Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752

1009 Pages·2006·8.02 MB·English

by  Jonathan I. Israel

ENLIGHTENMENT CONTESTED
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Enlightenment
Contested
Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation
of Man 1670–1752
JONATHAN I. ISRAEL
1
1
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Preface
Was the Enlightenment in essence a social or an intellectual phenomenon? The
answer,arguably,is that it was both and that physical reality and the life ofthe mind
must be seen to be genuinely interacting in a kind ofdialectic,a two-way street,if
we are to achieve a proper and balanced approach to this fundamental topic.Does it
really matter how we interpret the Enlightenment? Surely,it does.For while it has
been fashionable in recent years,above all (but not only) in the Postmodernist camp,
to disdain the Enlightenment as biased, facile, self-deluded, over-optimistic,
Eurocentric,imperialistic,and ultimately destructive,there are sound,even rather
urgent,reasons for rejecting such notions as profoundly misconceived and insist-
ing,on the contrary,that the Enlightenment has been and remains by far the most
positive factor shaping contemporary reality and those strands of‘modernity’any-
one wishing to live in accord with reason would want to support and contribute to.
It is consequently ofsome concern that we almost entirely lack comprehensive,
general accounts ofthe Enlightenment which try to present the overall picture on a
European and transatlantic scale;and also that there still remains great uncertainty,
doubt,and lack ofclarity about what exactly the Enlightenment was and what intel-
lectually and socially it actually involved. For much of the time, in the current
debate,both the friends and foes ofthe Enlightenment are arguing about a histor-
ical phenomenon which in recent decades continues to be very inadequately under-
stood and described.In fact,since Peter Gay’s ambitious two-part general survey
The Enlightenment: An Interpretation,published in 1966,there have been hardly any
serious attempts, as Gay puts it, to ‘offer a comprehensive interpretation of the
Enlightenment’.Especially disturbing is that it remains almost impossible to find a
reasonably detailed general account ofthe crucially formative pre-1750 period and
that there is nowadays among general historians of the eighteenth century, as
distinct from philosophers and specialists in political thought, rarely much
discussion ofthe Enlightenment’s intellectual content as opposed to the—accord-
ing to most current historiography—supposedly more important social and mate-
rial factors.
The purpose ofthis present account is to attempt to provide a usable outline sur-
vey and work of reference,enabling the general reader,as well as the student and
professional scholar,to get more ofa grip on what the ideas ofthe Enlightenment
actually were,and one which at the same time denies that thesocial,cultural,and
material factors are ofgreater concern to historians than the intellectual impulses
but does so without simply reversing this and claiming ideas were,therefore,more
crucial than the social process.Rather,my aim is to strive for a genuine balance,
showing how ideas and socio-political context interact while yet approaching this
interplay ofthe physical and intellectual from the intellectual side,that is running
vi Preface
against the nowadays usual and generally received preference.The reason for this
contrary emphasis is that the intellectual dimension,it seems to me,is by far the less
well-understood side ofthe equation and hence at present much more in need of
reassessment than the social and cultural aspects.
One ofthe most controversial questions about the Enlightenment in recent years
has been that concerning its precise relationship to the making of revolutions,a
question closely tied, in turn, to that concerning its relationship to ‘modernity’
more generally.Odd though this may appear today,it was often claimed,from the
late seventeenth to the mid nineteenth century,in books,pamphlets,sermons,and
newspapers,that ‘philosophy’had caused,and was still causing,a ‘universal revolu-
tion’in the affairs ofmen.After 1789,it was usual to link this notion to the French
Revolution in particular and view that vast upheaval as the ‘realization of philo-
sophy’.¹ But there was nothing new about bracketing ‘philosophy’ with modern
‘revolution’in the early nineteenth century,or indeed earlier,and it is vital to bear in
mind that in the decades before and after 1789 there were all kinds ofother ‘revolu-
tions’beside that in France—not all violent and not all political,but all very closely
associated with the unprecedented, and to many deeply perplexing, impact of
philosophers and philosophy.
For some time after 1789, the French Revolution and its offshoot upheavals
across the European continent and in the Americas, including by the 1820s the
major revolutions in Greece and Spanish America,were usually thought ofas essen-
tially parts of a much larger and more ‘universal’revolution generated by ‘philo-
sophy’or,to be more exact,what in the previous century had come to be known as
l’esprit philosophique or sometimes philosophisme. For l’esprit philosophique, as a
French revolutionary statesman interested in this question, Jean-Étienne-Marie
Portalis,pointed out in 1798,was actually something very different from philosophy
in general.For most philosophers,including those embracing a strict empiricism
and confining themselves to what could be deduced from ‘l’observation et l’expéri-
ence’,as well as those adhering to the German idealist systems,had long sought to
curtail philosophy’s scope and reconcile reason with religious belief. L’esprit
philosophique,by contrast,while also a ‘résultat des sciences comparées’,was defined
precisely by its refusal to limit philosophy’s scope to specified parts of reality,its
sweeping aspiration to embrace and redefine the whole ofour reality:revolutionary
‘esprit philosophique’,in other words,claimed,as Portalis puts it,to be ‘applicable à
tout’.²Above all,as against other sorts ofphilosophy,philosophismewas ‘une sorte
d’esprit universel’.
