Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 [Paperback]

Israel's book offers a valuable new perspective on the nature of the Enlightenment. Instead of concentrating on England or France, Israel looks at all of Europe. There is considerable attention paid not only to the Netherlands, Israel's main area of expertise as a historian, but also to Spain, Portugal, Italy, the many German states and Scandinavia. Nor is this emphasis undeserved, since the Dutch Republic was the home of Spinoza, Sweden the home of Linnaeus, and Italy the home of Vico. Only two areas receive little attention. One is Russia, under the grip of Tsarist despotism. The other is the future United States, which were arguably peripheral to the intellectual life of the West before 1750. Israel argues that the Enlightenment can be seen as a construct and a conflict between four major forces. The first is Cartesianism, the second Newton-Lockean ideas, the third the Leibnitzian synthesis, and the fourth, and the main subject of this book, the Radical Enlightenment around Spinoza. The main theme of this book is that Spinoza's ideas, and the debates around them were central to the development of the Enlightenment.

Israel's perspective is an unusual one. His book ends in 1750 and therefore only briefly discusses much of what people popularly consider the Enlightenment. Diderot gets only a few pages, and Rousseau and Voltaire get even less. The Scottish Enlightenment is not mentioned at all, and Hume is barely mentioned. Israel's concentration is on the critique of religion; it is this ultimately successful challenge that he considers the Enlightenment's major achievement. As a consequence other areas get less attention. It is Locke the theorist against innate ideas and the ambiguous believe in miracles that Israel concentrates on, not so much the constitutional theorist. The development of history, of economics, of many of the sciences are downplayed in this account. The liberation of women is discussed only briefly and the question of slavery is discussed even less. Many questions that have concerned intellectual history over the past few decades are dealt with only cursorily. One would have to go elsewhere to find out what were the links between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, what was the relationship between religion, magic and the rise of science, and what was the popular mentality of the time? Likewise questions about the potential dark side of modernity, why Enlightenment arose at this particular time in history, or the origins of pornography will have to be looked at elsewhere.

Nevertheless this book makes a valuable contribution. First off it demonstrates Spinoza's importance to the rise of the Enlightenment as his pantheism, materialism and determinism became the major challenge that other philosphers had to face. There is also some tantalizing evidence that Spinoza's ideas were making greater popular headway in the Netherlands than one might have thought. Second, it provides copious accounts of the many debates and discussions in intellectual life that other accounts tend to ignore. Many accounts concentrate on the "great men," while Straussian accounts tend to drastically oversimplify intellectual debates. By discussing such thinkers as Fontenelle and his debunking of classical oracles, Bekker on the death of the devil, the many Dutch thinkers who helped to propagate Spinoza's ideas one gets a fuller picture of the Enlightenment's progress. Third, Israel's book is full of many valuable insights. Israel is particularly good on how Spinoza's theory of toleration is more liberal than that of Locke's. He also shows how the "moderate" enlightenment consistently supported the censorship of their radical opponents. He is also good on the fundamental modernity of Vico, as well as on the limited influence Locke and Newton had on the continent before the 1730s. All in all, this is an important book.

Jonathan Israel presents his work as an important new history of the `Early' Enlightenment (1680-1740).

He has two key, inter-related theses. Firstly, that the whole of the early Enlightenment was driven by an engagement with the views of Spinoza (e.g. P.431) and secondly that the whole of the early Enlightenment, across Europe needs to be understood as a single, integrated process.

At one stage (P.456) he draws a comparison betweenSpinozism and Marxism and that gives you a good sense of how he sees Spinoza's movement.

His own background as a specialist in the Enlightenment in the Netherlands comes strongly into play and the book is at its best on this topic. The original growth of Cartesianism is taken as read. Spinoza's breach with Cartesian dualism and his counter arguments for monism are gone into in more detail . The book comes alive when discussing the popularizers of Spinoza such as Leenhof, Van Dale, Bekker, Kuyper, Van Den Enden, Meyer, Beverlaand, Goeree. Other radical figures such as Vauvenarues, de Boulainvilliars, Radicati, le Clerc take on a new significance in this light.

