Sobre la fuente spinozista de la Ilustración Radical y sus trazas conflictivas latinoamericanas

Untangling the Complexities of Radical Enlightenment John D. Eigenauer (bio) Steffen Ducheyne, editor Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment New York: routledge, 2017 xii + 318 pages; isbn: 9781472451682 in the world of enlightenment studies, one of the most exciting and controversial fields of inquiry has been that of the Radical Enlightenment. The term Radical Enlightenment gained significant scholarly attention with the 1981 publication of Margaret Jacob's The Radical Enlightenment—Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans. After that, the field exploded with the publication of four massive volumes on the topic by Jonathan I. Israel: Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006), Democratic Enlightenment (2011), and Revolutionary Ideas (2014). The theory behind this term roughly divides Enlightenment thinkers into two categories: radical and mainstream (or moderate). According to Israel, radical Enlightenment writers follow a line of thinking that parallels Spinoza's: a materialistic metaphysics, atheism, and antimonarchical politics. This theory has been contested for two reasons. First, not all scholars agree that extreme political views follow from radical metaphysics (such as substance monism) and, second, some think that Enlightenment thinkers cannot be so easily divided into these camps. Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment is offered as an attempt to evaluate this tension. The book brings together an international group of scholars who both address the concept of Radical Enlightenment and attempt to sort out difficult issues presented by various stances toward the concept. It begins with several essays that orient the reader to the debate. Naturally enough, Israel opens the volume with an explanation of the complexities and nuances of understanding Radical Enlightenment within the context of intellectual history, social history, politics, and culture. He does [End Page 153] this not only to provide an introduction but also to demonstrate that the concept of Radical Enlightenment emerges from the use of what he calls the "controversialist strategy"—the discovery of tensions among members of society or societies on many levels that reveal underlying ideological allegiances. Absolutely key to his essay is the effort to dissuade readers from thinking that the Radical Enlightenment is a purely intellectual movement best studied by historians of ideas and best explained in terms of intellectual history—a common accusation against his work. In this sense, his essay is a defense of the idea of Radical Enlightenment as a structural concept that helps us understand the tremendous complexity of the evolution of human freedom in all its forms: emancipation, the rule of law, citizenship, equality, the pursuit of happiness, the right to education, the right to pursue truth, and the formation of republics that separate church and state. Margaret Jacob disagrees that this is Israel's focus. Her essay insists that Israel has missed the point about Radical Enlightenment by relying too heavily on abstruse writings centering on Spinoza's philosophy at the expense of social discourse and the role of British writers such as John Toland and Isaac Newton. Harvey Chisick's essay does a nice job of accurately describing the tension between Israel's and Jacob's views through a deft presentation of the political and philosophical ideas of Baron d'Holbach, suggesting that Israel inappropriately ties metaphysical monism to political radicalism. His presentation reveals that it is not so much that Israel discounts the complexity of Radical Enlightenment as that he insists too strongly that materialism implies radical politics. And by demonstrating that thinkers such as d'Holbach and Voltaire could differ markedly in their metaphysics while agreeing on a goal of widespread social justice, Chisick reinforces the blurry nature of the lines between radical and moderate Enlightenment thinkers. In terms of truly presenting the essence of the debate, Chisick's essay is quite important. The second third of the book discusses the "Origins and Fate of the Radical Enlightenment." Because of the primacy of Spinoza in Israel's understanding of the origins of the Radical Enlightenment, the first three essays in this section deal in different ways with Spinoza. The first is a complex and subtle essay on Spinoza's materialism (and ensuing radicalism) in which Nancy Levene offers an orientation to competing interpretations of Spinoza's monism. This essay is an orientation in the sense that it describes these interpretations; however, her explanations will probably be clear...

