The Crisis of the European Mind

"The book has shown an ability to endure, which is very unusual in any kind of history book , not just in the world of intellectual history. It’s remarkable that it made the impact that it did at the time and has continued to do so, consistently, over decades. Its durability is perhaps its most impressive feature — although actually the main reason I chose it is that I designed my Five Books in such a way as to be comprehensive and cover the Enlightenment in all its aspects in an exciting, but also a thorough, way. There’s a tendency for most surveys to be rather weak, especially on the early period, and to focus too much on the second half of the 18th century — giving the reader the impression that what happened earlier was a mere preface. Hazard’s book gives a lively and dramatic picture of the early Enlightenment period and the intellectual crisis that it entailed, not just in one European country, but right across the Western world. In that respect it’s excellent and still unmatched. It would be hard to compete with its account of the crisis of the European mind in that early period. I have some difficulties with his starting point in 1680. There’s quite a lot in the book that I agree with, but, as one might expect, there are other things I do not agree with. Choosing 1680 is perhaps a rather French perspective: it’s when Bayle and Malebranche and other key figures writing in French are really developing their thoughts and their ideas. But, as I see it, the Dutch Republic plays a crucial role, not just in the history of the Enlightenment, but in creating the framework of basic ideas which shaped and generated controversy throughout the whole history of the Enlightenment. If one were to accept that, then 1680 becomes rather problematic. The Dutch crisis of reaction to the challenge thrown down by Descartes and Hobbes and Spinoza is really in the period between 1650 and 1680. It’s in the 1650s the Descartes makes his first really big impact in the Netherlands. So one would need to take the period between 1650 and 1680 as the first stage of this crisis — which in every other respect, Hazard describes for us very, very effectively — and the period between 1680 and 1720 as the second phase of the Enlightenment. This is very heavily dominated by French writing, although — and Hazard in no way understates this — the link with Holland is still there. The Huguenot diaspora, which played such an important part in intellectual life all over Western Europe, had as its pivot, its central point, the Dutch Republic. Holland had the largest of the Huguenot émigré communities, but also the largest group among the intelligentsia, prominent figures in the republic of letters at that time. On learned subjects the Dutch publishing industry was the freest and the biggest in terms of quantity of publishing, especially for French and Latin. Bayle, Malebranche, Jean Le Clerc and other Huguenot and French and French-speaking Swiss scholars, who were central to the debates that formed Hazard’s crisis in the closing decades of the 17th century and opening decades of the 18th century, were carrying on and responding to intellectual challenges which had already been set out by a number of scholars in the Dutch context. Spinoza is much the most famous of these, but the intellectual crisis was actually a much wider phenomenon than simply Spinoza and the response to Spinoza. It began, really, as a response to Descartes and to Hobbes. Hobbes had a very major impact at an early stage in Holland, and both the theological and the philosophical response was rather wide-ranging — perhaps more so than in any other European country. One major reason for that was the religious complexity of the scene in the Dutch Republic. There was a relative tolerance — not by any means a complete tolerance — which was important for publishing, as I mentioned. Another very important reason in explaining the intensity and complexity of intellectual crisis in the second half of the 17th century is that none of the churches were able to establish real domination. There was one particular church — the Dutch Reformed Church, a Calvinist church, which had the title of being the public church and was privileged by the state. But it’s doubtful whether more than half the population subscribed to it. In practice it would not be inaccurate to say that all the churches were minorities in the Netherlands. There were the various dissenting churches, of which the Lutherans were a very large group. The Mennonites played a very major role. Also, the Catholic community in the Dutch Republic was considerably larger than it was in England, possibly as large as 40%, certainly at least a third of the population. The Jewish community was also larger than in Britain in the 17th or 18th centuries. So all the churches had a minority status and were forced to compete with each other in a more obvious way than was the case in any other European country. This combination of a freer press and a more divided religious framework explains why a philosophical innovation which poses, in principle, a serious challenge to the philosophical establishment of the day — which Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza all did in their different ways — was likely to resound both in a more complex and in a more worrying way — and perhaps more quickly in the Dutch context. The Enlightenment, as I understand it, was revolutionary in multiple ways. In the early period, the emphasis is on the challenge that philosophy posed to the dominance of