Alexandre Kojève?

I completely agree that understanding both Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment is important to appreciate what ‘radical’ proposals look like, and that (simplifying a bit) it would be correct to say that in both what’s at stake is the fate of Spinozism (how different would the history of western philosophy be had Spinoza lived to old age and kept working? Very, very different, I’d wager). I’m not saying anything new here but German idealism is drunken Spinozism (or perhaps Kantianism tripping under Spinozistic acid). And it’s precisely the ‘re-discovery’ of people like Schelling as realist resources (I’m not saying that Schelling does not deserve to be studied!) that leaves me quite cold. I like my Spinozism to be sober

This is not a disagreement, barely a comment. It’s not a very important point in your text, but, maybe because the last book I bought was Oswald Bayer’s Contemporary Dissent: Johann Georg Hamann as a Radical Enlightener, I still wanted to comment it. I’ve been working, as a student, mostly on Spinoza, and feel a stronger affinity with the French radical and materialist tradition of the 18th Century, than the German romanticism of the 19th Century – but, both these traditions, both the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment, as it’s been crudely called in my opinion, are receptions of Spinoza and Spinozist thought, so I feel they’re both important aspects, and both bring important insights to what I would still call a Radical Enlightenment thinking. But I’m not sure of which thinkers you’re actually thinking of as being rehabilitated in the name of realism.