Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750

by Jonathan I. Israel

In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the complete demolition of traditional structures of authority, scientific thought, and belief by the new philosophy and the philosophers, including Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. The Radical Enlightenment played a part in this revolutionary process, which effectively overthrew all justification for monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical power, as well as man's dominance over woman, theological dominance of education, and slavery. Despite the present day interest in the revolutions of the eighteenth century, the origins and rise of the Radical Enlightenment have received limited scholarly attention. The greatest obstacle to the movement finding its proper place in modern historical writing is its international scope: the Radical Enlightenment was not French, British, German, Italian, Jewish or Dutch, but all of these at the same time.

In this wide-ranging volume, Jonathan Israel offers a novel interpretation of the Radical Enlightenment down to La Mettie and Diderot, two of its key exponents. Particular emphasis is placed on the pivotal role of Spinoza and the widespread underground international philosophical movement known before 1750 as Spinozism.

Genres: History, Philosophy, Nonfiction, European History, Politics, Religion, Science

834 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Jonathan Irvine Israel is a British writer on Dutch history, the Age of Enlightenment and European Jews. Israel was appointed as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, in January 2001. He was previously Professor of Dutch History and Institutions at the University of London.

In recent years, Israel has focused his attention on a multi-volume history of the Age of Enlightenment. He contrasts two camps. The "radical Enlightenment" founded on a rationalist materialism first articulated by Spinoza. Standing in opposition was a "moderate Enlightenment" which he sees as profoundly weakened by its belief in God. In Israel’s highly controversial interpretation, the radical Enlightenment is the main source of the modern idea of freedom. He contends that the moderate Enlightenment, including Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, made no real contribution to the campaign against superstition and ignorance.

Reviews

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spinoza, Enlightenment, And The Love Of Learning

In "Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity", Jonathan Israel has written an erudite, extensive, and inspiring study on a seminal moment in Western thought, commonly known as the Age of Enlightenment .In short, the Enlightenment marks a change from a thought and society that was theologically focused to thought and society that were secular and scientific in character. This period and this transition has been much studied, but Israel has many new insights to offer. In addition, he writes a book filled with wonderful detail, with rare thinkers and books that make the reader yearn to learn more. It is an enlightening experience in itself to read this book.

The book begins with the philosophy of Descartes which is widely regarded as overthrowing the philosophy of scholasticism and initiating the modern period. Descartes developed a dualism with a mechanistic philosophy of nature and a spiritual philosophy of mind. It was the first of many attempts to reconcile theology with the newly developed scientific outlook.

But the focus of Professor Israel's study is on Spinoza (1632-1677.) Spinoza rejected Cartesian dualism and developed his philosophy equating God and Nature. He rejected a transcendental God, providence, miracles, revelation, and transcendental bases for human ethics. Spinoza developed his ideas in his "Ethics" while in his earlier and almost equally important "Theological-Political Treatise", Spinoza developed the basis for modern Bible criticism.

Professor Israel argues that Spinoza's thought constitutes the basis for what he terms "radical enlightenment", which rejected theology and revealed religion in favor of a philosophy of mechanism and determinism. Radical enlightenment proved to be a potent weapon in rejecting the divine right of kings and other forms of privilege, in promoting democracy and the rights of women, in encouraging free speech and free thought, and in allowing people to pursue happiness, in particular sexual fulfillment, in this world without fear of hells and punishments in the next world. Spinoza influenced many scholars and thinkers and also, Israel points out, had substantial influence on unlettered people of his time.

Professor Israel contrasts the Radical Enlightenment emanating from Spinoza with "moderate enlightenment". Moderate enlightenment sought, as indicated above, to reconcile mechanism and science with traditional religious faith, to the extent possible. Professor Israel identifies three separate strains of moderate enlightenment: Cartesianism, the monadic philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff, and the deism and empiricism of Locke and Newton. Most of the book is about Radical Enlightenment and its impact and about the interplay between Radical Enlightenment on the one hand and Moderate Enlightenment and traditionalism on the other hand.

The book includes a good basic exposition of the thought of Spinoza. (The exposition of Descartes thought and of the teachings of scholasticism is less thorough.) The major theme of the book is that Spinoza's ideas were not simply those of an isolated recluse; rather, his ideas became widely known and disseminated even during his lifetime, and became the basis for much of the secular, modern thought and life we have today.

Israel discusses a plethora of sources, some well-known some highly obscure in which various thinkers from throughout Europe (another theme of Israel's book is that Enlightenment was European in character and shared essentially the same features in all European countries) adopted and promulgated Spinozistic doctrines. The books and individuals are fascinating, as are the conflicts many of them encountered with civil and religious authorities. He discusses how many writers had to try to present their teachings covertly (i.e. by appearing to criticize Spinozism while in fact advocating it.) in order to attempt to avoid conflict. There are also extended treatments of Leibniz and Locke and their interactions with Radical Enlightenment.

For the most part, Professor Israel avoids explicit comment on the philosophical merits of the many ideas and thinkers he explores. The reader is left to think through the issues on the basis of his descriptions and from the words of the thinkers themselves. It is a fascinating study.
I have long been a student of Spinoza and came away from this book awed by the wealth of learning displayed in this book and by the scope and influence of Radical Enlightenment in the years following Spinoza's death. Philosophically, I came away from this book with a new appreciation of the virtues of Western secularism and with a renewed understanding of the dear price that has been paid for the intellectual liberation of the mind and heart. It is a journey that every person must undertake for him or herself, and many people may reach results that differ from those reached during the age of Radical Enlightenment. Spinoza's goal (shared with the religious thinkers whom he rejected) was to find the path to human blessedness, enlightenment, and happiness by freeing the mind. I got a good sense of the value of this search through reading this masterful book.

Robin Friedman

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid work, full of detail and a great read. Israel presents only one great these: the Enlightenment began much earlier than always assumed, and the Jewish, Portugese, Dutch philosopher Baruch/Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677) was the trunk from which everything grew! This theory is so fanatically formulated, again and again, that in the end I turned a bit sceptical. But that does not mean that there is no basis of truth in it. I just can't judge. Fascinating read, though.

[Thore Husfeldt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I abandoned this book after a few hundred pages. It makes me increasingly angry. It’s also unenlightening.