Post-1789 attribution ofthe ‘revolution’to l’esprit philosophiquewas frequent but
in essence no different from the many examples ofpre-1789 complaints about dan-
gerous new forms ofthought infiltrating religion,social theory,and politics in such
a way as to threaten the basic structures ofauthority,tradition,faith,and privilege
¹ McMahon,Enemies ofthe Enlightenment,56.
² Portalis,De l’usage et de l’abus,i.114–15.
Preface vii
on which ancien régimesociety rested.Modern historians and students,ofcourse,
are apt to dismiss this sort ofthing as a figment ofthe collective imagination ofthe
time,an illusion powerfully fed by ideological obsessions and bias which only very
vaguely corresponds to the historical reality.In recent decades,it has been deeply
and more and more unfashionable among historians,in both Europe and America,
to explain the French Revolution,the greatest event on the threshold of‘modernity’,
as a consequence of ideas.Marxist dogma with its stress on economic reality and
cultural superstructure helped generate this near universal conviction.But another
major justification for this in some ways distinctly peculiar article of the modern
historian’s creed is the growing democratization ofhistory itself:students especially,
but professors too,readily take to the argument that most people,then as now,do
things for exclusively ‘practical’reasons and have no interest in matters intellectual.
Any attempt to stress the impact ofthe philosophesis nowadays routinely objected
to on the ground that the vast majority knew next to nothing about them or their
books and cared even less.
This,of course,is perfectly true.But there is an important sense in which this
fashionable objection misses the point.For those who inveighed most obsessively
against new ideas before and after 1789 also insisted that most people then,as now,
neither knew nor cared anything about ‘philosophy’.Yet practically all late eigh-
teenth- and early nineteenth-century commentators were convinced, and with
some reason,that while most failed to see how philosophy impinged on their lives,
and altered the circumstances oftheir time,they had all the same been ruinously led
astray by ‘philosophy’; it was philosophers who were chiefly responsible for pro-
pagating the concepts oftoleration,equality,democracy,republicanism,individual
freedom,and liberty ofexpression and the press,the batch ofideas identified as the
principal cause ofthe near overthrow ofauthority,tradition,monarchy,faith,and
privilege.Hence,philosophers specifically had caused the revolution.
Throne, altar, aristocracy, and imperial sway, according to spokesmen of the
Counter-Enlightenment, had been brought to the verge of extinction by ideas
which most people know absolutely nothing about.Most of those who had sup-
ported what conservative and middle-of-the road observers considered corrosive
and pernicious democratic concepts had allegedly done so unwittingly,or without
fully grasping the real nature ofthe ideas on which the ringing slogans and political
rhetoric ofthe age rested.Yet ifvery few grasped or engaged intellectually with the
core ideas in question this did not alter the fact that fundamentally new ideas had
shaped, nurtured, and propagated the newly insurgent popular rhetoric used in
speeches and newspapers to arouse the people against tradition and authority.
Indeed,it seemed obvious that it was ‘philosophy’which had generated the revolu-
tionary slogans, maxims, and ideologies of the pamphleteers, journalists, dema-
gogues, elected deputies, and malcontent army officers who, in the American,
French, Dutch, and Italian revolutions of the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s, as well
as the other revolutions which followed proclaimed and justified a fundamental
break with the past.
viii Preface
The kind of‘philosophy’they had in mind,like its social and political impact,was
plainly something fundamentally new.What was not at all new was the turmoil,
violence,and fanaticism accompanying the revolutionary process.For ifthe com-
mon people were perfectly capable ofcausing all sorts ofagitation,instability,and
disruption without any help from philosophers,the conceptual overthrow ofaltar,
throne,and nobility was considered,surely rightly,something previously wholly
unimagined and inconceivable which,consequently,had little inherently to do with
economic need, social pressures, or the allegedly innate unruliness of the plebs.
Rather,such upheaval could only stem from a revolutionary transformation in the
people’s way ofthinking.