“Radical Enlightenment” and “moderate Enlightenment” are general categories which, it has become evident in recent decades, are unavoidable and essential for any valid discussion of the Enlightenment broadly conceived (1650-1850) and of the revolutionary era (1775-1848). Any discussion of the Enlightenment or revolutions that does not revolve around these general categories, first introduced in Germany in the 1920s and taken up in the United States since the 1970s, cannot have any validity or depth either historically or philosophically. “Radical Enlightenment” was neither peripheral to the Enlightenment as a whole, nor dominant, but rather the “other side of the coin” an inherent and absolute opposite, always present and always basic to the Enlightenment as a whole. Several different constructions of “Radical Enlightenment” have been proposed by the main innovators on the topic – Leo Strauss, Henry May, Gunter Muhlpfordt, Margaret Jacob, Gianni Paganini, Martin Mulsow, and Jonathan Israel – but, it is argued here, the most essential element in the definition is the coupling, or linkage, of philosophical rejection of religious authority (and secularism - the elimination of theology from law, institutions, education and public affairs) with theoretical advocacy of democracy and basic human rights.

Margaret Jacob and Jonathan Israel have offered somewhat differing accounts of what they call the “Radical Enlightenment”; the elements of enlightenment thought which resulted in the radical political upheavals of the late eighteenth century and the rise of democratic republicanism. Jonathan Israel, in particular, insists that the radical enlightenment was radical both in its secular rejection of all providentialist and teleological metaphysics, as well as radical in its democratic tendencies. This paper looks at the way in which Catharine Macaulay’s very influential defense of the equal rights of men, during the lead up to the American and French revolutions, poses problems for Israel’s account of the radical enlightenment and it argues that the religious foundation of her political radicalism was characteristic of many of her contemporaries, thus fitting in better with Jacob’s more ecumenical account of the radical enlightenment than with Israel’s more purely secular characterization.

ABSTRACTThis article probes Jonathan Israel’s theory about ‘Radical Enlightenment’ inaugurating political modernity by way of explicating the thought of Joseph Priestley. In Israel’s view, despite the inconsistencies plaguing Socinian thought, Priestley, a monist, emerged as an ardent supporter of religious toleration and democratic republicanism. This article seeks to restore the fundamental coherence of Priestley’s theological and metaphysical views, arguing that they were produced as parts of a system founded on the simultaneous adherence to providentialism and necessitarianism. Prized as a prerequisite of the unfolding of the divine plan, the unobstructed expression of religious opinions was the centre of the conception of civil society and civil liberty that Priestley articulated based on these premises and his forays into politics aimed to secure its permanence. A comparison of Priestley’s stance on the issue of manhood suffrage with that of Richard Price reveals not the materialist Priestley, but Price, a dualist, as an advocate of democratization and casts into doubt the applicability of Israel’s scheme in the case of England. The article closes with some suggestions towards reappraising the relationship between Enlightenment and modernity.

This bibliography does not aim at comprehensiveness. It is conceived as a guide to future reading and research, beyond the works mentioned in the text. The topic of the Enlightenment has never been short of major general surveys. Besides those mentioned in the text, the reader might consult still valuable examples of an older style of interpretation well represented by the lively writing of Paul Hazard, The European Mind 1680–1715 (first published in French in 1935, English translation 1963), and his European Thought in the Eighteenth Century: From Montesquieu to Lessing (1946 and 1963). Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (London, 1968) is valuable for its extended treatment of science in this period. Lucien Goldmann, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment: The Christian Burgess and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1973) examines this period from a Marxist perspective. Radical reinterpretations of the Enlightenment are well represented by Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London, 1981). More recently, Jonathan Israel's trilogy, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006), The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), and Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (Oxford, 2011) has been hotly debated. See also Anthony J. La Vopa, ‘A New Intellectual History? Jonathan Israel's Enlightenment’, Historical Journal , 52 (2009), 717–38; Antoine Lilti, ‘Comment ecrit-on l'histoire intellectuelle des Lumieres?’, Annales ESC 64 (2009), 171–206. See also Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hans Reill, eds, What's Left of the Enlightenment? A Post-Modern Question (Stanford, CA, 2001); Daniel Gordon, ed., Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History (New York, 2001). Conflicts over the meaning of the Enlightenment may be further explored in E. Behr, ‘In Defence of Enlightenment: Foucault and Habermas’, German Studies Review , 2 (1988), 97–109, and in Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in The Foucault Reader , ed. P. Rabinow (New York, 1984). See also Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge MA, 1992).

