Untangling the Complexities of Radical Enlightenment

in the world of enlightenment studies, one of the most exciting and controversial fields of inquiry has been that of the Radical Enlightenment. The term Radical Enlightenment gained significant scholarly attention with the 1981 publication of Margaret Jacob's The Radical Enlightenment—Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans. After that, the field exploded with the publication of four massive volumes on the topic by Jonathan I. Israel: Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006), Democratic Enlightenment (2011), and Revolutionary Ideas (2014). The theory behind this term roughly divides Enlightenment thinkers into two categories: radical and mainstream (or moderate). According to Israel, radical Enlightenment writers follow a line of thinking that parallels Spinoza's: a materialistic metaphysics, atheism, and antimonarchical politics. This theory has been contested for two reasons. First, not all scholars agree that extreme political views follow from radical metaphysics (such as substance monism) and, second, some think that Enlightenment thinkers cannot be so easily divided into these camps. Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment is offered as an attempt to evaluate this tension.

The book brings together an international group of scholars who both address the concept of Radical Enlightenment and attempt to sort out difficult issues presented by various stances toward the concept. It begins with several essays that orient the reader to the debate. Naturally enough, Israel opens the volume with an explanation of the complexities and nuances of understanding Radical Enlightenment within the context of intellectual history, social history, politics, and culture. He does this not only to provide an introduction but also to demonstrate that the concept of Radical Enlightenment emerges from the use of what he calls the "controversialist strategy"—the discovery of tensions among members of society or societies on many levels that reveal underlying ideological allegiances. Absolutely key to his essay is the effort to dissuade readers from thinking that the Radical Enlightenment is a purely intellectual movement best studied by historians of ideas and best explained in terms of intellectual history—a common accusation against his work. In this sense, his essay is a defense of the idea of Radical Enlightenment as a structural concept that helps us understand the tremendous complexity of the evolution of human freedom in all its forms: emancipation, the rule of law, citizenship, equality, the pursuit of happiness, the right to education, the right to pursue truth, and the formation of republics that separate church and state.

Margaret Jacob disagrees that this is Israel's focus. Her essay insists that Israel has missed the point about Radical Enlightenment by relying too heavily on abstruse writings centering on Spinoza's philosophy at the expense of social discourse and the role of British writers such as John Toland and Isaac Newton. Harvey Chisick's essay does a nice job of accurately describing the tension between Israel's and Jacob's views through a deft presentation of the political and philosophical ideas of Baron d'Holbach, suggesting that Israel inappropriately ties metaphysical monism to political radicalism. His presentation reveals that it is not so much that Israel discounts the complexity of Radical Enlightenment as that he insists too strongly that materialism implies radical politics. And by demonstrating that thinkers such as d'Holbach and Voltaire could differ markedly in their metaphysics while agreeing on a goal of widespread social justice, Chisick reinforces the blurry nature of the lines between radical and moderate Enlightenment thinkers. In terms of truly presenting the essence of the debate, Chisick's essay is quite important.

The second third of the book discusses the "Origins and Fate of the Radical Enlightenment." Because of the primacy of Spinoza in Israel's understanding of the origins of the Radical Enlightenment, the first three essays in this section deal in different ways with Spinoza. The first is a complex and subtle essay on Spinoza's materialism (and ensuing radicalism) in which Nancy Levene offers an orientation to competing interpretations of Spinoza's monism. This essay is an orientation in the sense that it describes these interpretations; however, her explanations will probably be clear...