Such figures have been lost to history. It is a paradox of the history of philosophy that the greatest intellectual achievement often resides in defending the indefensible, putting obstacles in the path of progress. Those who championed change often achieved less of lasting intellectual quality, being too busy achieving a different world.

It is for this reason refreshing that Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Voltaire, Leibniz, Malebranche and Rousseau play a support role in this book. Soon we begin to believe that the Enlightenment may indeed have been driven forward by radical deists and atheists elaborating on Spinoza.

The argument goes too far as we slip from the 1670s and 1680s to the 1730s and 1740s. Israel is too keen to amalgamate the whole period. He fails to emphasise sufficiently that whereas Spinoza's own work, with Geulincx and Malebrance and Gassendi was part of a debate about Descartes, what came later was something different. Spinoza may have survived better in the 1730s as an icon than Descartes or Malebranche, but he was no less an historical figure. The new battle, by that time, was - as he says - a three cornered fight. But the third corner with Lockean empiricism and Leibnizian/Wolffian rationalism was an emergent mechanical materialism and not a continuing Spinozism. The two over-lapped, but were not the same.

Furthermore, Israel nowhere recognises the full force of the Newtonian-Lockean and Leibniz-Wollfian critiques of Spinoza - undermining, respectively the epistemology and concept of necessity on which Spinoza relied. The internal tensions and dialogue within Spinozism are also often lost sight of in the repeated insistence on drawing the lineage of continuity. Thus the intellectual origins of 18th century materialism are misplaced and he does not see that the changed treatment of Spinoza in the works of the moderate Enlightenment, such that he came aroudn 1730 to be treated with « meticulous care » (P.658) derives from Spinoza's increasing irrelevance.

The failure to chart as carefully as he might have the changing pattern of influence of the radicalEnlightenment reflects a certain crudity of approach which affects more substantially Israel's unwisely formulated second thesis. The idea that the early Enlightenment was a single trans-European process is simply too crude. Israel's own nation-specific chapters don't even support it. Israel speaks repeatedly of the `Republic of Letters'as an unproblematic trans-European unity. Yet the evidence is of a far more complex set of phenomena, driven not only by the interchange of ideas, but also by the precarious realities of book and manuscript circulation (often via smuggling routes) of erratic patterns of translation and survival of Latin as an international language and of local governmental and institutional politics. We never get any structured treatment of the complex inter-related systems of dialogue in secret discussion circles, in the manuscript circulation of material and in the very different published circulation of material. It is paradoxical that the national and even `local' character of the Enlightenment is so effectively lost in the midst of so sweeping and knowledgeable a survey across Europe.

A very particular and telling problem lies with defining the margins between heterodox Christianity and deist Enlightenment. Israel's account involves drawing figures like Leerhof into the deist fold while evaluating others such as Van Hatten as merely heterodox Christians. Tellingly, at one point we are assured that Stosch's stance was « philosophical not local » (P.641). We see here an artificial distinction that has less grounding in historical reality than in Israels' retrospective schema.

It is strikingly illustrated in this book that when Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach rejected philosophy he was rejecting a substantial, reputable tradition of philosophical militancy against revealed religion. Spinozism was a militant tradition, determined, in its day, by bravery and deception to undermine the established churches.The early Enlightment was also a period of militant deism rampant among the ruling elites, championed by figures such as Federick the Great, the Duc de Noailles and the Earl of Shaftesbury. This combination of dissent from within the ruling elite and isolated radical intellectuals is strikingly strange to us.

Despite the weaknesses of his two specific theses on this period, Israel has written a fascinating work, reminding us of that militancy, of Spinoza's central role in it and of - as so often - how the militant minority drive the moderate as well as the reactionary mainstreams.