Thomas Hobbes devotes several chapters of Leviathan to a careful critique of belief in, and the uses and abuses of, demons, ghosts, and spirits. But his broader views on religion remain one of the more contested areas of his thought, leaving his role in the ‘Radical Enlightenment’ unclear. A thoroughgoing opposition to demons and ghosts was also one of the primary objectives of Dutch theologian Balthasar Bekker, a figure whose central role in the historical narrative on atheism is well defended and accounted for in Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment. Bekker was loudly declared an atheist of the worst sort, that is, of the Hobbesian or Spinozist sort. This paper engages an analysis and comparison of their respective treatments of demons and ghosts, elucidating several of the real differences in their views, and arguing that Hobbes’s critique of religion, one on the surface one quite similar in spirit to that of Bekker, is indeed the more ‘radical’ when considered in light of their distinctive epistemologies, arguments for God, and the main thrust of their projects. Alongside Bekker, the innovative elements of Hobbes’s critique of religion become especially clear.

Margaret Jacob and Jonathan Israel launched two much-debated versions of the historiographical concept of ‘radical Enlightenment’, with, respectively, The Radical Enlightenment (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981) and Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). In successive sequels, Israel has rewritten the history of the Enlightenment down to 1848. A stocktaking of these epoch-making books was overdue and is welcome. Jacob’s work rests on tireless archival research; Israel’s on truly encyclopaedic reading in many languages. Their essays here, however, illustrate how both rely on key terms which are strategically ambiguous. Both favour ‘subvert’ — but does ‘subversion’ make any real difference, or not? Israel praises ‘democratizing republicanism’ but seems uninterested in the institutional forms corresponding to emancipatory rhetoric. In 1792, the ‘Montagnard authoritarian populist coalition’ appears as if from nowhere. What if authoritarian populism is the real form that vaguely democratic aspirations are bound to assume? If so, perhaps the ‘moderate Enlightenment’ of Voltaire and Hume, which Israel condemns for shabby compromises with entrenched power, deserves more credit, and the ‘radical Enlightenment’ of Raynal, Diderot, and Paine a little less. Meanwhile, Israel chides Jacob for over-estimating Freemasonry; she deplores his obsession with Spinoza. Several subsequent essays take Israel’s radical Enlightenment as a given in investigating intellectual life around 1700: Nancy Levene on Spinoza as materialist; Ian Leask on Spinozism in John Toland’s Origines Judaicae (1709); Charles Develennes on the atheism and republicanism of Jean Meslier (linked by rejecting domination, whether human or divine). Wiep van Bunge shows how radical Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic petered out with the rise of Newtonian physico-theology. Beth Lord questions Israel’s understanding of Spinoza, arguing that he wrongly ascribes to Spinoza a normative understanding of nature and supposes that the equality of all natural entities must, for Spinoza, entail political equality in human society. Further essays consider the wider impact of radical thinking: on women’s emancipation (Jennifer J. Davis), on Sade’s incoherent materialism (Winfried Schröder), on Irish revolutionaries of the 1790s (Ultán Gillen). There is much instruction here, but few surprises. Israel’s neat antitheses are questioned by Eric Palmer, who demonstrates the importance of philosophical abbés and other enlightened Christians, and Felix Wunderlich, who shows how two Göttingen professors somehow combined materialism and Christianity. Focusing on empathy and egalitarianism, Devin J. Vartija cogently questions Israel’s claim that Spinozan philosophical monism necessarily implies political radicalism. The concept of radical Enlightenment comes under intense scrutiny: Frederick Stjernfelt, using Google Ngrams, finds that it became current in nineteenth-century Germany and was introduced to the anglosphere by the émigré Leo Strauss (whose arguments about ‘clandestinity’ Israel seems now to favour); Harvey Chisick shows, quietly but devastatingly, that there is really little difference between the ‘moderate’ Voltaire and the ‘radical’ d’Holbach, and that, far from advocating popular democracy, Enlighteners, including d’Holbach and Diderot, distrusted the ‘people’ and denied equality. It is ironic that the first sustained examination of Israel’s radical Enlightenment should leave the concept in shreds.

