Radical Enlightenment

"I had in mind to choose Spinoza’s Ethics . In the pantheon of great 17th and 18th century philosophers – Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Kant et cetera – Spinoza is usually seen as hovering in the back row. He is surprisingly little known. Yet he is arguably the philosopher who more than most has shaped modern thinking about freedom, equality and the possibility of a secular morality. In the end, though, I plumped for Jonathan Israel’s book, which tells the story not just of Spinoza but of the radical Enlightenment as a whole, of which Spinoza was the key figure. Radical Enlightenment is the first in a magnificent trilogy – the third of which, called Democratic Enlightenment , is published this autumn – through which Israel rethinks the history of the Enlightenment and its impact upon the modern world. The Enlightenment has long been recognised as key to development of secular morality. Israel’s importance is to draw out the distinction between two different Enlightenments. The mainstream Enlightenment of Kant, Locke, Voltaire and Hume is the one of which we know, and which provides the public face of the Enlightenment. But it was the radical Enlightenment, shaped by lesser-known figures such as d’Holbach, Diderot, Condorcet and in particular Spinoza that provided the Enlightenment’s heart and soul. The two Enlightenments 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, as Israel observes, aspired to conquer ignorance and superstition, and revolutionise ideas and attitudes, but in such a way as to preserve what they saw as essential elements of the past by marrying reason and faith. By contrast, the radical Enlightenment rejected all compromise with the past and sought to sweep away existing structures entirely. This distinction was to shape the attitudes of the two sides to a whole host of social and political issues, such as equality, democracy and colonialism. The attempt of the mainstream to marry traditional theology to the new philosophy, Israel suggests, constrained its critique of old social forms and beliefs. The radicals, on the other hand, were driven to pursue their ideas of equality and democracy to their logical conclusions because, having broken with traditional concepts of a divinely-given order, there was no meaningful alternative to grounding morality and politics on a radical egalitarianism. The moderate mainstream was overwhelmingly dominant in terms of support, official approval and prestige. But in a deeper sense, and in the long run, it proved less important than the radical strand. The “package of basic values” that defines modernity – toleration, personal freedom, democracy, racial equality, sexual emancipation and the universal right to knowledge – derive principally from the claims of the radical Enlightenment."