Most people, when they think of the Enlightenment, think first of 18th France, of Voltaire and of Diderot. The late Roy Porter, in his spirited Enlightenment (Penguin paperback) claimed that the roots of the Enlightenment were actually in England. Then we have recently had James Buchan's Capital of the Mind, which claims in its subtitle that the philosophers of Edinburgh "changed the world". Jonathan Israel says that these are all parochial approaches, and that the Enlightenment was a movement whose international character he intends to illustrate. He has indeed read prodigiously in international literature: his bibliography gives 26 pages of published primary sources and 31 of secondary literature, and these include titles in Latin, English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish and Danish.

Nevertheless, what emerges quite clearly from this book is that he places the origins of the Radical Enlightenment very firmly in 17th century Holland in general and in Spinoza in particular; and although one might perhaps expect this from a historian whose previous book was an equally massive work on the Dutch Republic (OUP), he makes a totally convincing case for this. In the course of it we learn much about many Dutch thinkers. Many of them are scarcely known in this country; and there are some, like Anthonie van Dale and Frederik van Leenhof, who according to Professor Israel are almost unknown even in Holland today.

True, it is a Frenchman, René Descartes, who could be said to have planted the seeds of what would become the Enlightenment, and there is a good deal about him in the book; but the principal theatre for the debate about Descartes is again shown to be Holland, where he had moved for safety in 1628, where the Discours de la Méthode was first published in 1637, and from where it later spread to other countries. Indeed, Spinoza's first published work was The Principles of Cartesian Philosophy (1663). I think myself that the title of the book is somewhat misleading. It ought really to have been called Spinoza and the Enlightenment, since it is almost wholly devoted to his influence: all later Enlightenment thinkers of whatever nation are discussed almost exclusively in terms of the extent to which they were in agreement or disagreement with him.

That debate is described in exhaustive - I would say - exhausting - detail, since in fact the various arguments are repeated over and over again. There are principally three parties to this argument: thinkers of the Radical Enlightenment who follow Spinoza more or less all the way; those of the Moderate Enlightenment, who accept a broadly rational approach but stop short of denying a providential deity and the principal mysteries of the Christian faith; and the Conservatives or fideists who demand total acceptance of the traditional doctrines of the churches about such matters as miracles, the existence of Hell and of the Devil. Jonathan Israel patiently gives the arguments of this last group more space than most histories of the Enlightenment would do. Interestingly, many members of even the first group often denied that they were "Spinozists". That label was used by anti-rationalists, right up to eve of the French Revolution in a positively McCarthyist way to discredit even members of the second group, who themselves went out of their way to condemn Spinoza in the strongest terms. The true Spinozists often protected themselves by giving a full statement of the Spinozan positions and then following them with perfunctory or even deliberately feeble objections.

Despite its enormous length and the width of Israel's research, the book does remain rather narrowly focussed. The debates described in the book are largely about religion and about the challenges to deductive rationalism both from the churches and from the pragmatic schools. Such discussion as there is of Enlightenment political thought is again entirely related to the influence of or reaction against Spinoza's unfinished Tractatus Politicus. So, for instance, the debate in France between the thèse royale, the thèse nobiliaire, and democracy does not feature on its own terms. At the end there is an interesting short section on Diderot and his relationship to Spinozism; but there is nothing much of interest on Montesquieu, Voltaire, Helvétius or Holbach, all of whom are considerable figures in the history of the French Enlightenment. And there are just two references to Hume.

There are two other major criticisms: the book takes much previous knowledge for granted (for example, what exactly had been both the psychological and political teaching of Thomas Hobbes). Although there are several references to Malebranche and Malebranchisme, there is nowhere a concise account of what that philosopher taught: the "Occasionalism" for which he is famous has just two references in the index, only one of which links that doctrine with him.

However, Professor Israel has undoubteldy written a most important book which significantly shifts the focus of Enlightenment studies. For that and for his immense scholarship he deserves the praise that reviewers have heaped upon his book.