Steven Nadler. Rembrandt's Jews. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 250.David Liss. The Coffee Trader. New York: Random House, 2003. Pp. 389.Willi Goetschel. Spinoza's Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine. Studies in German Jewish Cultural History and Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Pp. x + 351.Rebecca Goldstein. Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. New York: Schocken, 2006. Pp. 287.Steven Nadler, Manfred Walther, and Elhanan Yakira, eds. Spinoza and Jewish Identity. Studia Spinozana 13 (1997) (thematic issue, published 2003).Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman, eds. Jewish Themes in Spinoza's Philosophy. SUNY Series in Jewish Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. x + 290.Chaya Brasz and Yoseph Kaplan, eds. Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and by Others: Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on the History of the Jews in the Netherlands. Brill's Series in Jewish Studies 24. Boston, Leiden, and Cologne: Brill Academic Publishers, 2001. Pp. xiv + 457.Jonathan Israel and Reinier Salverda, eds. Dutch Jewry: Its History and Secular Culture (1500-2000). Brill's Series in Jewish Studies 29. Boston, Leiden, and Cologne: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002. Pp. vi + 335.Jonathan Israel. Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires (1540-1740). Brill's Series in Jewish Studies 30. Boston, Leiden, and Cologne: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002. Pp. vi + 613.AMSTERDAM'S SEPHARDIC COMMUNITY during the Dutch Golden Age has long attracted particularly avid attention. Per capita, indeed, the seventeenth-century Amsterdam Sephardim may well rank among the most intensively studied Jews in history. Generally thought to have numbered only about three thousand souls by the end of the seventeenth century (although Hubert Nusteling, in one of the volumes here under review, suggests this estimate should be revised significantly upward to approximately 4,500(1)), it almost seems as if they will eventually be outnumbered by the accumulated conference papers and essays devoted to them.In the nineteenth century this community figured prominently in the identificatory genealogy of many newly bourgeois Ashkenazim, for whom the imagined connection between their own era and the of medieval Andalusia passed via Amsterdam in the age of Spinoza.2 In our own era, lamentably perhaps, this lineage has lost much of its appeal. Few cultural spheres are today imagined as so starkly separate as the Arab and the Western, and it is therefore not surprising that Sephardic Amsterdam is now seldom evoked as a bridge between the Moorish and the modern. Nonetheless, a of sorts continues to shroud this community. The fascination that draws contemporary scholars and general readers to this chapter in Jewish history looks forward rather than backward: it is not so much a Sephardic that fascinates today but rather a mystique of modernity . The tolerance, ethnic diversity, and economic dynamism of seventeenth-century Amsterdam readily appear to herald the emergence of the modern urban experience, while the dilemmas faced by the city's Sephardim, seduced but also challenged by the possibilities and temptations of this almost unprecedentedly free environment, seem to resonate particularly strongly with the preoccupations of contemporary North American Jewry. Predominantly Portuguese by origin, the Sephardim arrived in Holland as direct or indirect refugees from the Iberian Inquisitions. Their reconstruction of the structures of normative Judaism, after generations of sustaining a covert, hybrid, or minimal Jewish identity, readily finds sentimental echo when refracted through the ordeals and dislocations of twentieth-century Jewish history. The early modern Sephardim of Amsterdam have been well served by specialist historians. …

Against proponents of the “Radical Enlightenment” like Jonathan Israel, Harrison Fluss, and Landon Frim, Aaron Jaffe argues for a historical approach that traces radical politics to the movements and social struggles that birthed them, rather than metaphysical first principles.

