A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (review)

For over a half century—ever since Peter Gay in the late sixties made the "party of humanity" the embodiment of a "modern paganism" and the "science of freedom"—philosophers and historians have been steadily dismantling both the image of a general European Enlightenment and the claims that the Enlightenment was engaged in a broadly emancipatory project. For those philosophers with what might be called more premodern sympathies, the Enlightenment has increasingly been linked to a disorienting relativism that deprived modern societies of a moral compass. For philosophers with more postmodern sympathies, the Enlightenment came to be seen as laying the foundations of a despotic rationalism that forced women, non-Europeans, and gays and lesbians into, at best, the margins of history. Among historians, some began to discern less a common European movement than an assortment of Enlightenments responding to distinct national and even provincial contexts, while other historians gradually shifted the emphasis from "ideas" to the social history of book publishing and the tastes of a new middle-class reading public.

Jonathan Israel means to reverse these tendencies and redirect our attention back to the Enlightenment's libertarian agenda and to a broadly European movement of ideas. His intention, however, is not a return to Gay's interpretation. Israel's Enlightenment is less mandarin and more plebeian. It is less an Enlightenment of rational reform than a radical, indeed self-consciously revolutionary, Enlightenment, whose origins lay not with the Englishmen Locke and Newton but with the Dutchmen Spinoza and Bayle, and whose heroes were not Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, and Kant, but Diderot, Raynal, Paine, and Lessing. Indeed, one of Israel's primary purposes is to demonstrate how a "basic duality of philosophical systems" between a moderate and a radical Enlightenment cut across all national Enlightenments and gave to European intellectual history, from the 1770s through the French Revolution, a fundamental coherence. Israel also constructs an Enlightenment that can answer its philosophical critics. Not only did radical "new philosophy" embrace an uncompromising axiological commitment to the natural rights of the individual, this commitment, in turn, empowered a thoroughgoing critique of the subordination of women, European colonialism and the institution of slavery, conventional sexual morality, and any abridgment of the freedom of thought or expression.

Israel's agenda is not merely historiographical. He hopes that the tradition of the radical Enlightenment might provide resources to resist contemporary forms of religious fundamentalism and contemporary threats to civil liberties. But however justified these hopes, they carry Israel to an unfortunately simplistic account of the debate between the moderate and radical Enlightenments. There were very good reasons why moderates might hesitate before the radical vision. Were material motives sufficient to build a good society or were they a recipe for what Kant called "soulless opulence"? Would the language of the natural rights of the individual be a bulwark of liberty or would it foster civic disengagement? Might egalitarianism tend toward a tyranny of the majority, either in the political sense of democratic despotism or in the social sense of a stifling conformity? Only when these questions—questions that certainly have their own contemporary relevance—are taken more seriously will we fully achieve the goal toward which Israel rightly aspires: to recapture the continuing, and critical, significance of the Enlightenment for our time.