How can one write a book about the enlightenment that is so unwilling to enlighten? I’m baffled how so much erudition and scholarship can be poured into a tome that reads like a PhD thesis with an audience of 1. Mind you, I like books that are challenging and flatter the reader’s intelligence. But I’d rather have my groin pummeled by Spinoza’s femur than subject myself to yet another page of flat, turgid, conceited, repetitious enumeration of which new pamphlet created immediate outcry in which Dutch city. Instead, please tell me what the pamphlet said. Please, Jonathan, what was the radical contents of the Enlightenment that we must witness hundreds and hundreds of pages of reaction to?

Please tell me.

Oh, and please don’t tell me in French. For some reason, the author quotes extensively in French. Here’s a random excerpt. (I literally opened my book at a random page.)

In the words of his critics, Jaques Saurin, a prominent Huguenot preacer at The Hague, Bayle was a genius who lived a sober, austere life, but used his pen ‘à attaquer la chasteté, la modiestie, toutes les vertus chrétiennes’ and, while adamantly professing his allegiance to the Reformed faith, repeated the objections to Christianity of all the world’s greatest heretics ‘leur prêtant des armes nouvelles, et réunissant dans nôtre siècle toutes les erreurs des siècles passez.’

This is a typical sentence in the book: the point of the passage is in French. Many pages have several of these, entire chapters are probably senseless for readers who are not francophone. Now, I have good enough French to just exactly be able to follow it, but it slows me down. (French is my fifth language.) And it annoys me. Every. Bloody. Time. Dutch philosophers? German? Spanish? Italian? Jonathan Israel translates all of them. But for some reason, every turn of phrase that the author got in French must find its way into the book in the original. Why somebody wants to write a book, and about the Enlightenment to boot, with such a conceited mindset, is, well, c’est au-delà de ma compréhension.

Can I imagine a readership for this book? Sure. I’m not it.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the few books I read in grad school that I really feel I benefited from being exposed to. When I return to it, I am surprised by how rich and compelling it is, in spite of its length and density. Each time, I find new things to be fascinated by, as if it anticipates my growth and changing interests, and writes new chapters of itself in my absence.
It is essentially an intellectual history of secular thought, answering the perplexing question: How did modern secular thought become the cornerstone of European approaches to life and philosophy, undermining the long dominance of theological primacy in thought and helping to build a scientific and technocratic society? Israel argues that this drastic change was begun by a radical underground of thinkers, inspired by the work of Benedictus de Spinoza, and circulated clandestinely and in code by prominent philosophes throughout Europe. Israel argues that the "radical" Enlightenment has been under-studied, in part due to an over-emphasis on national narratives that ignore the trans-national nature of Spinozism. His work demonstrates the value, but also the complexity of creating trans-national narratives. He devotes several chapters to national examples, and often looks at sources from several countries (and in several languages) comparatively. His source base is bewildering at times, and it must have required considerable linguistic skill to manage works in Dutch, Latin, English, French, German, and Italian all at once.
Israel connects Spinoza and the "neo-Cartesians" (who tried to appear less radical, but often arrived at Spinozist conclusions) to a change in thinking that is almost viral in nature. Once intellectuals were exposed to secular ideals of philosophy, it seems, they could rarely refute them without resorting to either religious fundamentalism or a tortured double-think in which Spinoza's own weapons are marshaled against him, in the end proving him right in methods if not conclusions. Philosophers like Diderot became committed to the rejection of revealed religion, miracles, and the actual existence of demons or diabolic possession, and this kind of thinking became central to efforts to understand the known world.
Going beyond a mere critique of religious predominance in intellectual life, Israel finds the Spinozists responsible for circulating anti-absolutist and humanist political ideas, including sexual freedom and women's equality. The social contract of Locke, as well as the ideas of Hobbes, are shown in their connection to the radical movement. Although many philosophes were from the noble classes, critique of social position through birth rapidly became part of the general discourse, and these intellectuals found themselves in a new milieu, estranged from their traditional positions. He explores the rise of libraries in connection with the new philosophies, and the fascinating networks of thinkers through correspondence. While Spinoza himself was theoretician, we also find Newton and Boyle, and other champions of empiricism picking up his concepts and putting them to the test.
The book is sprinkled with life stories of fascinating people - the proponents and opponents of the radical Enlightement alike. It is not written for a reader unfamiliar with Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries, and, although the writing style is strong compared to many historical works, the difficult language and concepts will discourage the popular reader. Even for this reader, Israel's tendency to leave quotes in their original language (not even providing translations in the footnotes) was unfortunate. Nevertheless, for those up to the challenge, there are amazing treasures to be found within this text.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Appearing in 2001, and weighing in at over 800 pages, this is the first of a projected three volumes on the Enlightenment. In this first volume, Israel constructs the basic argument that is foundational for the second and third volumes, which together present a comprehensive survey of the Enlightenment as a whole. He sets out to supplant Peter Gay's two-volume work, which has been the standard treatment of the Enlightenment for three decades. Reviewers are abuzz.

Back in 1981, Margaret Jacob argued that the Dutch Republic was crucial to the Enlightenment. After France revoked the Edict of Nantes, Huguenots fled to the four winds, and a concentrated population settled in the Dutch Republic. Their refugee experience forged arteries of traffic for the book trade all over Europe, and printing boomed in the low countries. Their sour experience in France gave these Huguenots a decidedly anti-monarchist tilt, and new notions of social order were set forth in treatises that flowed out of the Dutch Republic. Now Jonathan Israel picks up on Jacob's thesis, but inexplicably, he does not interact with her work. (She took polite umbrage in her review that appeared in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Jun., 2003), pp. 387-389.)

Back to Israel's big book. Coinciding with this focus on the Dutch Republic is an emphasis on Spinoza, the main protagonist of Radical Enlightenment (which Jacob had previously suggested). “The question of Spinozism is indeed central and indispensable to any proper understanding of Early Enlghtenment European thought,” he says. Israel’s choice of Spinoza, who was born and raised in a Jewish community in the Dutch Republic, may have been anticipated by his previous books on early modern Jews and on the Dutch Republic--books which established him as a solid scholar. Another implication of this focus on the Dutch Republic—again, which Jacob had proposed—is to push the Enlightenment’s formative period back to the mid-seventeenth century.

In Radical Enlightenment, Israel places Spinoza at the center by solidifying the three-part taxonomy for Enlightenment-era intellectuals that Jacob had first suggested. Israel posits, first, a moderate Enlightenment; second, a radical Enlightenment (represented by Spinoza); and third, a conservative opposition to the Enlightenment. The moderate Enlightenment sought to establish toleration and revolutionize ideas in such a way that sought to preserve elements of traditional social structures; it blended old and new. The radical Enlightenment, by contrast, countenanced no compromise with the past, rejected all ecclesiastical authority and scorned any God-ordained social hierarchies. Spinoza’s work circulated in the Dutch Republic in the middle of the seventeenth century, but soon diffused throughout Europe along the arteries of the print trade, which Israel documents in impressive detail.