In this chapter, I provide a brief survey of conceptions of the Enlightenment in order to situate the present study within that historiographical tradition. Particular reference will be made to the concept of ‘radical Enlightenment’ in the work of Margaret Jacob and Jonathan Israel, with which I maintain an appreciative critical dialogue. I clarify my method of writing intellectual history, which is characterised by reading texts in and between contexts: the former recognises the importance of the local conditions for the production of texts; the latter acknowledges the extent to which writers enter into critical dialogue with discourses produced in very different social settings. My conception of the Enlightenment is twofold: (1) it is understood synchronically, as a loosely defined stretch of modern history (from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century), characterised by reforming intellectual, religious, and social projects; and (2) it is understood diachronically, as a Foucauldian ‘ethos’ characterised by perennial critique in the name of truth and wisdom, often making explicit use of the metaphors of ‘light’, ‘luminosity’, and their ‘dark’ nemeses. The religious and philosophical crucible of this vision of Enlightenment will be outlined with reference to Jesus and Socrates: the Christian tradition and Platonic traditions will both be emphasised as making important contributions to the intellectual and religious spirit of early modernity.

Reviewed by: The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reasoned. by Jeffrey D. Burson and Anton M. Matytsin Gianni Paganini Jeffrey D. Burson and Anton M. Matytsin, editors. The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason. Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment. Gregory S. Brown, General Editor. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019. Pp. 235. Paper, £65.00. In the last half century, the image of the Enlightenment underwent many changes and no longer is monolithic, as was the case with Paul Hazard, Peter Gay, and Ernst Cassirer. It is usual nowadays to talk about national Enlightenments, moderate and radical Enlightenment, religious Enlightenments, counter-Enlightenment, and so on. In this process of widening the notion of Enlightenment, which the editors depict as a real "explosion," there is also [End Page 615]room for a skeptical Enlightenment, which not so long ago was limited to a few, supposedly fringe figures: Bayle, Hume, and Rousseau. The ubiquitous "specter" of skepticism that Burson and Matytsin see as present all along the eighteenth century comprises also the reactions and responses to skepticism. Actually, besides enriching enormously the mapping of skeptical thinkers in the age of reason, the editors advance a more daring thesis: the interaction between skepticism and anti-skepticism would ultimately qualify the very meanings of the terms 'reason' and 'rationality,' redefining the powers and the limits of human understanding, and bringing about a new, more comprehensive definition of the Enlightenment. The authors of the different chapters show that the imperative to overcome doubt and uncertainty stimulated some of the most innovative characteristics of the Enlightenment. For example, Burson deals with the Jesuits and the skeptical crisis, Martin Mulsow and John C. Laursen with legal skepticism, Rodrigo Brandao with Voltaire, Sébastien Charles with Berkeley, and John P. Wright with skepticism in Bayle and Hume. In the Introduction, the editors react to the thesis, advanced by Jonathan Israel, that the skeptical crisis was resolved by the partisans of the "radical Enlightenment," and emphasize by contrast the persistence and fertility of the debates on skepticism. The target of the volume is, in the editors' words, "any overly reductive and celebratory paradigms of the Enlightenment," and especially explanations ex post factothat "whiggishly derive a conjectural and triumphalist origin narrative of a historically distorted definition" (5). This collection of essays thus challenges several prevailing interpretations of the Enlightenment. However, the reader has sometimes the impression that the editors fall into the same mistake that they charge others with, even if the values they stress are different from the "radical" or the "pagan" vulgate. Is it not the same, albeit inverted, essentialist error to claim that the learned culture of the eighteenth century was "an age of skepticism" rather than an "age of reason"? To counter unidirectional teleological explanations of "whiggish" style, the editors risk falling into opposite oversimplifications when claiming that "philosophical skepticism, far more than certainty and the glib assumption of inevitable progress, was, in fact, the crucible of the Enlightenment process" (8). Without any doubt, it is important to stress the fact that skepticism was an important aspect of the eighteenth-century culture; but substituting a part for the whole is never wise. Caution is all the more legitimate as the editors, in their sketch of "the age of skepticism, c. 1500–1750" (8), neglect other important aspects that do not fit in their schema. For example, in light of recent post-Popkin scholarship, it is astonishing that Matytsin and Burson still place under the same label of "Christian skepticism" authors who are very different from each other, such as Montaigne, Charron, La Mothe Le Vayer, and Huet. Only the latter was a true "Christian skeptic," while La Mothe, especially in his juvenile works, was much more a pagan than a Christian skeptic. As for Montaigne and Charron, they established the canon of the "honnête homme," who is not simply a believer, but also a moralist, a fine connoisseurof human nature, a defender of toleration, a proto-anthropologist of societies, customs, religions, and civilizations. Nonetheless, it is certainly a very good thing that Enlightenment skepticism at last leaves the margins of history and enters the range...

