Historian Jonathan Israel's magisterial three-volume history of the 'Radical Enlightenment' rips up the terrain around him. Kenan Malik follows him down the dark alleys of the Age of Reason.
There is no period of history that has been more analysed, debated, celebrated and disparaged than the Enlightenment. Unlike, say, the Renaissance or the Reformation, the Enlightenment is not simply a historical moment but one through which debates about the contemporary world are played out. From the role of science to the war on terror, from free speech to racism, there are few contemporary debates that do not engage with the Enlightenment, or, at least, with what we imagine the Enlightenment to have been. Inevitably, then, what we imagine the Enlightenment to be has become a historical battleground. The historiography of the Enlightenment has come to be as contested as the Enlightenment itself.
The story of the Enlightenment, of what it was and how it developed, began to be written by thephilosophes themselves. To the question “What is Enlightenment?”, Kant responded that it was “Man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage”. For Kant and Voltaire, for Hume and Diderot, the importance of the Enlightenment was that it cleansed the European mind of medieval superstition and allowed the light of reason to shine upon human problems.
Subsequent historians developed this theme. Ernst Cassirer’s classic 1932 study, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, was highly influential in setting the tone. Cassirer’s Enlightenment, like Kant’s, is primarily an intellectual project, the means by which the human spirit achieved “clarity and depth in its understanding of its own nature and destiny, and of its own fundamental character and mission”. Three decades later, Peter Gay’s magnificent two-volume study, Enlightenment: An Interpretation, reworked Cassirer’s themes for a new generation.
The vision expressed in such studies of a single coherent Enlightenment understood in terms of an intellectual transformation of the European mind has come to be challenged in the past half-century from a number of quarters. Some historians started developing national, rather than pan-European, accounts of the Enlightenment. The French Enlightenment, the German Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment: each came to be analysed in its own terms, and often as a display of national pride.
Other historians began to stress not the intellectual but the social and cultural aspects of the Enlightenment. “Perhaps the Enlightenment was a more down-to-earth affair than the rarefied climate of opinion described by textbook writers,” suggested Robert Darnton, the most significant of these new cultural historians, “and we should question the overly highbrow, overly metaphysical view of intellectual life in the eighteenth century.”
A third group of scholars challenged the very idea that the Enlightenment was a good. Twelve years after Cassirer published his The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, founders of the Frankfurt School of Marxism, now exiled in America, published their seminal work Dialectic of Enlightenment. Like many radicals of the time, Adorno and Horkheimer asked themselves why it was that Germany, a nation with deep philosophical roots in the Enlightenment, should succumb so quickly and so completely to Nazism.
The answer seemed to lie in the nature of Enlightenment rationalism itself. Adorno and Horkheimer did not reject the Enlightenment in its entirety, but they saw it as not only lighting the way to emancipation but also enabling the darkness of the Holocaust. In recent decades these ideas have come to be developed within postmodern and postcolonial theory. Enlightenment rationalism and universalism, long seen as the foundation stones of progressive thought, are now often dismissed as Eurocentric, even racist.
Now, into this fractured and fractious Enlightenment landscape comes Jonathan Israel, with the intellectual version of a JCB, ripping up the terrain around him. Professor of Modern European History at Princeton University, Israel built his reputation as a historian of the Spanish and Dutch empires. Over the past decade, however, he has published an extraordinary trilogy, Radical Enlightenment, Enlightenment Contested and Democratic Enlightenment, that has begun to reset the debate about the character of the period and its meaning for the modern world.
The size of Israel’s labours is eye-catching. Each work in the trilogy runs to almost a thousand pages; in total there must be close to two million words here. Equally eye-catching is the detail. Israel possesses an astonishing command of sources in English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Swedish. It sometimes seems as if there is no pamphlet he has not read, no debate he has not revisited, no intellectual alleyway into which he has not poked his head. What really sets the trilogy apart, however, is the way that Israel has wielded all that detail to cement a new structure for understanding the Enlightenment.
Like many before him, Israel lauds the Enlightenment as that transformative period when Europe shifted from being a culture “based on a largely shared core of faith, tradition and authority” to one in which “everything, no matter how fundamental or deeply rooted, was questioned in the light of philosophical reason” and in which “theology’s age-old hegemony” was overthrown. And, yet, despite language and imagery that hark back to Kant, Israel is also deeply critical of much of the Enlightenment, and hostile to the ideas of many of the figures that populate the works of Cassirer and Gay. At the heart of his argument is the insistence that there were two Enlightenments. The mainstream Enlightenment of Kant, Locke, Voltaire and Hume is the one of which we know, which provides the public face of the Enlightenment, and of which most historians have written. But it was the Radical Enlightenment, shaped by lesser-known figures such as d’Holbach, Diderot, Condorcet and, in particular, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, that provided the Enlightenment’s heart and soul.
The two Enlightenments, Israel suggests, divided on the question of whether reason reigned supreme in human affairs, as the radicals insisted, or whether reason had to be limited by faith and tradition – the view of the mainstream. The mainstream’s intellectual timidity constrained its critique of old social forms and beliefs. By contrast, the Radical Enlightenment “rejected all compromise with the past and sought to sweep away existing structures entirely.”
The two Enlightenments, Israel suggests, divided on the question of whether reason reigned supreme in human affairs, as the radicals insisted, or whether reason had to be limited by faith and tradition – the view of the mainstream. The mainstream’s intellectual timidity constrained its critique of old social forms and beliefs. By contrast, the Radical Enlightenment “rejected all compromise with the past and sought to sweep away existing structures entirely.”
In Israel’s view, what he calls the “package of basic values” that defines modernity – toleration, personal freedom, democracy, racial equality, sexual emancipation and the universal right to knowledge – derives principally from the claims of the Radical Enlightenment.
It is, as might be expected, a controversial and contested thesis. The resurrection of the old-fashioned history of ideas, the unashamed celebration of the Enlightenment, the trenchant critique of religion, the dismissal of previously venerated figures such as Locke, Hume and Kant, the seeming obsession with Spinoza, the supposed lack of nuance in both philosophical understanding and historical account – all have drawn criticism from many historians and philosophers. Others, however, myself included, while accepting that many of these criticisms are valid, have found Israel’s account a revelation, and have discovered in his framework an illuminating way of rethinking the Enlightenment and its legacy. So, when Israel came to speak at an academic conference on the Radical Enlightenment at the Free University in Brussels, I took the opportunity to take in the debate and to talk to Israel about his ideas.
* * * * *
“I’m tired of talking of Spinoza.” That was not exactly the response I had expected. I had met Israel at Brussels’ Bibliothèque Royale where he had been researching 17th-century Spinozistic pamphlets – there are clearly some he still has not read.
And in talking about his work and ideas, I started at the only place I could start: with Spinoza. “The trouble is,” Israel responded, “I’ve become so closely associated with the idea that Spinoza has been underestimated that it’s crowded out most of the rest. There’s a tendency of people to say that ‘Here’s an interpretation of the Enlightenment that wants to explain everything in terms of Spinoza’, and that’s a bit of a distortion.”
Israel’s work is indeed far richer and more nuanced than many of his critics suggest..
read more: http://rationalist.org.uk/articles/4194
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