The ensuing philosophical debates provide the motor for the progress and shape of the Enlightenment. Israel says that the growth of Spinozism prompted moderates to position themselves as the middle group of the three. They responded to challenges from conservatives, in part, by distancing themselves from the radicals. The conservatives, making up the third group, also tried to position themselves in the middle. Their polemical strategy was to couple the moderates with the radicals. On Israel’s analysis, all sides in the Enlightenment’s intellectual battles defined their own positions, and those of their opponents, in relation to the radicals. Thus, though Spinoza’s philosophy may not have claimed the most adherents, it nonetheless framed the major issues of the period. By recentering the Enlightenment around Spinoza, Israel pushes the more familiar, canonical writers (Descartes, Voltaire, Locke, Hume, Newton) out to the Enlightenment’s periphery. This is one of the stunning implications of his interpretation, and reviewers are taking notice.

See my review of Enlightenment Contested.

[John Warner · Rating 3 out of 5]

this erudite but meandering and interminable volume makes, i think, three central claims. they are: (1) that something like a unified enlightenment (as opposed to the multiple "enlightenments" that historians talk about now) existed in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, (2) that there existed "radical" and "moderate" strains of enlightenment thought, and (3) that Spinoza was the most radical, the most comprehensive, and the most influential intellectual figure of this period.

(3) is the most interesting but, unfortunately, the most implausible claim of the bunch. Israel does demonstrate convincingly that Spinoza's texts were known and considered dangerous throughout Europe, but the same could be said of Hobbes, and Israel simply waves his hand at this rather obvious but potentially problematic alternative hypothesis.

Relatedly, Israel tends to conflate questions of philosophical comprehensiveness with questions of historical influence. He posits that Spinoza was the most comprehensive thinker of the 17th century (he is, i think, right about this, but he is right for the wrong reasons), and, on this basis, concludes that he was also the most influential. This inference is undefended, unwarranted, and somewhat implausible.

Though the scope of Israel's scholarship is impressive, one wonders whether depth was sacrificed at the altar of breadth in this work. His engagements with the central texts of the 17th century--Locke's in particular--are breezy, unsystematic, and even careless.

All that aside, it is a pretty damn good piece of scholarship, and should be read by anyone who cares about modern intellectual history.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extraordinarily good book and I’ll even say it’s a necessary book to read for understanding how we became who we are today. There’s an ebb and flow to history but clearly the thinkers presented in this book laid the foundation for what has happened and where we are going.

The author goes into great detail for the writers and thinkers who created the Enlightenment with their Radical break from tradition, authority and religion. The author’s main theme is along the lines that the Enlightenment thought was well entrenched by the early 18th century and most of the rest of the latter thinkers were at best just restating and commenting on previous thought that was already established. Voltaire is only mentioned in passing in this book because by his time most of what he said was just derivative from previous writers. Rousseau is the one exception during the later part of the 18th century and the author gives him his special due.

Most of the interesting thinkers and writers’ books are not currently available in English off the internet. I looked for them and couldn’t find them. The Leibnitz-Wolf system, Newton-Locke, and the religious defenders’ writings are available, but the heart of the radical enlightenment books are not (except for Spinoza and Descartes’s writings). This book made all of the forgotten books relevant and explicated their relevance to the real project of the Enlightenment.

As I was reading this book, I took the time and read Spinoza’s A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise. I’m glad I did. I previously started that book and gave up on it. I thought there were too many Bible citations and did not realize what Spinoza was really getting at until I read this book and it set me straight. Now, I realize that it is one of the best books ever written since I now understand its proper context and purpose. Briefly, it is the first-time exegesis is properly applied to Scripture, and Spinoza does it in such a way that it is beautiful to behold. This book pointed the way for me to understand that. Hobbes is mentioned in Radical Enlightenment but only in passing, because he really doesn’t have the depth that Spinoza gives to the subject. A warning: for anyone that thinks Hobbes and Voltaire are foundational for the Enlightenment, I would recommend that person first read this book.

This author mentioned something that I was already aware of: those who call Spinoza a pantheist are making a mistake. People love to quote Spinoza’s ‘nature is God and God is nature’ and say they believe in Spinoza’s God, but wrapped in that statement is something way more complex because of the way Spinoza states a necessary universe with necessary laws and that will necessarily make Spinoza not a pantheist. (This is a paraphrase of what the author said).

This author did something that I’m grateful for. He said that the word substance can mean reality. For Spinoza there is one substance for Descartes there are two substances. That would mean for Spinoza there is only one reality, and for Descartes there are two realities. Spinoza’s geometrical writing is difficult to follow at times and also remember that for him he would say that nature natured, and that nature natures, or in other words, there is an ‘is’ and there is a becoming.

The radical enlightenment consistently demolishes all of the modern day apologists. The argument from design, the need for absolute morality, the need for revelation, the cosmological argument, and authority for the sake of authority, and the need for an after-life in order to give meaning to our life, and so on. All of today’s apologia were refuted previously by these mostly late 17th century forgotten thinkers, and their books they wrote are mostly not available in English and it takes a book like this one to get at the core of their importance.

One note and a warning about this book. It definitely helps if you are fluent in French otherwise major parts of this book will frustrate you since the author tended not to translate the French book titles or quotes except for the Rousseau quotes.

[Otto Lehto · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no business like clandestine philosophy business.

"How I love this noble man
More than I can say with words.
Still, I fear he remains alone
With his shining halo." - Albert Einstein

Jonathan Israel's monumental tome is a rich and valuable compendium of historical research. It highlights, with staggering erudition and zealous advocacy, the somewhat neglected importance of Spinoza and the "Spinozists" (a rather loose grouping of writers, polemicists, philosophers and demagogues) for the radical transformation of European society into the direction of democracy, secularism, freedom and tolerance. Focusing on the history of ideas, it relies on the "republic of letters", mostly consisting of aristocratic white men, as its main source of material. It thus sets aside the everyday life of the masses, and propounds an idea-driven vision of history, with the knowledge and faith that such an approach, aloof and elitist as it may seem, is the only way to find the true causes of how we can improve the living standards of the vast majority of the people.