theology, revelation, miracles, and religious authority as the main guide in social theory and politics. Here I agree entirely with Hazard — there is a challenge which is partly a skeptical challenge. It begins with Descartes and Hobbes but becomes much wider than that, and leads to — of course Richard Popkin was perhaps the intellectual historian who was most famous for stressing this aspect, but there’s a lot of it already in Hazard — a skeptical challenge which is a major feature of the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries. There were two ways of responding to this crisis. (This way of seeing it is related to a theory which I’ve tried to construct over the years, a workable framework, as I see it — though there are many critics who don’t see it as a workable framework — for the Enlightenment as a whole.) One is to pick up the pieces, so to speak, and try to forge a workable compromise, a reconciliation between reason and faith, between reason and revelation, which will be robust enough to be teachable in universities, and to provide a plausible explanation of reality and of how it is that the laws of nature work in conjunction with revelation and religious authority. That was the great challenge of the era. I think most theologians and philosophers were preoccupied with it, including the greatest scientists of the period, such as Newton who, for Hazard, stood absolutely at the centre of all these processes. “In the early period, the emphasis is on the challenge that philosophy posed to the dominance of theology, revelation, miracles, and religious authority as the main guide in social theory and politics” There had to be new ways of explaining the relations between science and religion, there had to be a whole new rhetoric, whole new lines of thought, whole new philosophical techniques which would facilitate and make convincing this reconciliation of philosophical reason and scientific reason with revelation and religious authority. At the same time, there was a semi-clandestine, philosophical underground, that I call the Radical Enlightenment. The French have been interested in this phenomenon since before World War II , but English and American scholars were not interested in it until quite recently. The age of Bayle and of the Huguenot diaspora was also a time when atheistic and near-atheistic texts — rejecting religious authority and revelation — were circulating. Perhaps the most famous example of these clandestine texts, which was circulating from the 1670s, though the first printed version was in 1719, was The Treatise of the Three Impostors or Le Traite des Trois Imposteurs . But there were dozens of others, some of which were circulating on only a very small scale and others of which were actually quite widely diffused in various European countries, often in manuscript form. If they did appear in print those printed versions were suppressed rather harshly by the authorities, so in many cases only small quantities circulated and very small numbers survive today. There are several things to be said about that. Is an unknowing god, who is not benevolent, but is, as it were, the totality of nature, a Spinozistic view of God, in other words, atheism or not? Whether Spinoza is an atheist or not is still a moot point amongst philosophers. It depends what you mean by atheism. But for the 17th and 18th centuries, where God plays such a central role in society and politics because he knows , because his divine providence guides what happens, and because divine authority is the basis of the moral order, a Spinozistic conception of God, whether the philosopher today calls it atheism or not, must count as atheism in 17th or 18th century terms. There’s a wonderful democratic republican pamphlet by Camille Desmoulins which was published at the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 where he discusses this very point. He says the real issue, if you’re talking about revolution and turning everything upside down, what really counts in the 18th century, is not atheism as such, but the rejection of divine providence and religious authority. That’s what we’re really talking about. If there is no divine providence guiding the course of history, if there is no divine direction in the way things happen, this means that the existing social order – for instance the fact that most of the properties are owned by the aristocracy – can’t be part of the divine plan, or can’t be sanctioned by religious authority. “If you’re talking about revolution and turning everything upside down, what really counts in the 18th century, is not atheism as such, but the rejection of divine providence and religious authority.” Religious authority doesn’t have that kind of connection with divine providence that it claims to have, and therefore it doesn’t have the legitimacy that many people imagine that it does. This is deeply subversive, and is the connection between being revolutionary in religious matters and being revolutionary in social and political matters. That is one of the most important things to grasp about the Enlightenment. Lots of historians have said — sometimes in criticism of myself — that there is no necessary connection between atheism and the anti-aristocratic, democratic tendency in politics in the 18th century. Personally, I’m quite convinced that’s totally wrong. And not only that, I don’t think one can possibly hold that position, unless one has little grasp of the role religion plays in social theory and in all forms of political and legitimation in the 17th and 18th centuries."