HEGRBTP03U Tværfagligt projektfag: The New Right in Europe: From ”Anti-Enlightenment” roots to challenging liberal democracies?

This course introduces to the century-old European tradition of “anti-enlightenment” thought and how core ideas are recycled by a transnational “New Right”. Skepticism towards modernization and especially secularization has for centuries opposed Enlightenment values, underpinning the fundaments of liberal-democratic philosophy, including rationalism and universalism, individualism and egalitarianism, progress, and secularism. In this course we examine in depth these core ideas and trace their development across languages, cultures and political geographies until their resurgence in the discourses of the “New Right” in all regions covered by Engerom.

Course structure:

1. Introduction to the concept of Anti-Enlightenment from a historical-conceptual perspective, as an identity-based reaction to the disintegrative processes of modernity and as a form of resistance to the project of liberalism. This section identifies the existence of a coherent ideological core within philosophical and social thought.
2. Reconstruction of the genealogy of the Anti-Enlightenment tradition by examining its major historical and intellectual manifestations in the twentieth century. Despite differing socio-political and cultural contexts, this analysis highlights the persistence of a common framework and its illiberal and anti-modern tendencies. In this part students will collaborate with the Centre for Digital and Computational Humanities and the Centre for the Study of Global Nationalisms in setting up the free access online corpus “Talking to the books” which will allow users to critically interact with a text collection (provided by the research project “Lifeworlds of the New Right”). This includes the development, testing and training of a Large Language Model tool.
3. Students put their historical and text knowledge into practice and apply the acquired analytical tools doing problem-based group work on contemporary manifestations of Anti-Enlightenment thought. Focus will be on discourses of the “New Right” which students will assess regarding re-emerged ideas and tropes, focusing on their area of studies or collaborating across the linguistic and geographic borders. Through these projects students learn to examine and understand the “New Right” as a transnational phenomenon and to recognize their common European ideological framework. Working on these illiberal ideas, students achieve indirectly profound knowledge on often taken for granted values of liberal democracies – while also creating awareness of their challenges.

Learning objectives:

Knowledge

• on the historical and ideological roots of Anti-Enlightenment thought, the continuity of traditions and contemporary forms of expression;
• on Large Language Models and their application on a text corpus;

Skills

• to critically identify Anti-Enlightenment concepts in political discourse;

• to apply Large Language Models to a text corpus and assess the perfomance;
• to design and carry out a minor research project with self-chosen topic, including assignment writing;

Competences

• in strengthening awareness of how anti-modern ideas contribute to the erosion of the liberal-democratic ethos;

• in understanding phenomena of the studied language area as interconnected with European trends and in a transnational perspective; in working across disciplines and in teams.