The gist of such an outlook is that ideas matter; that some ideas matter more than others because they are more powerful or more transformative; and that the general mass society CAN BE and HAS BEEN changed as a result of the "battle of ideas" fought within the ranks of the intellectual and journalistic classes. The end result of such battles - which have been waging ever since man first invented symbolic representation and language - has been a continuously shifting climate of opinion. The world of ideas has only been rendered more or less secure, at one historical conjuncture or another, by political power relations and symbolic control in a fixed social setting. The purpose of radical philosophy is to realign these political, social and ideological structures.

The earthquakes and wildfires, metaphorical rather than physical, that have led to the revolutions of modernity - be it the political/social revolutions, or the scientific/technological revolutions - have been stirred, not by blind forces of history, but by the fierce debate around new ideas.

Of all such newfangled ideas, especially meritorious ones, philosophy and science have provided the major share, although they have always fought against mass superstition, political tyranny and religious dogma. This was especially true in the crucial years of 1650-1750 (or, for that matter, until the 1790s; which is when the book actually ends, with Robespierre and the French Revolution).

The great achievement of Israel's in-depth research is to provide a counter-narrative to many of the existing histories of the philosophical underpinnings of the Enlightenment, by focusing much-needed attention on the Dutch context, especially the vibrant intellectual atmosphere around Spinoza and a dozen other radical writers in Amsterdam, Hague, Leiden and elsewhere.

The book provides an excellent showcase of the importance of the relative freedom of the Dutch Republic (justly lauded by contemporary and subsequent radical authors) as a breeding ground, especially in the publication sense, but also in the conception sense, of radical philosophy.

I share with Israel his enthusiasm for Spinoza. The greatness of Spinoza was of world historical significance, even if the true depth of his philosophy has not been appreciated widely even today.

Israel decisively shows how Spinoza's influence, far from being negligible, formed an important and vital backbone of the intellectual debates around scripture, secular authority and science. The main importance of Spinoza was, as many of his detractors pointed out, to revive many of the pre-Christian ideas of naturalism, fatalism and rationalism, but in a fresh and systematic fashion. He took Descartes's rationalist challenge and radicalised it to a potent weapon of reason. He argued for the toleration of freethinking, the questioning of authority (including the Bible), the promotion of rationalism, science and naturalism; and the introduction of republican liberalism. He undermined the faith in the supernatural that the old regime of kings and priests rested on. He showed the way for scientific rationalism, deism, atheism, true freedom of the press and liberation of the self. He could be characterized as the #1 enemy of Church, State, Tradition and Stupidity.

That he clearly DID affect Europe, from France to Germany, and Italy to Scandinavia, despite the near-universal condemnation and demonization he faced - and not only from the political and spiritual defenders of the status quo, but also from fellow modernizers and philosophers (who nonetheless often admired Spinoza's courage privately) - is a testament to the power of his philosophy, the radical lure of his ideas among fellow intellectuals, and the needs of the time. The fact that Spinoza shaped European thought in a major way, even in such a hostile and toxic environment, proves that slow, patient, reasoned argumentation can, indeed, create lasting effects - even if it comes at the cost of one's reputation, social standing and occasionally even one's life.

To be sure, Israel places Spinoza's influence in the proper context of his radical Dutch contemporaries - the Brothers Koerbagh, Van den Enden, Bekker, etc. - and in the context of his major, arguably less radical, contemporaries - especially the "neo-Cartesians" (including Malebranche), the "Leibnitian-Wolffians" and the "Newtonian-Lockeans" (including Voltaire).

The zeal for Spinoza, which makes the book such a joy to read, and which is amply justified by the archival material from a dozen or so countries, unfortunately also casts a shadow over the whole enterprise. Other reviewers have pointed out the author's monomaniacal desire to paint Spinoza in a favourable light. He does this, paradoxically enough, by showing that he was the most reviled and hated author of his day. This fact, then, is used to argue that Spinoza's ideas were, out of all his contemporaries, the most at odds with the spiritual and political authorities of his day. The end result is that the philosophical radicalism of Hobbes, Locke and a handful of other potential "co-sources" or "co-revolutionaries" within the Ur-sprung of the Enlightenment, gets painted, with a broad brush, as unfairly and unrealistically "moderate" and "non-radical" in comparison.

This leads to a very one-sided picture of the radical potential of the time. It is simply not true that Spinoza was the ONLY truly radical thinker of the age - although he surely was ONE of them. And it is simply not true to say that he was ALWAYS the MOST radical thinker. His political writings, in my opinion, are LESS radical than those of Locke, who argues for a libertarian basis for popular government; and his fatalistic materialism, while certainly astoundingly radical, is not THAT much different from the theory of "matter in motion" in Hobbes, from whom he learned a lot. By trying to put Spinoza on a pedestal, and trying to downplay the influence of his contemporaries, Israel ends up doing disservice to many great philosophers who have contributed to radical thought.

So, the major flaw with the work is that the reader cannot entirely trust that the comprehensive Zeitgeist of the era is represented evenly and fairly, when the true focus of the book is to paint a picture of the era as the era of clandestine Spinozism conquering Europe. But considering how little emphasis has been placed on Spinoza and Spinozism in past historiography, such "overshooting" is at least understandable, although it cannot be entirely forgiven. However, when combined with the fact that the structure of the book is a bit bloated and occasionally aimless, I must subtract one star.

For me personally this book has been a godsend. It provides the definite historical narrative of the influence of my favourite philosopher, and it does so convincingly, painstakingly, and zealously. It resurrects the name of dozens of minor authors and revolutionaries, many of whose fate was tragic, whose role in the spreading of radical ideas was once important and continues to be fascinating. In learning about the public debates and intellectual heresies of centuries past, we can perhaps inoculate ourselves against repeating the book-burnings and (often literal) witch hunts of the past.

As a scholarly tour-de-force, despite its forbidding length and small-print font, Israel's "Radical Enlightenment" is an important contribution to the revitalizing interest in Spinoza. Beyond its somewhat overzealous tone and dismissive attitude towards other philosophers, it provides a perspective that is firmly rooted in fact, citation and evidence - just as Spinoza would have wanted.

