The Enlightenment’s True Radicals

December 25, 2011

NY Times Sunday Book Review

The Enlightenment’s True Radicals

By Darrin M. McMahon
Published: December 23, 2011

In recent decades, Jonathan I. Israel writes, the Enlightenment has emerged as “the single most important topic, internationally, in modern historical studies, and one of crucial significance also in our politics, cultural studies and philosophy.” That is a large claim for a movement of 18th-century thought, and many will find it exaggerated, if not self-serving, seeing that its author, a professor of history at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, has devoted the last decade of his life to exploring that very subject.

Still, in the context of a worldwide religious resurgence and the war on terror, the Enlightenment has become a favored precursor of our time, replacing wizened rivals like the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Russian Revolution. Speaking before the British Parliament in May, President Obama invoked the “ideals of the Enlightenment” as a treasured source of modern values. Others disagree, presenting the movement as the source of contemporary ills, ranging from irreligion to Western hegemony to the tyranny of reason. In these readings, the Enlightenment serves nicely as the opening chapter in a book of stories we tell about ourselves.

In Israel’s telling, the story goes like this: Not long ago, the world lived in near-total eclipse. Men and women fumbled in the dark, and in their ignorance and fear they gave credence to all manner of superstition and injustice — God and the angels; aristocracy and the divine right of kings; empire and slavery; and the oppression of women, people of color and the poor. But then, in tenebris lux, a few bold philosophers marched forward. Spreading reason, tolerance, a love of liberty and humanity, they fostered a revolution of the mind, setting the world on its modern course.

If the story sounds familiar, it should. Eighteenth-century men and women said much the same about themselves, even as their enemies decried their false lights. Partisans and opponents continued the battle in the 19th century, creating “The Enlightenment” as an accepted historical category. At critical junctures in the 20th century, too, after the First and Second World Wars and in the 1960s, when the fate of civilization seemed imperiled or doomed, critics returned to the Enlightenment as a sort of palimpsest on which to read and write our fate.

Israel’s narrative is thus part of a tale that has been told before, though in the nearly 3,000 pages of his Enlightenment trilogy, of which “Democratic Enlightenment” is the final installment, he gives it a slightly different spin.

Whereas historians in recent years have emphasized how often religion and Enlightenment got along, Israel relegates such cushy coexistence to a “Moderate Enlightenment” that was decidedly second-tier. The great names one learns at school — Voltaire and Rousseau, Newton and Locke, Leibniz and Kant — turn out never to have been willing or able to think themselves through to the new. Israel’s real heroes were hard-nosed atheists, materialists and revolutionaries who brooked no compromise with the status quo.

Israel traces the lineage of this Radical Enlightenment to Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century philosopher who serves here as the father of all atheists and “one substance” materialists who rejected the suspiciously spiritualist dualism of mind and body. Spinoza was certainly a radical critic of Scripture, who denied miracles and seemed to equate “God” with nature.

But in Israel’s controversial account, a complete “package” of modern values sprang from Spinoza’s head — fully formed like Athena from Zeus — including equality, democracy and a litany of basic human rights. Taken up in turn by a band of intrepid followers, “Spinozism” spread clandestinely throughout Europe, challenging and bedeviling the moderates until it burst forth into the open in the mid-18th century.

In the French encyclopedist Denis Diderot and his Parisian allies, the Baron d’Holbach, Claude Helvétius and the Abbé Raynal, Israel sees the true heirs of Spinoza. Declaring the “entire existing social order” unjust, they formed a small band of “deliberate, conscious revolutionaries . . . preparing the ground for revolution.”

Although critics of the first two volumes complained that Israel’s reading of Spinoza was reductive, his division between Radical and Moderate too stark, and that “Spinozism” was seldom a straightforward package, even the harshest detractors marveled at his erudition and scope. Those qualities are on ample display here, as he follows the fortunes of radical ideas across Europe and as far afield as the movements for Latin American independence and the fight against European imperialism in Asia.

Working with tremendous energy, Israel has turned up evidence of the Radical Enlightenment’s influence in surprising places, and that labor alone should ensure that this book finds a place on every specialist’s shelf.

Yet if the description is thick, the narrative itself is often thin, reading all too frequently like a conspiracy tale. The Radical Enlightenment, we are told, was “the only important direct cause of the French Revolution” and the revolutionary leaders of 1789 themselves “a tiny batch of philosophes-­révolutionnaires,” making praxis of thought. This is an explanation that historians of the Revolution will roundly dismiss but that contemporary enemies of the Enlightenment widely shared.

Israel, to his credit, has read deeply in their work and cites them often. But reproducing Counter-­Enlightenment claims as evidence for the influence of philosophy is a little like gauging the strength of Communism in the United States on the basis of reports of the House Un-­American Activities Committee.

In the end, Israel greatly exaggerates the impact of atheism and Spinozism, attributing intention and foresight where it didn’t exist. It is revealing that when Raynal confronted the Revolution itself (Diderot, Holbach and Helvétius, having received church burials, were dead), he didn’t like what he saw. No wonder, for as Israel grudgingly concedes, the Radical Enlightenment was inclined to treat the humbler part of humanity, steeped in its superstitions, with contempt. The Revolution of the mind was better when it stayed there.

Yet for Israel, as for militants over the last 200 years, the fight continues. Israel brandishes the Radical Enlightenment’s standard of truth before fundamentalists and postmodernists alike. But in repeating its categorical language (critics are dismissed regularly as “totally wrong” and “fundamentally incorrect”) and refusing to acknowledge that the movement had any blind spots at all, Israel perpetuates a tradition as doctrinaire as any faith.

Is it time to move on? The brave men and women of Tahrir Square had no need of one-substance materialism to free themselves from despotism. And though they may well require a little more enlightenment before all is said and done, their experience suggests that the dialectic of light and dark is ill-equipped to capture modernity’s shades of gray.

The historian François Furet once declared the French Revolution is “over,” meaning that it is time to stop rehearsing its battles and fighting its fights to better understand it and ourselves. Israel’s vast history helps us see that, in that sense, the Enlightenment is over too. We’re ready for a different tale.

Darrin M. McMahon, a professor of history at Florida State University, is writing a history of the idea of genius.

A version of this review appeared in print on December 25, 2011, on page BR17 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Artillery of Words.

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