Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (review)

Israel's Radical Enlightenment is an audacious, pathbreaking, and deeply learned work that may be read on a multiplicity of levels. For the specialist, it is a thick empirical survey and analysis of a vast strain of thought derived from the work of Benedict de Spinoza. For Israel, this "radical Enlightenment" obtained not only in the Netherlands, but also in France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, the Baltics, the Iberian Peninsula, and the British Isles. It assailed the transcendent, providential God of Christian and deistic thought, and it articulated a categorical naturalism and determinism with profound implications for political philosophy.

For the student of what Israel terms the "High Enlightenment" or "modernity," it is a work with a major thesis, arguing that the standard history of the Enlightenment is chronologically incoherent and ignores manifest cultural evidence. Israel seeks to overturn a narrative in which, after the downfall of scholastic and Cartesian metaphysics, the progress of British empirical natural philosophy—that of John Locke and Isaac Newton above all—shaped and caused the crucial intellectual movements of the eighteenth century. For Israel, such an account ignores nothing less than a century (1650 to 1750) of unparalleled intellectual dynamism and radicalism without which the High Enlightenment is literally unthinkable. That dynamic radicalism was an international movement with Spinozism at its core. This movement accomplished the transformation of European thought well before Voltaire's long efforts to spread English natural philosophy on the Continent had even begun. If Israel is right, most Enlightenment studies have long been profoundly wrong. He argues his case with impressive scholarship and with rich explication of texts and schools of thought.

As an examination of categorical naturalism and determinism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Israel's work is a singular gift. It leaves room for doubt, however. It does not always distinguish adequately between the biblical criticism of Spinoza in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Amsterdam, 1670) and the radical metaphysics of Spinoza in the Ethica (1665). It begs the question, at times, of Spinoza's actual influence simply by defining works of categorical naturalism and determinism as "Spinozist," despite other plausible determinations of intellectual provenance.

As a broader thesis, it is truly profound without being finally compelling. It marginalizes an influential Latin literature of ongoing debate among Cartesians, neo-Cartesians, Malebranchists, and Aristotelians, who often use the charge of "Spinozism" as a weapon for attacking each other. It assigns scant influence to developments in the secondary schools and universities through which most educated minds still passed. It does not give adequate weight to the long-term effect of anti-Galenist and Cartesian rejection of final causes. It minimizes the role both of Thomas Hobbes and of the dramatic debates that his work occasioned. It occasionally assigns fixity to states of philosophical flux and speculation. It does not focus upon the deeper tidal current of a growing naturalism within Catholic and Protestant philosophical and theology. Seeking a synthetic radical "movement," it also misses the unintended consequences and creative ramifications of bitter philosophical and theological debates among the orthodox—above all, the tendency of debators to reduce their opponents to a categorical naturalism and impotence against "the atheist." Israel's book, however, intentionally invites such discussions, and by its breadth, welcome audacity, and erudition, it promises to shape scholarly considerations for decades to come.