Hopefully this book serves as a springboard for other people to go back to read Spinoza's books in their full glory. A history book likes to use Spinoza to measure the forgone stupidities of yesterday, but there is much to be learned from his systematic philosophy, even today, and even tomorrow. His Ethics, in particular, deserves to be read and re-read (hopefully with a useful commentary) for its cogent rationalism and revolutionary naturalism. Although he was born 400 years ago, I believe he will remain a timely thinker for the next 400 years, too. Re-engaging, post-Darwin, post-QM, with Spinoza's philosophy, can be thrilling. Perhaps only today, with the potent revolutions in biology, genetics, neurology, computing, etc., we can finally understand his naturalist philosophy.

Thanks to Israel's book, and thanks to others who are giving Spinoza a second go, perhaps the reviled philosopher won't have to "remain alone with his shining halo", to quote Einstein's poem:

"Wie lieb ich diesen edlen Mann
Mehr als ich mit Worten sagen kann.
Doch fürcht' ich, dass er bleibt allein
Mit seinem strahlenen Heiligenschein."

"How I love this noble man
More than I can say with words.
Still, I fear he remains alone
With his shining halo."

- Albert Einstein, "Zu Spinozas Ethik", 1920

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strong thesis from Israel - that the celebrated thinkers in the post-Renaissance western world are all essentially the intellectual progeny of Spinoza - but one which is remarkably researched and, given the weightiness of the topic, clearly conveyed. Most Anglo-Americans will suggest it was Hobbes who ushered in the radical enlightenment, but even he had to admit that with the publication of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (and the posthumous Ethics), the Dutchman had 'out-thrown him by a bar's length'.

[Andrew]

Well, this man has certainly done his homework.

The scholarship is certainly exacting, as to how exactly Spinozism (or Spinosisme, as he continually refers to it, thanks to his habit of refusing to translate easily translatable French-language quotes, for seemingly no damn reason) and Cartesianism spread around Europe. I'll admit, it can be hard to care about at times -- what radical thinker got in what hot water in Augsburg or Utrecht and for what supposed offense to holiness. And sometimes the single-minded focus on the influence of Spinoza can seem like cherry-picking (as for the secondary focus on Descartes, he has far more grounds to talk about the spread of his thought), while largely ignoring the influences of Locke, Hobbes, Voltaire, Rousseau, etc., let alone the challenges to authority that arose as a direct result of the Reformation. I get it, to the doctrinaire theologians of the time, Spinoza was the Big Bad (to use a TV trope term) whose thought presented the greatest threat to their Christ-centric world, but that doesn't mean that he was the most influential thinker of the time. I could use a more head-on discussion, but parts of this 1000-page behemoth are very much worth reading, if nothing else, so one can get a taste of the intellectual climate of the time.

[German Diaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muy bueno

Debería de haber más libros como este, un libro raro,de filosofía práctica, como cultura es un dulce de chocolate para todos los que les guste la lectura

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, which is the first of a three volume set, explores the history of the Radical Enlightenment in the years 1650 to 1750, and places the philosophers of this era in their social, political and philosophical contexts. The result is to bring them alive and to give to their ideas an urgency and a relevance that might otherwise be missed. It is an astonishing book, not only because its subject is the ‘revaluation of all values’ but also because it calls into question the way these philosophers and their ideas have previously been written about and understood.

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 famously ended the 30 Years War, bringing the Reformation to a bloody conclusion, but it did not introduce an era of religious tolerance. Whether Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist or Anglican, each European state retained the full machinery of oppression to impose religious conformity within its own borders. What they were not equipped to handle was an outbreak of new ideas, the Enlightenment.

Caught up in this oppressive machinery, Galileo was condemned by the Catholic Church in 1633; in 1643 Cartesian philosophy was condemned at the University of Utrecht, and Descartes was obliged to flee to the Hague. Even so, there was something about the new approach to science and philosophy which they represented that religious and political authority was not well equipped to handle. Both Galileo and Descartes were well aware of the way censorship worked and made very sure to stay within the boundaries of what was legal and acceptable (and to stay alive). Indeed, both in their different ways proposed to the authorities that it would be in their best interests to accept and collaborate with the new reasoning, because in practice they lacked the ability either to silence it or to refute it.

Over the coming century, three strategies were explored to the full: a Counter Enlightenment, based on reaction and repression, a Moderate Enlightenment, borrowing new philosophical ideas and methods to restore and reinvigorate traditional systems of faith and authority, or a Radical Enlightenment, in which science and reason overthrow theology and tradition.

Quotes

Mid-seventeenth-century Europe was still...overwhelmingly a culture in which all debates about man, God and the World which penetrated into the public sphere revolved around ‘confessional’ – that is Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist) or Anglican issues, and scholars fought above all to establish which confessional bloc possessed a monopoly of truth and a God given title to authority. It was a civilization in which almost no one challenged the essentials of Christianity or the basic premises of what was taken to be a divinely ordained system of aristocracy, monarchy, land ownership and ecclesiastical authority.
By contrast, after 1650, a general process of rationalization and secularization set in which rapidly overthrew theology’s age-old hegemony in the world of study, slowly but surely eradicated magic and belief in the supernatural from Europe’s intellectual culture, and led a few openly to challenge everything inherited from the past – not just commonly received assumptions about mankind, society, politics and the cosmos but also the veracity of the Bible and the Christian faith or indeed any faith. Of course, most people at all levels of society were profoundly disquieted by such sweeping intellectual and cultural change and frightened by the upsurge of radical thinking. Jeremiads were heard everywhere. [p4]

...while it is true that the intellectual revolution of the laste seventeenth century was primarily a crisis of elites – courtiers, officials, scholars, patricians and clergy, it was precisely these elites which moulded, supervised and fixed the contours of popular culture. Consequently, an intellectual crisis of elites quickly made an impact on ordinary men’s attitudes too...[p5]

...it was a drama played out from the depths of Spain to Russia and from Scandinavia to Sicily. Its complexity and awesome dynamic force sprang not only from the diversity and incompatibility of the new philosophical and scientific systems themselves but also from the tremendous power of the traditionalist counter offensive, a veritable ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ which, as with the Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century, generated a major reorganization and revitalization of traditional structures of authority, thought and belief. For the age of confessional antagonism, broadly the period 1520 – 150, had equipped Europe’s government, churches, courts, schools and universities with newly devised or reinforced mechanisms of spiritual and intellectual control which proved extremely effective in tightening the cohesion of society and culture, and strengthening the state and ecclesiastical authority and therefore represented the accumulation of power and influence which was not going to be lightly abandoned anywhere.
However, even the most assertive and intolerant of these instruments of doctrinal supervision, such as the Calvinist consistoires or the Spanish Inquisition, were primarily geared to eradicate theological dissent and were soon partly if not largely, outflanked and neutralized by the advance of new philosophies and scientific ideas which proved a much tougher problem for ecclesiastical authority to deal with than had religious heresy, especially as it proved difficult to separate what was compatible from what was incompatible with established doctrine. [p7]

