Jonathan Israel, "The Radical Enlightnement"

How's this for a model of human history:

1. Hunting and Gathering
2. Agriculture and Village Life
3. Civilization: Cities, Writing, Kingdoms and Empires, Aristocracies, Religious Institutions
4. Modernity

Don't worry too much about this scheme, it's just me trying to impress on anyone who needs impressing that the onset of modernity is one of the biggest events in human history. It is also, to me, something very much in need of explaining. We had several very rich, very successful civilizations – the Roman Empire, various Chinese empires, the medieval Arab world – that did not make this leap. Something else besides a rich, stable society with impressive intellectual achievements was needed. What was it about Europe in the 1600s and 1700s that launched us on this rocket ship to the future?

Jonathan Israel's The Radical Enlightenment is a 700-page doorstop of a book arguing that the key developments of modernity were ideas. Israel does not argue very hard for this view. Mainly he assumes it, then shows you in astonishing detail how these ideas arose, developed and spread. He goes out of his way to demonstrate that these ideas were not the property of any particular social class, or any one nation, and had no particular attachment to any particular industry (e.g., global commerce) or to colonization or anything else you might care to base them on. They did have some relationship to science, but the scientific understanding of many philosophers was weak (e.g. Hobbes, Spinoza), and there was just as much if not more influence from philosophy into science as the other way around.

In Israel's world ideas arise in remarkable minds and spread to other remarkable minds, which make their own additions and spread them to yet more minds, until they mount into an intellectual tsunami that sweeps away the past and strands us on the shores of a new world. The level of detail in The Radical Enlightenment is both impressive and annoying. Here is an entirely typical sentence:

In 1651, at the University of Nassau Dillenburg, at Herborn, where Wittichius (who was then teaching there) and a young professor, Johannes Clauberg (1622-65), originally from Solingen but trained at Leiden and destined to become one of the foremost Cartesian expositors in Europe, had been quietly infiltrating Cartesian ideas into their teaching for several years, uproar ensued when the two professors openly espoused Cartesianism in the lecture room.

If you don't want to read a university-by-university, professor-by-professor account of the spread of  ideas, stay away from this book. But I will summarize it for you!

To Israel these dangerous new ideas came mainly from two sources: the worldly, skeptical writers of the Renaissance, of whom Machiavelli and Montaigne are the most prominent, and René Descartes (1596-1650). I found it odd that Israel tells us nothing about Descartes; his book begins in 1650, and since Descartes had published all his books by 1644 we are assumed to know who he was and what he said. Besides being a remarkable mathematician who demonstrated that algebraic equations and graphs are the same thing, Descartes created a philosophical system that was supposed to stand on its own, with no reference to past thinkers or to revealed theology. He seemed sometimes to be saying – though in other places he denied this – that we could only have knowledge of God or the soul by reasoning about them, using data that we could only get through our senses. As Israel shows, he made many theologians foam at the mouth with rage, and everybody from the Pope to the King of Poland tried to ban his books and forbid discussion of his ideas. But they could not be banned; they were so appealing to so many intellectuals, including some nobles and some eminent churchmen, that they spread like Covid-19 across the European world.

One of my favorite sections of The Radical Enlightenment shows a series of European princes finding out that to maintain peace in their universities, churches, and bureaucracies they must develop policies about philosophy. They had, of course, religious policies that had been shaped over the preceding century. But as confessional conflict died down, philosophical combat heated up, and one university after another was convulsed by the same "uproar" over Cartesian and other radical ideas. It is fun to imagine these weary princes wondering why they need to get involved in professorial quarrels about qualities, substances, or the infinite.

To Israel, this is where the modern world began: with these bold intellectuals who rejected all past wisdom and insisted that we must think for ourselves about everything. These thinkers attacked every kind of received religious teaching, every kind of political arrangement (why kings? why aristocrats? why Roman law?), even the fundamentals of social arrangements, with some calling for the abolition of private property and the full equality of women. Against them were arrayed what to Israel are "traditional" thinkers who imagine that authority flows from god to kings to nobles and finally to male heads of household, and that this arrangement is the only thing holding the human world together, our only bulwark against both political anarchy and moral turpitude. 

