About the Book
Jonathan Israel presents the first major reassessment of the Western Enlightenment for a generation. Continuing the story he began in the best-selling Radical Enlightenment, and now focusing his attention on the first half of the eighteenth century, he returns to the original sources to offer a groundbreaking new perspective on the nature and development of the most important currents in modern thought.
Israel traces many of the core principles of Western modernity to their roots in the social, political, and philosophical ferment of this period: the primacy of reason, democracy, racial equality, feminism, religious toleration, sexual emancipation, and freedom of expression. He emphasizes the dual character of the Enlightenment, and the bitter struggle between on the one hand a generally dominant, anti-democratic mainstream, supporting the monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical authority, and on the other a largely repressed democratic, republican, and 'materialist' radical fringe. He also contends that the supposedly separate French, British, German, Dutch, and Italian enlightenments interacted to such a degree that their study in isolation gives a hopelessly distorted picture.
A work of dazzling and highly accessible scholarship, Enlightenment Contested will be the definitive reference point for historians, philosophers, and anyone engaged with this fascinating period of human development.
Table of Contents:
I: Introductory
1: Early Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Modern Age
2: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity
II: The Crisis of Religious Authority
3: Faith and Reason: Bayle versus the Rationaux
4: Demolishing Priesthood, Ancient and Modern
5: Socinianism and the Social, Psychological, and Cultural Roots of Enlightenment
6: Locke, Bayle, and Spinoza: A Contest of Three Toleration Doctrines
7: Germany and the Baltic: Enlightenment, Society, and the Universities
8: Newtonianism and Anti-Newtonianism in the Early Enlightenment: Science, Philosophy, and Religion
III: Political Emancipation
9: Anit-Hobbesianism and the Making of 'Modernity'
10: The Origins of Modern Democratic Republicanism
11: Bayle, Boulainvilliers, Montesquieu: Secular Monarchy versus the Aristocratic Republic
12: 'Enlightened Despotism': Autocracy, Faith, and Enlightenment in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe 1689-1755
13: Popular Sovereignty, Resistance, and the 'Right to Revolution'
14: Anglomania, anglicisme, and the 'British Model'
15: The Triumph of the 'Moderate Enlightenment' in the United Provinces
IV: Intellectual Emancipation
16: The Overthrow of Humanist Criticism
17: The Recovery of Greek Thought
18: The Rise of 'History of Philosophy'
19: From 'History of Philosophy' to Histoire de l'Esprit humain
20: Italy, the Two Enlightenments, and Vico's 'New Science'
V: The Party of Humanity
21: The Problem of Equality
22: Sex, Marriage, and the Equality of Women
23: Race, Radical Thought, and the Advent of Anti-Colonialism
24: Rethinking Islam: Philosophy and the 'Other'
25: Spinoza, Confucius, and Classical Chinese Philosophy
26: Is Religion Requisite for a Well-Ordered Society?
VI: Radical Philosophes
27: The French Enlightenment prior to Voltaire's Lettres Philosophiques (1734)
28: Men, Animals, Fossils: French Hylozoic materialisme before Diderot
29: Realigning of the parti philosophique: Voltair, Voltairemanie, antivoltairianisme 1733-1747
30: From Voltaire to Diderot
31: The 'Unvirtuous Atheist'
32: The parti philosophique Embraces the Radical Enlightenment 1747-1752
33: The 'War of the Encyclopedie: The First Stage 1745-1752
34: Postscript
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Jonathan Israel is Professor of Modern European History, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Review :
The core ideas of this book deserve to be widely disseminated and debated.
`Review from previous edition Enter Jonathan Israel. His vast - and vastly impressive - book sets out to redefine the intellectual landscape of early modern Europe. The stupendous scale of this book ranges from London to Moscow, Stockholm to Naples, in a virtuoso display of polyglot learning . . . Magnificent and magisterial, Radical Enlightenment will undoubtedly be one of the truly great historical works of the decade.'
John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph
`There is much to praise in Israel's majestic account of the Enlightenment and his detective work in placing Spinoza at the heart of it.'
A.C. Grayling, FT Weekend
`The scholarship is breathtaking. Israel has read everything, absorbed every nuance, followed up every byway ... Five years from now, our views of the Enlightenment will have been enormously influenced by Israel.'
Peter Watson, New Statesman
`Deserves to be widely read because it is an example of ground-breaking vastly well-informed and thoroughly new history'
David Horspool, The Guardian