Historically, State and Church had worked closely together and since the mid sixteenth century had met the challenge of confessionalizing the population with spectacular success. Whether Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist or Anglican, the people of western Europe had everywhere been grouped into cohesive doctrinal blocs formidably resistant to rival theologies. But once the main thrust of dissent ceased to be theological and became philosophical, there set in an inexorable slackening and loss of coordination in State-Church collaboration in the cultural, educational and intellectual spheres. [p8]

Of the two rival wings of the European Enlightenment, the moderate mainstream, supported as it was by numerous governments and influential factions in the main Churches, appeared, at least on the surface, much the more powerful tendency. Among its primary spokesmen were Newton and Locke in England, Thomasius and Wolff in Germany,... This was the Enlightenment which aspired to conquer ignorance and superstition, establish toleration, and revolutionize ideas, education and attitudes by means of philosophy but in such a way as to preserve and safeguard what were judged essential elements of the older structures, offering a viable synthesis of old and new, and of reason and faith. ...
By contrast, the Radical Enlightenment, whether on an atheistic or deistic basis, rejected all compromise with the past and sought to sweep away existing structures entirely, rejecting the Creation as traditionally understood in Judeo-Christian civilization, and the intervention of a providential God in human affairs, denying the possibility of miracles, and reward and punishment in an afterlife, scorning all forms of ecclesiastical authority and refusing to accept that there is any God-ordained social hierarchy, concentration of privilege or land-ownership in noble hands, or religious sanction for monarchy. From its origins in the 1650s and 1660s, the philosophical radicalism of the European Early Enlightenment characteristically combined immense reverence for science, and for mathematical logic, with some form of non-providential deism, if not outright materialism and atheism, along with unmistakably republican, even democratic tendencies. [pp11,12]

From the 1650s, ... the opportunity to forge an explicit and systematic philosophical radicalism existed. Nevertheless, all new strams of thought which gained any broad support in Europe between 1650 and 1770, such as the philosophies of Descartes, Malebranche, Le Clerc, Locke, Newton, Thomasius, Leibniz or Wolff, sought to substantiate and defend the truth of revealed religion and the principle of a divinely created and ordered universe. .... all except Spinoza and Bayle sought to accommodate the new advances in science and mathematics to Christian belief (if not always that of one or other Church) and the authority of scripture. [p15]

From the mid sixteenth century onwards, Europe was a civilization in which formal education, public debate, preaching, printing, bookselling, even tavern disputes about religion and the world, were closely supervised and controlled. Virtually nowhere, not even in England or Holland after 1688, was full toleration the rule, and hardly anyone subscribed to the idea that the individual should be free to think and believe as he thought fit. ... Consequently, the cultural and intellectual system prevailing in mid-seventeenth century Europe ... was .. geared to uniformity, authoritarian and formidably resistant to intellectual innovation and change. As such, it harmonized admirably not only with the dominant ecclesiastical and aristocratic hierarchies presiding over Church and society but also with the pervasive princely absolutism of the age. Yet, astonishingly, it was precisely when the monarchical principle was most dominant ... that this common European culture, based on the primacy of confessional theology and scholastic Aristotelianism over belief, thought, education, and scholarship, first faltered, then rapidly weakened and finally disintegrated. From the 1650s onwards, first in one land, then another, variants of the New Philosophy breached the defences of authority, tradition, and confessional theology, fragmenting the old edifice of thought at every level from court to university and from pulpit to coffee shop. [p17]

At the core of Spinoza’s philosophy then, stands the contention that ‘nothing happens in Nature that does not follow from her laws, that her laws cover everything that is conceived even by the divine intellect, and that Nature observes a fixed and immutable order.’ [p244]

Spinoza’s conception of truth, and the criterion for judging what is true, is ‘mathematical logic’, and mathematical rationality universally applied provides, from Spinoza to Marx, the essential link between the Scientific Revolution and the tradition of radical thought. [p244]

Spinoza formulates criteria for judging the validity, or invalidity, of all reasoning in a way which makes no distinction between scientific method and philosophical procedure. Spinoza bases his case on the proposition that the sole criteria of truth are the ‘principles of nature’, expressed as mathematically verifiable equations. ‘Spinoza’s epistemological dogmatism,’ it has been aptly observed, is probably the furthest removed from scepticism of any of the new philosophies of the seventeenth century. It is a genuine anti-sceptical theory trying to eradicate the possibility, or meaningfulness, of doubting or suspending judgement.’ Spinoza’s reply to the sceptics is simply that ‘there is no speaking of the sciences with them, for if someone proves something to them, they do not know whether the argument is a proof or not.’ His point is that mathematical and scientific – that is all – truths are those which are logically demonstrable from correctly adduced proofs. Data can be correctly or incorrectly explained, but not so that we are unable to judge whether the explanation is correct or not. If the validity of mathematical demonstrations is called in question, then nothing at all can be known and no investigative philosophy or science is possible. [pp 244, 245]

The rise of the ‘mechanistic world view’ commencing with Galileo and Descartes, and especially the formulation and refinement of the laws of motion, itself intensified the growing conceptual antithesis in European culture and thought between the ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’. The sharpening of this antithesis, in other words, is a typical and general seventeenth century phenomenon. dEscartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Malebranche and innumerable lesser figures all contributed in various ways to heightening awareness, and stimulating debate about, this growing dichotomy of reality. Yet... only Spinoza creates an absolute and irreconcilable antithesis between these increasingly distinct ... ways of comprehending reality, dismissing the ‘supernatural’ as a total figment of our imagination. Re-embodying the principle of classical Greek atheism, according to Muller, Spinoza is the prime ‘propogator’ and ‘restorer’ of ideas which set the ‘natural’ in fundamental conflict with the ‘miraculous’, thereby threatening the whole basis of Christian (and he might have added, also Jewish and Islamic) civilization – ideas, faith, authority, morality and the political and social order. [pp245, 246]

The most important and exceptional element in Spinoza’s scientific thought, then is simply that natural philosophy, or science, is of universal applicability and that there is n lo reserved area beyond it. This implied a stark contrast between Spinoza’s scientific rationality and that of every other leading philosopher and scientist of the age, not least Descartes. ... Everything that Descartes had said surpasses human understanding, Meyer had stated, can, according to Spinoza, ‘not only be conceived clearly and distinctly, but also explained very satisfactorily – provided only Man’s intellect is guided by the search for truth and knowledge of things along a different path from that which Descartes opened up.’ In effect, Descartes’ mechanistic world-view was being radically extended to encompass the whole of reality. [p246]

