This is certainly a much different look at many figures of the Enlightenment than I've come across before. Israel maintains a major split amongst Enlightenment writers: the Moderate Enlightenment, as represented by Newton, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau among others, and the Radical Enlightenment of Spinoza, Bayle, Diderot, d'Holbach, Helvetius, Paine, et. al.
"Radical Enlightenment is a set of basic principles that can be summed up concisely as: democracy; racial and sexual equality; individual liberty of lifestyle; full freedom of thought, expression, and the press; eradication of religious authority from the legislative process and education; and full separation of church and state. It sees the purpose of the state as being the wholly secular one of promoting the worldly interests of the majority and preventing vested minority interests from capturing control of the legislative process." (Preface)
Israel traces this split back to Spinoza's positing of one substance--pure materialism--as the metaphysics of the universe, without the corresponding split between mind and matter "Spinoza…forged the basic metaphysical groundplan, exclusively secular moral values, and culture of individual liberty, democratic politics, and freedom of thought and the press that embody today the defining core values of modern secular egalitarianism" (location 1955) In other words, Spinoza really underlies most modern thought.
The moderate enlightenment figures, especially Voltaire and Rousseau, really come off fairly badly in Israel's eyes. Whereas I've kind of thought of Voltaire as an Enlightenment hero, to be revered alongside Erasmus and Montaigne, Israel sees him as a major conservative figure, who attacked the church, it is true, but only to destroy the abuses of its power and to consolidate power with the aristocratic classes. Of course, Israel may be talking more about the later Voltaire, but he maintains that Voltaire "consistently opposed radical thought and its egalitarian aims" throughout his career. Voltaire almost comes off as a pitiable figure at the end of his career as he stops attacking the church and begins attacking la philosophie moderne and its deplorable tendencies toward evolution, among other ideas. He recognized that his own influence over the ideas of the day were waning.
That's because a flood of literature in the 1760s-1780s bought about the predominance of the ideas of the Radical Enlightenment, culminating in the French Revolution. Israel vents against the historicism of the revolution for failing to emphasize this role and concentrating almost exclusively on social and political forces at work. "One cannot begin to grasp the revolutionary position in 1789 rightly without acknowledging that philosophisme was seen to have engineered a vast "revolution of the mind." And this phenomenon is in turn inexplicable without looking at the long, and in part self-conscious, build-up to its climax in the 1770' and 178os of a radical tradition reaching all the way back to the 166os. (location 1861) And it was the thinking of Rousseau that directly influenced Robespierre and the Jacobins in the excesses of the Terror, not the supposed "coldly clinical, unfeeling machine of rational ideas" that many critics of the Enlightenment have pointed to.
The moderate enlightenment thought lost influence because, in the end, it could not effectively criticize the abuses and social grievances of the day. The radical enlightenment became the "mouthpiece" for social resentment, calling for radical equality, the redistribution of wealth and happiness, and the universal education of mankind. It seems to me that that is still the world that we strive for today.
Author: Israel, Jonathan
Date Published: 2009
Length: 296 pp & 7 hr 28 min
electronic print & audio
Narrator: Adams, James
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