In recent decades, Jonathan I Israel writes, the Enlightenment has emerged as “the single most important topic, internationally, in modern historical studies, and one of crucial significance also in our politics, cultural studies and philosophy”. That is a large claim for a movement of 18th-century thought, and many will find it exaggerated, if not self-serving, seeing that its author, a professor of history at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, has devoted the last decade of his life to exploring that very subject.
Still, in the context of a worldwide religious resurgence and the war on terror, the Enlightenment has become a favoured precursor of our time. In these readings, the Enlightenment serves nicely as the opening chapter in a book of stories we tell about ourselves.
In Israel’s telling, the story goes like this. Not long ago, the world lived in near-total eclipse. Men and women fumbled in the dark, and in their ignorance and fear they gave credence to all manner of superstition and injustice — God and the angels; aristocracy and the divine right of kings; empire and slavery; and the oppression of women, people of colour and the poor. But then, in tenebris lux, a few bold philosophers marched forward. Spreading reason, tolerance, a love of liberty and humanity, they fostered a revolution of the mind, setting the world on its modern course.
Israel’s narrative is part of a tale that has been told before, though in the nearly 3,000 pages of his Enlightenment trilogy, of which Democratic Enlightenment is the final installment, he gives it a slightly different spin. Whereas historians have emphasised how often religion and Enlightenment got along, Israel relegates such cushy coexistence to a “Moderate Enlightenment” that was decidedly second-tier. The great names – Voltaire and Rousseau, Newton and Locke, Leibniz and Kant – turn out never to have been willing or able to think themselves through to the new. Israel’s real heroes were hard-nosed atheists, materialists and revolutionaries who brooked no compromise with the status quo.
Israel traces the lineage of this Radical Enlightenment to Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century philosopher who serves here as the father of all atheists and “one substance” materialists who rejected the suspiciously spiritualist dualism of mind and body. Spinoza was a radical critic of Scripture, who seemed to equate “God” with nature. But in Israel’s controversial account, a complete “package” of modern values sprang from Spinoza’s head including equality, democracy and a litany of basic human rights. Taken up in turn by a band of intrepid followers, “Spinozism” spread clandestinely throughout Europe, challenging and bedeviling the moderates until it burst forth into the open in the mid-18th century. In the French encyclopedist Denis Diderot and his Parisian allies, the Baron d’Holbach, Claude Helvétius and the Abbé Raynal, Israel sees the true heirs of Spinoza.
Israel follows the fortunes of radical ideas across Europe and as far afield as the movements for Latin American independence and the fight against European imperialism in Asia. He has turned up evidence of the Radical Enlightenment’s influence in surprising places, and that labour alone should ensure that this book finds a place on every specialist’s shelf.
More From This Section
Yet if the description is thick, the narrative itself is often thin, reading all too frequently like a conspiracy tale. The Radical Enlightenment, we are told, was “the only important direct cause of the French Revolution” and the revolutionary leaders of 1789 “a tiny batch of philosophes-révolutionnaires”, making praxis of thought. This is an explanation that historians of the Revolution will roundly dismiss but that contemporary enemies of the Enlightenment widely shared. Israel has read deeply in their work and cites them often. But reproducing Counter-Enlightenment claims as evidence for the influence of philosophy is like gauging the strength of Communism in the United States on the basis of reports of the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the end, Israel exaggerates the impact of atheism and Spinozism, attributing intention and foresight where it didn’t exist. It is revealing that when Raynal confronted the Revolution itself (Diderot, Holbach and Helvétius, having received church burials, were dead), he didn’t like what he saw. No wonder, for as Israel grudgingly concedes, the Radical Enlightenment was inclined to treat the humbler part of humanity, steeped in its superstitions, with contempt. The Revolution of the mind was better when it stayed there. Yet the fight continues. Israel brandishes the Radical Enlightenment’s standard of truth before fundamentalists and postmodernists alike. But in refusing to acknowledge that the movement had any blind spots at all, Israel perpetuates a tradition as doctrinaire as any faith.
Is it time to move on? The historian François Furet once declared the French Revolution is “over”, meaning that it is time to stop rehearsing its battles to better understand it and ourselves. Israel’s vast history helps us see that, in that sense, the Enlightenment is over too. We’re ready for a different tale.
DEMOCRATIC ENLIGHTENMENT
Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790
Jonathan I Israel
Oxford University Press; 1,066 pages; $45
©2011 The New York Times News Service