Not only was the foundational role of ‘philosophy’ heavily stressed by
contemporaries in the early nineteenth century,but there was also a clear grasp of
the later obscured,yet perhaps rather obvious,fact that it makes little sense to seek
the causes ofthe ‘revolution’in the decades immediately preceding 1789;for a great
revolution in thought and culture takes time.One must look back to the century
before 1750 to locate the intellectual origins and early development ofwhat tran-
spired in the revolutionary era. It was not popular grievances, economic causes,
obsolete institutions,lack of liberty,or any material factor,according to Antonio
Valsecchi,in a book posthumously published in Venice in 1816,but specifically spir-
ito filosofico which in Italy, as in France and the rest of Europe, had virtually
destroyed ‘society,commerce,discipline,faith,and throne’,a revolution ofthe mind
culminating in Voltaire and Rousseau certainly but whose real origins lay further
back,in the seventeenth century.The true originators ofthe French Revolution,he
says,were not Rousseau or Voltaire but ‘Tommaso Hobbes d’Ingilterra,e Benedetto
Spinosa di Olanda’,truly world-shaking and subversive philosophers whose deadly
work ofcorrosion had been continued,again in Holland,by the no less subversive
‘Pietro Bayle’.³
Yet this interpretation ofthe revolutionary upheavals ofthe late eighteenth cen-
tury in essence scarcely differed from that of another Italian professor,Tommaso
Vincenzo Moniglia (1686–1787),at Pisa,who over seventy years earlier,in 1744,
warned the Italian reading public that recent intellectual trends in France,inspired
by the English ‘Deists’Anthony Collins and John Toland,using ideas introduced by
Spinoza,were producing a new and dangerous kind ofphilosophy,one which over-
turns all existing principles,institutions,codes ofcustom,and royal decrees.Their
ideas,he argued,entail a ‘total revolution in ideas,language,and the affairs ofthe
world’,leading to a drastically changed society in which Spinosismo,or as another
Italian writer of the period, Daniele Concina, put it,‘questa mostruosa divinita
Spinosiana’ [this monstrous Spinozist divinity], would reign supreme, meaning
that in place offaith,hierarchy,and kingship everything would henceforth be based
on physical reality alone and ‘on the interests and passions ofindividuals’.⁴
³ Valsecchi,Ritratti o vite,101–2.
⁴ Moniglia,Dissertazione contro i fatalisti,ii.21–2;Israel,Radical Enlightenment,523–4.
Preface ix
Moniglia’s and Concina’s admonitions about Spinosismoand ‘universal revolution’
in the mid eighteenth century,in turn,differed little in substance from other warnings
issued still earlier.At the beginning of the century,the Anglo-Irish High Church
divine William Carroll,in the second part ofhis pamphlet Spinoza Reviv’d(London,
1711), maintained that philosophy based on what he calls ‘Spinoza-principles’,
meaning militant Deism based on one-substance philosophy,‘fundamentally sub-
verts all natural and reveal’d religion,[and] overthrows our constitution both in
church and state’.⁵The earliest avowals along these lines indeed reach back to the
late seventeenth century.In 1693,for example,a prominent German court official
ofwide experience,the Freiherr Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff(1626–92),thought it
quite wrong to suppose,as many theologians did,that ‘atheistic’philosophy ofthe
kind propagated by Spinoza undermines only religion and theology;for by making
life in this world, and individual expectations, the basis of politics Spinozism
equally threatened to liquidate all royalty,and their courts and courtiers,as well.⁶In
1681,similarly,the French Calvinist Pierre Yvon (1646–1707) avowed that Spinoza
not only destroys theology philosophically,reducing morality to a mere calculus of
individual advantage,but that his political theory authorizes everyone to instigate
political rebellion.⁷
Across Europe,the radical-minded,as well as many religious thinkers,were quick
to grasp that a fundamental revolution ofthe mind must eventually translate also
into political revolution.The threat to the political,religious,and social status quo
posed by ‘Spinoza-principles’was colourfully alluded to by the anonymous author
ofthe tract Rencontre de Bayle et de Spinosa dans l’autre monde,published in 1711 in
Holland—though with ‘Cologne’declared on the title page—a work designed to
tighten the reading public’s association ofBayle with Spinoza by implying these two
great thinkers shared not just parallels in their lives, both being refugees from
Catholic,monarchical intolerance in quest of individual freedom of thought,but
also common philosophical aims.⁸In the imaginary dialogue between the two,set
in the next world,‘Bayle’assures ‘Spinosa’that while some approved the latter’s self-
portrayal (in his sketch-book,found after his death) in the fisherman’s garb ofthe
notorious seventeenth-century insurgent Masaniello—a symbol in Spinoza’s day of
popular revolt against monarchical oppression⁹—his enemies feared this might
imply that ‘what Masaniello had brought about in fifteen days [i.e.a democratic
revolution],in Naples,you would likewise accomplish in a short time,in the whole
ofChristendom’.¹⁰
Later Counter-Enlightenment accusations associating philosophy and the
philosophes with revolution, then, once stripped of ideological bias, possess
⁵ Carroll,Spinoza Reviv’d Part the Second,7.
⁶ Seckendorff,Christen-Staat,i.12,ii.139–41.
⁷ Yvon,L’Impiété convaincue,212,362,400,411–12.
⁸ Rencontre de Bayle et de Spinosa,21–2,31.
⁹ Meinsma,Spinoza et son cercle,473;Stone,Vico’s Cultural History,3,31,115.
¹⁰ Rencontre de Bayle et de Spinosa,12;See alsoStewart,Courtier,95–7.