metanarratives of the century. He read it as a rejection of imposed modernization by an entire people and an entire culture.
His interpretive grid — built on systematic suspicion of Western power and studied neutrality toward any anti-modern resistance — made him structurally unable to see what was actually forming in front of him: a theocratic apparatus that, within months, would strip women of basic rights, eliminate dissidents, and build one of the most brutal security states of the postwar period. The failure wasn’t informational. Foucault was there; he saw what the skeptical journalists saw. It was structural. His theory of power had no category for distinguishing resistance that liberates from resistance that installs a new domination — because any independent normative standard, any criterion for saying this is wrong, had already been dissolved as just another effect of the hegemonic discourse he was committed to dismantling.
That’s the mechanism worth naming precisely: once every normative claim gets relativized into a contingent regime of truth, the intellectual loses the ability to say “this is wrong” without immediately qualifying it into “wrong according to whom, according to which power” — and a thinker who can’t say something is simply wrong is, in practice, disarmed in front of actual power. This doesn’t retroactively void Foucault’s analysis of institutions, which remains one of the most influential of the twentieth century. It shows that the analysis had a specific, identifiable gap — and that the gap had consequences that were not academic.
Not a return — a mutation
Here’s where the genealogy gets interesting rather than just damning. The contemporary far right is frequently described as a regression to colonial universalism — the old habit of exporting one civilization as the model for everyone. That’s not quite it. What’s emerged is structurally different, and in some ways harder to fight: a post-universalist tribalism that knows it’s speaking after Lyotard, and uses that self-awareness as a shield. “America First” doesn’t say “America is the model for the world.” It says “America answers to no one” — an explicit refusal of any universal claim at all. European sovereigntists don’t claim Western civilizational superiority; they claim every people’s right to be itself, a formula that sounds pluralist and is, in practice, the death of any shared normative space.
It is a tribalism that took just enough epistemology to know the universal is contestable — and uses that knowledge not to open debate but to close it permanently. Where colonialism said “we are the model for everyone,” this says “we answer to no one,” which, from the standpoint of whoever is on the receiving end, produces comparable effects, minus even the hypocritical opening colonialism left toward universal appeal. We need to shed the colonial residue in Enlightenment universalism — that critique is necessary and unfinished. But the answer to colonialism cannot be tribalism, because tribalism doesn’t solve the problem of arbitrary power. It multiplies it.
Truth as a program, not a verdict
The critical tradition was right about one thing: truth as correspondence — the idea that a statement can match reality completely and definitively — doesn’t survive scrutiny. Not because reality doesn’t exist independently of us, but because the idea that language can fully and finally “correspond” to it assumes a transparency language doesn’t have.
This is where the conversation needs to leave Paris and go to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Charles Sanders Peirce offered an alternative that drops correspondence without sliding into relativism: truth isn’t a match, it’s a telos — the ideal limit that collective inquiry approaches asymptotically without ever fully arriving. “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate,” Peirce wrote, is what we mean by truth — provided inquiry is pushed far enough, with the right method. End of inquiry doesn’t mean the moment when every question gets settled. That moment never comes. It means the regulative horizon that gives the whole process direction.
This is, not incidentally, the closest thing to a founding intuition behind the broader project of epistemic validation this newsletter keeps circling back to: incompleteness isn’t a bug in the system, it’s the system working as intended. Science isn’t a finished building. It’s a permanent construction site — which doesn’t make it equivalent to superstition, because the site has a direction and a method. Worth being precise here: Peirce is more objectivist than people assume. He isn’t saying “everyone has their own truth” — that’s James, that’s Rorty, not him. He’s saying there’s a point the inquiry converges toward, external to what any individual researcher wants to be true.
That model carries a specific risk, and the Covid-19 pandemic made it visible in real time. When truth is genuinely under construction — when scientists are still figuring out what a newly emerged virus actually is, how it spreads, how it’s treated — a space of uncertainty opens that human cognition finds structurally hard to tolerate. Kahneman’s System 1 wants the fastest coherent answer, not the correct one; sustained uncertainty is cognitively expensive, and the brain treats that cost as something to escape rather than something to pay. Three pathological responses followed, and they were symmetrical. Premature dogmatic certainty — answering as if you already knew what nobody knew yet. Denialism — which isn’t a form of doubt at all, but its mirror image: rushing toward “it’s all fake” with exactly the same cognitive structure as premature certainty, just pointed the other way. And, the subtlest and arguably most damaging of the three: credentialed science communicators who answered too fast, with the confidence of people who knew, while the people actually generating new knowledge didn’t have answers yet. Vanity plus impatience — the cardinal sin of public discourse under uncertainty, and one the media incentive structure rewarded.
