The Enlightenment That Failed

"Jonathan Israel is a great scholar. His work is daunting for us all because he knows so much and has written so much. It’s hard to come to terms with so much material. I use it mostly as an encyclopaedia of the Enlightenment. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think it’s a very important work, one of the major milestones in the history of Enlightenment scholarship. I would place Israel alongside Ernst Cassirer, who came first, then Peter Gay in the 1960s with his Enlightenment: an Interpretation (2 vols), then Jonathan Israel in the first 20 years of the 21st century, with his four massive volumes. He puts forward the idea of the ‘radical enlightenment’ as essentially being a critique of religion that begins with Spinoza and runs throughout the Enlightenment. Israel claims that the critique of religion, the Spinozist approach, is combined with political republicanism. He argues that this remains underground for most of the 18th century, but it comes to the foreground in the debates leading up to the French Revolution. He explains that the idea is again persecuted during the age of revolution, and that although it revives from time to time, the radical enlightenment eventually fails—hence the title of the fourth volume. But, of course, the Enlightenment shaped European politics and culture. The radical component, which goes back to Spinoza, was espoused by many thinkers, and even revolutionary movements, to some extent, including, Israel argues, Simon Bolivar in Latin America. But it finally failed—it didn’t shape the eventual political outcomes."