Modernity, to Israel, is what we got when Descartes, Spinoza, and their allies swept away all those assumptions. 

I say, maybe. I will elaborate on my views more below. But to get back to Israel, what does this giant book actually demonstrate?

First, he shows that these new ideas – that reason must predominate over faith or tradition, that the universe is a machine that runs on its own with no divine intervention, that miracles and magic are impossible, that inherited political arrangements are arbitrary and should be rethought – had enormous appeal. After 1650 European intellectuals mostly gave up theological combat and devoted their lives to wrangling about the new philosophy. Many described first learning about the new philosophy as a kind of awakening that changed their lives.

Second, people thought this mattered in the most profound way. This was an era when thousands of ministers, priests, professors, bureaucrats, and noblemen threw themselves into abstruse philosophical debates because they believed there was nothing more important or more exciting they could do.

Third, calling people radical, moderate or conservative had real meaning in this context. Israel shows at great length that the people most taken up with Cartesian or Spinozan philosophy were the ones most likely to question royal power, aristocratic privilege, established churches, patriarchy, and so on. Most of the people who hated the new philosophy were deeply invested in religious and political tradition; indeed their main argument against the new philosophy was to show that it undermined all the other things they held dear. In between were people who saw the power of the new ideas but tried hard to accommodate them to Christianity and the existing social order, and they were mostly political and social moderates as well.

Fourth, many attempts at creating a moderate position that acknowledged the power of reasoned analysis while preserving the essentials of Christianity failed intellectually. Many people badly wanted to do this, but their theories were always torn apart by rivals from both the radical and conservative sides.

This is all very interesting, but I am not sure it is enough to explain the modern world. Not that I dismiss ideas as forces in history; I am on record somewhere saying that the Enlightenment might be the most important event in human history. But I doubt that ideas exist only on the intellectual plane.

I think it is important to remember that radical ideas were nothing new in 1650. The ancient Greeks and Romans had all kinds of them, including people who called for the abolition of private property and the emancipation of women. Nothing about Enlightenment thinking on science or human nature was more radical than the teachings of the ancient Epicureans, who said that all morality and politics were hot air, because we are just atoms floating in the void and the best we can do is try to live pleasant lives.

Yes, some of the new radical thinkers attacked monarchy, aristocracy, and private property, but peasant rebels had been doing that for centuries. Israel himself notes that some philosophers were very interested in the Diggers and Levellers of the English Civil War.

In the ancient world radical thinking did not change the world, and the experiments of the Levellers ended after a few years. But in the 1700s radical ideas rather suddenly acquired the power to remake whole kingdoms. How?

I think, as I have argued here before, that the difference between the Europe of 1700 and the Europe of 300 BC was the discovery of the world. In 1650 Europe was no longer a peninsula on the wester edge of Asia, but the center of the globe. From its ports, ships set sail for Patagonia, Japan, Ceylon and Zanzibar, returning with cargoes of exotic goods and exotic ideas. This trade created an astonishing economic dynamism; between 1650 and 1800 European living standards greatly improved even though the population roughly doubled. The number of rich families grew by even more. All this change would, I suggest, have created huge political tensions even without new ideas.

Here is Israel on the French Revolution:

A revolution of fact which demolishes a monarchical, courtly world embedded in tradition, faith and a social order which had over many centuries determined the distribution of land, wealth, office and status seems impossible, or exceedingly implausible, without a prior revolution in ideas.

I agree. But I also say that a revolution in ideas is exceedingly implausible in a static economic world with no inputs of new knowledge and new ideas, and that in fact the Enlightenment took place in a dynamic world where new discoveries were announced every month, and that this vast expansion of knowledge and experience was the crucial difference between the revolutionary impact of the Enlightenment and the minimal impact of earlier experiments in radical thought.

If you want to read in detail about how the key ideas of the Enlightenment developed and spread, The Radical Enlightenment is the best book I know on the subject. But it is no easy read, and I think that even its vast bulk does not sustain the thesis it advances.