A purely cognitive account misses something: the pleasure of doubt itself. Plato describes the pursuit of truth, in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, as a form of desire — an erotic tension toward what one doesn’t yet have, where the pleasure lives in the movement, not in final possession. Someone who’s never been introduced to that pleasure isn’t necessarily unintelligent. They simply haven’t been trained in the practice — the way not knowing how to swim isn’t about physical incapacity, it’s about never having been taken to a pool. Whoever rushes toward false negative certainty isn’t suffering an intelligence deficit. They’re suffering an absence of epistemic education, with a strong affective component that gets routinely underestimated. That, and not just better fact-checking, is the actual civic project worth building: teaching people to enjoy not knowing yet.
What grounds the program
Peirce tells us how truth gets built — through a convergent collective process of inquiry. He doesn’t, on his own, tell us why that process isn’t arbitrary. That’s where Ferraris’s 1997 book, Estetica razionale supplies the missing piece: inemendability. Despite the title, it isn’t about aesthetics in the art-critical sense — it’s an ontology of sense perception. Reality resists the conceptual schemes we apply to it. We can’t simply interpret it however we like, because it pushes back. Ferraris traces this to what he calls a “transcendental fallacy”: constructivism conflates epistemology with ontology — what we know about things with the things themselves. Constructivism is right that knowledge is always situated and partial. It’s wrong to conclude reality is equally malleable.
Peirce and Ferraris are complementary, not in tension: one operates on the epistemological plane, the other on the ontological one. Together they answer the question relativism leaves open — how can knowledge be permanently under construction without surrendering everything to arbitrary will? Because the construction process itself is constrained by a reality that doesn’t bend to taste.
This is also, where the truth question stops being a seminar topic and becomes an engineering one. Not every statement carries the same kind of truth-value. An empirical claim, a normative claim, a piece of metalanguage, a report of sensory experience — these are not certifiable by the same method, and collapsing them into a single undifferentiated category of “things people say” is the error that both bad-faith relativism and bad science communication share. What’s needed is a taxonomy: necessarily incomplete, testable against real language use, revisable, and — this matters — open-ended rather than fixed, because the class of entities we need to reason about keeps expanding. There are arguably more kinds of things worth having a truth-value for in 2026 than there were in the fifth century BCE: legal personhood, digital data, a language model trained on human corpora. Medieval philosophers spent centuries arguing about universals — whether general concepts have their own existence or are just artifacts of language — and were dismissed as splitting hairs by the people who came after them. It wasn’t hairsplitting. It’s the same question an AI governance framework has to answer before it can certify anything as reliable: what kind of claim is this, and what kind of verification does that kind of claim actually admit?
Recovering universalism without nostalgia
The way out is neither a naive return to eighteenth-century Enlightenment nor a surrender to relativism, which — as should be clear by now — doesn’t liberate anyone; it just hands the field to whoever has the most power to make their narrative stick. What’s needed is universalism that has made its peace with its own historical limits: aware of its colonial residue, aware of its own situatedness, and unwilling, for all that, to give up the project of building shared standards of truth, justice, and rights.
The distinction progressive thought still struggles to make cleanly is between criticizing universalism as it was historically practiced — necessary, unfinished, urgent — and abandoning the idea of universalism altogether. The Habermasian anchor is the strongest available: every time we argue, we already presuppose shared norms, not as metaphysical guarantee but as the pragmatic structure of argument itself. Anyone who argues has already committed to a game with rules — the better argument should win, not the louder voice. That’s the minimal universal relativism can’t abolish without self-contradiction, since relativism itself, to be asserted, has to appeal to a structure of argument that presupposes shared standards.
But the limit has to be stated honestly: procedural universalism only works for people already inside the argumentative game. The real political problem is whoever walks out of the game deliberately — and recovering universalism means doing something critical theory has struggled to do: naming that exit for what it is. Not pluralism. Not identity. Not resistance to hegemony. Surrender of discourse to force.
Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Enlightenment carried the seeds of its own reversal — instrumental reason, cut loose from any normative anchor, curdling into domination. They were right about the diagnosis. The location has shifted. It isn’t Enlightenment that turned on itself. It’s the critique of Enlightenment that did. Poststructuralism, built to expose the hidden power structures inside rational discourse, ended up eroding the conditions of possibility for any critique at all — including its own. Descartes handed the explosive to people who wanted to demolish. The critical theorists handed the vocabulary of critique to people who wanted to stop being criticized by it.
The poison wasn’t in the Enlightenment. It was in the antidote — not because poststructuralism caused reactionary nihilism, but because it made available, without meaning to, a vocabulary in which any critique can be disarmed as just another exercise of power. What’s left is harder and less elegant than either alternative: no dogmatic certainty, no thrill of demolition. Just the discipline — and, if you let yourself feel it, the pleasure — of knowing the inquiry never finishes, and continuing anyway.
Bibliography
René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637)
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)
Michel Foucault, dispatches on the Iranian Revolution, written as a correspondent for Corriere della Sera (1978)
Maurizio Ferraris, Manifesto del nuovo realismo (2012)
Charles Sanders Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly (1878)
Plato, Symposium and Phaedrus
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
Maurizio Ferraris, Estetica razionale (1997)
Jürgen Habermas, theory of communicative action and discourse ethics
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)