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Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752

[1] With his latest book Enlightenment Contested, Jonathan Israel has made an impressive argument in favour of the view that philosophical ideas shape, or at least help to shape, human history. What ideas, however, does he have in mind? Israel brings forward a specific set of notions: ‘toleration, personal freedom, democracy, equality racial and sexual, freedom of expression, sexual emancipation, and the universal right to knowledge and “enlightenment”’ (p. 11) and argues that these are at the heart of what defines our system of modern Western values. At the same time, he maintains that we owe these ideas exclusively to a group of early modern ‘Radical’ thinkers, who first defended them on the basis of a combination of atheist and anti-authoritarian viewpoints closely linked to the philosophy of Spinoza. Despite its nearly 1000 pages, Israel’s book fails to prove either of these latter theses, although it does deserve to attract the public and scholarly attention it is bound to receive. [2] Enlightenment Contested is remarkable for its scope and detailed presentation, as well as for the author’s immense knowledge of primary and secondary sources. This may too easily go unnoticed, since readers of books such as The Dutch Republic (1995) and Radical Enlightenment (2001) have already become familiar with Israel’s seemingly boundless erudition. As for its contents, Enlightenment Contested again has some marvellous new insights to offer. Even if these have not gone completely unnoticed before, Israel’s presentation puts them into a new perspective. The idea of a radicalisation of positions in early eighteenth-century France, due to the absence of a broad movement of Enlightenment moderates, is an interesting view not found in Israel’s earlier works. Other views invoke Israel’s earlier position in Radical Enlightenment. The way, for instance, in which, on the authority of Pierre Bayle, Spinoza’s philosophy was presented as a follow-up to ancient systems such as that of the philosopher Strato (c. 335–270 BC), and the debates surrounding the supposedly theistic core of Confucianism, reveal what issues were at stake in early eighteenth-century thought. [3] It is no exaggeration to say that Radical Enlightenment single-handedly reshaped, and Enlightenment Contested now confirms, some of our most basic