Enlightenment Contested

For the New Year I've begun reading historian Jonathan Israel's latest book, Enlightenment Contested. The work is a follow-up to his earlier study, Radical Enlightenment, which I read a few years ago. I'm quite excited to work through this book. Israel has grand intentions here; he plans on writing, in three volumes (of which this is the first), a comprehensive interpretation of the Enlightenment, the first since Peter Gay's The Enlightenment, written in 1966.

Building on his work in Radical Enlightenment, Israel argues that there were in fact two Enlightenments, a Moderate Enlightenment and a Radical Enlightenment. The former was championed by names that have been most commonly associated with the Enlightenment: Locke, Voltaire, Newton, Leibniz. Israel argues that this moderate Enlightenment was in continuous conflict with the more underground and suppressed but ultimately more coherent and significant Radical Enlightenment, whose leading light was the Dutch Philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Early on Israel notes the difference between these two movements:

The philosophes labelled in this work 'radical' were those who, prior to 1752--marking the end date of this present volume--openly opposed not just tyranny, intolerance, credulity, superstition, and ecclesiastical sway, like all men of the Enlightenment, but also the moderate mainstream Enlightenment of Locke, Newton, and Voltaire, rebelling so to speak from the 'left.' That is they broadly denied all miracles and revelations and rejected physico-theology, Lockean empiricism, and providential Deism along with monarchy, (in most cases) aristocracy, and all social, racial, and sexual hierarchy.(43)

One thing that distinguishes Israel's newest work from Radical Enlightenment is his willingness to outline the contemporary significance of his scholarship and to engage in polemics against his opponents, those scholars who belittle the achievements and enduring significance of the Enlightenment. Here I quote from the preface:

does it really matter how we interpret the Enlightenment? Surely, it does. For while it have been fashionable in recent years, above all (but not only) in the Postmodernist camp, to disdain the Enlightenment as biased, facile, self-deluded, over-optimistic, Eurocentric, imperialistic, and ultimately destructive, there are sound, even rather urgent, reasons for rejecting such notions as profoundly misconceived and insisting, on the contrary, that the Enlightenment has been and remains by far the most positive factor shaping contemporary reality and those strands of 'modernity' anyone wishing to live in accord with reason would want to support and contribute to.(v)

I'm about 1/4 of the way through the book now. As with Radical Enlightenment, Israel has done his homework. He has plunged into the primary material and done exemplary work in placing texts in context, and discussing not just the works but how they were debated by various factions. Israel has set out explicitly to write in a modern form of the "history of ideas" style rather than in what he would consider the voguish style of social historians. I'll report back later on the meat of his text.