This short book, based on lectures he gave in 2008, continues Jonathan Israel’s efforts to highlight the influence of Benedict de Spinoza on the radical wing of Enlightenment thought. Concentrating on the period 1750-1790, it sets out a case that the changed intellectual climate of Europe before 1789 – the revolution of the mind that radical Enlightenment represented – was a major cause of the French Revolution. This view pits Israel against Marxists, who deny that books cause revolutions, but aligns him with many older writers, such as Condorcet and de Tocqueville, who believed that philosophy brought about the revolution in France.
Israel, Professor of Modern History at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, divides the Enlightenment into two main wings, moderate and radical, and asserts that the main difference between them lay in rejection or acceptance of the “one substance” philosophy of Spinoza, whose view of the indivisibility of the God-man-nature package shaped views of ethics and morality, and hence almost everything else in the sphere of political, social and economic theory.
Moderates based their world view on ideas set out by Locke and Newton, who were happy with God, princes and noblemen. Leading moderates, such as Voltaire and Turgot, tended to be deists, who allowed a role for providence in human affairs, accepted social inequality as natural, and viewed reason as a reflection of man’s divine origin, whereas radicals, such as Diderot and d’Holbach, rejected divine intervention in human affairs and were, at least to their opponents, often indistinguishable from atheists. They considered reason to be modified experience, not part of revelation, and required not just legal equality and religious tolerance but also political and economic equality.
Israel rejects talk of “a family of Enlightenments” and believes that the moderate-radical split over Spinoza yields more useful distinctions than sub-divisions of Enlightenment thought based on nation or creed. The one exception to this is Rousseau, whom he views as an anomaly, whose dangerous concepts of unlimited popular sovereignty shared few roots with other Enlightenment ideas. He then blames Rousseau for the worst excesses of the Jacobin Terror, and thus exculpates his favourite radicals, who have often been blamed for justifying mob rule.
The book emphasises that moderate ideas, although adopted by kings, princes and courts, were a dead end. Compromised by acceptance of traditional society’s most gross distinctions, moderates had woefully insufficient room to manoeuvre, and were defeated long before 1789, most visibly in France, where Turgot was turned out of office in 1775.
Instead it was the radicals who were victorious in the long run, and it is their egalitarian ideas that have set the world’s intellectual and political agenda since 1945. Universal human rights and democratic theory descend directly from the radical ideas that Israel presents here, including the thoughts of several underexposed thinkers from America, Germany, Scotland and, especially, Holland.
Israel’s main purpose is to remind us of this largely forgotten history, because he fears that if we do not remember where these liberating ideas came from, then we will find it hard to defend them against new waves of bigotry and oppression which currently threaten them.
This is a book about ideas, thin on anecdote and character sketches. Instead it concentrates on drawing a very clear family tree of intellectual developments from Spinoza onwards, tracing a major conservative line through Montesquieu and Voltaire to Burke and Kant, and a progressive line through Bayle, Raynal and Diderot to Priestley, Price and Paine. Along the way, Israel covers a very wide area of opposed ideas about economics, social and political theory, war and ethics.