In place of Hobbes’ assigning a contracted overriding power to the sovereign, Spinoza leaves the citizen with his natural rights intact, according to an automatic and inevitable ‘right of resistance’ (and power of resistance) wherever the State proves unable to assert its authority over its subjects, an incapacity the more likely the further one departs from democracy. Effectively, Spinoza was the first major European thinker in modern times – though he is preceded here by Johan de la Court and Van den Enden – to embrace democratic republicanism as the highest and most fully rational form of political organization, and the one best suited to the needs of men. Monarchy conversely, is deemed altogether less perfect, rational and fitted to the genuine concerns of human society. [p259]

[Kenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Simultaneously an astonishing work of scholarship, and an amateurish exercise in historical editorialising, this book has taken me almost a year to complete. This has, in part, been because of the author's bad style of writing. Repetitive, prolix, and oftentimes conceptually confused, there is a certain irony in the fact that he complains of other historians that they have not done their work in trying to understand philosophy before writing about it.

With all that said, I can see why this book is, in some sense, the essential textbook for contemporary Enlightenment studies. It is the text with which one must either agree or disagree, a prism through which agreement or disagreement first appears in studying the 17th-18th centuries today. I am distinctly unconvinced that Spinoza was so important to the Enlightenment as Israel avers here. Even if Spinoza's name was so ubiquitously invoked, it could be, as Vernière once argued, a sort of mythical invocation which does not correspond to what Spinoza actually believed.

Nearing the end of this book, I met with another Spinoza scholar who confessed to me having not attempted to read Radical Enlightenment all the way through. The reason being, it is almost unreadable. I am inclined to agree. Israel repeats himself neurotically, providing a glut of detail which fails in any way to serve his argument apart from providing additional context. Perhaps there is worth in developing context as he does. But it is an open question at what point something counts as too much context, or too tenuously related to someone's thesis to merit inclusion. And I would hesitate to guess that at least 20% of this book could be excised without any real expense to Israel's argument.

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This detailed intellectual history contrasts the "radical" Enlightenment of Spinoza with the moderate version represented by John Locke. The author documents a five-way battle for the minds of modern people and shows how the most radical ideas of the era found their way into the High Enlightenment. The focus is on Europe, but the implications for the new American state are obvious, helping us over here sort out what is meant by the expression that the United States is a "product of the Enlightenment." The book looks at the Enlightenment in extraordinary detail. A year or more of French will help readers get through the many untranslated passages.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathtaking in scope and scholarship, a meticulous intellectual history. Overwhelmingly convincing about how Spinoza was the pivotal figure of the early Enlightenment - seemingly everything stemmed from or rose in reaction to him. Having read several books about him, and the Ethics, this gave me exactly the context I was hoping four. Just 3000 more pages to go in this series!

[Donald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back in the day, you weren't a REAL philosopher unless you held illegal underground reading circles and risked being burned at the stake for reading Spinoza.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is dedicated to three propositions: (1) There were two Enlightenments, one radical and the other moderate (2) the Radical branch does not have its origins in England (as we have all been taught in Philosophy 101 in the English-speaking world) (3) the Radical branch has its origin in Spinoza.

This is all ultimately debatable. It is all a matter of emphasis. How important was Hobbes on the continent vs. Spinoza? How important was Diderot vs. Rousseau for the French revolution? Recent scholarship has lionized Spinoza as the father of modernity at the expense of John Locke. One wonders if this isn't a case of academics needing something new and controversial to write about, rather than advancing scholarship.

My two criticisms are that Israel over-emphasizes the importance of La Mettrie and Diderot in their own time, and that the book is way too long with some unnecessary digressions into the doctrines of minor figures in the Enlightenment.

[Willem · Rating 5 out of 5]

My 'bible'. Great read, great reread, great reference book, great to leaf through on a rainy day. In short: great.

[Matthew Schreiner · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read this book for a class and here’s my HONEST review:
Pros:
- I learned a lot about The Big Bois of the enlightenment (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz).
- I learned about the effect of religious and political movements on radical enlightenment thought and vice-versa.

Cons:
- This book is about ten times as long as it needs to be. I don’t think I need to know about every single person Spinoza ever met in order to understand that his circle felt a particular way and the rest felt another way.
- There is so much untranslated language in here that made it inaccessible.
- This is quite possibly the most disorganized nonfiction book I’ve read in my entire life. Israel has no rhyme or reason to his order, jumping back and forth between random focii with a VAGUE direction chronologically. It was exhausting to keep up.

[Stefan Szczelkun · Rating 5 out of 5]

A towering and extraordinary book. Jonathan takes on the powers of institutional European historiography in an almighty attempt to topple various formations of knowledge that give a conservative and national interpretation of the European Enlightenment and undermine the potential of our current era of modernity.

What is the Enlightenment? Roughly a period from 1650 to 1750 when the discourses between the Republic of Letters in Europe reached a pitch at which rational discourse and scientific thought, published in book and journal form, started to threaten the power of The Bible and associated church hierarchies that had forged an unholy alliance with aristocratic power in the previous medieval period.

The various christian church(s) didn’t take kindly to a challenge to their power to preside over people - think Inquisition! But in the Netherlands there were some rudimentary republican states in which there was both a strong book printing and selling trade and a level of toleration. But the tolerance of new ideas was only allowed by the powers that be if, the innovators agreed to make their new ideas fit in with the basic tenets of Christianity. So... famous thinkers you may have heard of like Descartes, Newton, and Leibnitz all thought of ingenious way in which their scientific discoveries could be made to not challenge the main mystical beliefs of the establishment and in particular the miracles through which God revealed himself to mortal humans.

Then along came Baruch Spinoza who firstly, had a more rational approach to bible study, which he treated as a form of imaginative literature. Secondly, he went on to simply call a spade a spade; to write in detail about what the Christian faithful were asked to believe in, and how, in effect, the emperor had no clothes. He kept a low profile and somehow he managed to survive - although he did die young and before his main works were actually published in book form. He wasn’t alone - he had a band of friends who were also thinking in a similar ways. But he had a certain quiet methodical approach which made his form of argument irresistibly powerful. He argued that all of Nature was God, but that there was no all-powerful being in the heavens. And once his theories were published, soon after his death, by his brave band of friends, the ideas were like a genii that was difficult to put back in the bottle. (Although this is a very inappropriate metaphor as superstitious ideas like geniis were just what he was arguing against!)

In the period after his death his ideas continued to seep throughout Europe although they were outlawed and banned by the authorities at every turn. In print people could only get away with publishing ‘refutations’ of his arguments. But however hard they tried to find faults it was difficult to refute the truth, however uncomfortable, and the more they tried, the more well-known his ideas became. People who did publicly admit to agreeing with him were generally overpowered, silenced, gaoled and/or sent into exile. Often enough, their offending publications were burnt.

Jonathan Israel tells this story in exhaustive detail. Country by country and it gets quite intricate and complex. The bass line through all this is the ongoing influence of the ideas of Spinoza from 1660 to about 1750.

There are certain national historical consensii which he contradicts on the way. He shows that English radical Deism of that period wasn’t simply homegrown and owed much to the Dutch thought; That German Enlightenment was influenced by the Netherlands as well as by the English Empiricists; That the English influence of Hobbes and Locke on French thought, did not erase the previous more radical Spinozic discourses; That the achievements of Giambattista Vico in Italy owed nothing to Spinoza just because he denied such an influence (which he had to to survive!). In all these ways Israel has made himself unpopular with certain accounts of European history which like to tell a story that emphasises the Moderate Enlightenment in nationalistic terms.

Jonathan is very persuasive, but of course I’m a layman and so cannot weigh in with any scholarly knowledge of my own. Also I identify as a part of that Radical underground tradition in that I am working class and anti-establishment and so a biased reader.

My long summary and notes (and it really is long and not a review) is here
https://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.com...

[Levy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spinoza, the 'princeps atheorum' ('prince of the atheists'), was more influential than i would have ever thought. J. Israel basically makes the argument that Spinoza and the circle of intellectuals surrounding him, in the dutch republic, had a significant impact on the development of the enlightenment. And he does that with exceptional and convincing detail. One of the most enjoyable parts are the frequent citatations of outraged clergy ranting against Spinoza and the 'atheists'. At one point you might even start to feel immersed into the world of the 'Republic of letters'. Although J. Israel makes clear that this 'republic of letters' was transnational and european, the book did hit a patriotic nerve. I did find it fascinating that so many interesting thinkers, way ahead of their time, were discussing radical ideas in the dutch republic. This book is a treasure and is well worth the time and effort.

[Kajah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not going to pretend I’ve read all or most of this incredibly detailed brick of a book. As a student at Berkeley a few years ago I picked it up at Half Priced Books for $20, drawn by my perpetual, yet casual fascination with the European Enlightenment. I guess he is trying to argue here that Spinoza is The Godfather of the radical enlightenment? which sounds interesting but I don’t really give a shit whether he’s right or not, I just love how much detail about the era and it’s thinkers are in this book. I read it randomly, in arbitrary chapters, and find these fascinating nooks and crannies of this period of history that are always exciting to discover. It’s possible that there is some coherent thesis in here that gives us an accurate portrayal of the Enlightenment of the radical philosophers but I’m having too much fun Dr Whoing my way through this to find it.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stupendously detailed and very much a deep dive into the interconnectedness of the Early Enlightenment. Israel's work helped me define more clearly the international nature of the "Republic of Letters" with clandestine philosophical manuscripts changing hands frequently at book fairs. Israel also introduces a whole cast of secondary philosophes I had never encountered previously: Fontenelle, Van den Enden, La Mettrie, and so on. These figures were influential in communicating the ideas of the Enlightenment to a broad reading public. In addition, this book helped me understand that the main contenders for a systematic philosophy in the Early Enlightenment were the declining Aristotelianism of the Catholic Church, Cartesianism, Leibnizianism, Lockeanism, and Spinozism. This was one of the most helpful aspects of the work.

[Praveen Kishore · Rating 4 out of 5]

A massively detailed, insightful and magnificent endeavor and it shows Israel's erudition and scholarship. Accordingly, it requires close attention, time and effort to go through it.

What is more, this being the first volume of a four volume series on enlightenment, makes the book looks even more challenging. This volume, being more focused on Spinoza, sometimes seems to be going into too much details and nuances, but then these show the level of Israel's research, efforts, scholarship and erudition.

I have a feeling that the second volume in the series, titled 'Enlightenment Contented' would be more general in approach and coverage and accordingly, more interesting and easier read for me. And yes, I do plan to read all the four books!

[James Igoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book and ideas, with some flaws I found irritating. First, some quotes are provided without translations - I wish my French was better, and I have no real understanding of Dutch - and it would have been nice to link to the translation, if not had it displayed in the text. Second, the history is very detailed, a bit too much for my taste, and I would have preferred a somewhat higher-level view of the actions of the various actors in the enlightenment drama, although as I pored on, the complexity of the story was very engaging.

[Paul Foley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enlightenment values are under attack not only by gun wielding religious fanatics but by perfectly well meaning people who think it is unacceptable to challenge others deeply held beliefs, no matter how irrational or counter factual those ideas may be. This meticulously researched and erudite volume is a timely reminder of how important this revolution in ideas was, and how central it is to our modern world.

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unimpeachable, magisterial scholarship. A dense, and deep intellectual examination of modern enlightenment. That being said, it can be difficult to read and digest; the prose is articulate, but at times tedious with sentences that should end sooner, and many passages of quotations in French that are not translated (oddly enough, translations are presented when other languages are quoted). When all said and done however, I enjoyed it, and recognize its importance despite its flaws.

[Gotter · Rating 2 out of 5]

A reference book disguised as a history book. Good if you are a scholar researching the Enlightenment, but terrible for the general reader. I don't accept the author's concept of "radical", even in relation to Spinoza. Sounds more like academic spin than accurate historical context. You will gain 10 times more insight into the period from other books half this size.

[Baris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good introduction radicalism within Enlightenment thinking. Yet it could have been easier for reader to follow if the writer was more systematic in his approach. It seems to me that he himself was not sure whether he was writing about Enlightenment in general (and its radicalism) or the radical philosophes in the movement. Also, his criteria for being "radical" is somewhat sketchy.

[Philjones62]

Abandoned
Too many of his key points are solely described by quotes entirely in French (the one language he never translates)*.

* Probably hyperbole but is the impression.

Like his later book on the revolution, once you get past the early chapters he settles down - yes reading again.