This chapter presents and discusses interpretations of German Enlightenment thought advanced over the last hundred years, notably those current in contemporary scholarship. It discusses whether it is possible to determine the period in an essentialist manner, valid to the European Enlightenment, or only according to national and more local categories. Jonathan Israel’s interpretation of the European, so-called ‘radical Enlightenment’ is discussed critically, and it is argued that religion and philosophy were not separated in the German Enlightenment, but intimately connected.

This chapter refers to Jonathan Israel's recent Radical Enlightenment , which makes the additional point that there is something essentially misleading about concentrating on national or even local 'Enlightenments', since it fails to capture the momentum of the phenomenon itself. But if it is indeed the case that the Dutch Republic played the crucial role assigned to it by Jonathan Israel in the international proliferation of the Enlightenment's attack on 'all legitimation of monarchy, aristocracy, woman's subordination to man, ecclesiastical authority, and slavery, replacing these with the principles of universality, equality, and democracy', it would only seem to become all the more important to study the historical conditions under which this could arise. Over the last two decades in particular, the vast majority of modern dixhuitiemistes have chosen to confine their efforts to the study of all sorts of national varieties of the Enlightenment. Keywords: Dutch Republic; Jonathan Israel; Radical Enlightenment

Reviewed by: The Radical Enlightenment in Germany: A Cultural Perspective ed. by Carl Niekerk Samuel Heidepriem Carl Niekerk, ed. The Radical Enlightenment in Germany: A Cultural Perspective. Leiden: Brill-Rodopi, 2018. 422 pp., 2 illustrations. Over the last two decades, the historian Jonathan Israel has undertaken an ambitious multivolume project to change how we understand the Enlightenment. Where previous scholarship emphasized the diversity of separate national Enlightenment traditions, Israel regards it as an integrated, pan-European phenomenon with two prominent strands: a radical camp, populated by principled atheists and freethinking rebels who brooked no compromise with established monarchical and clerical power, and a moderate wing, which shared many values with the radicals but did not hesitate to accommodate the status quo. Israel argues we have given too much credit to moderates like Voltaire and Kant, while the real intellectual core of the Enlightenment—as well as its ongoing normative legacy—lies with radicals such as Diderot, and above all Spinoza. The Radical Enlightenment in Germany: A Cultural Perspective takes Israel's project as an occasion to bring late eighteenth-century German literature and culture into this debate. "This collection seeks to demonstrate," writes editor Carl Niekerk, "not only how a more explicit articulation of a cultural perspective can enrich our understanding of both the Radical and Moderate Enlightenment, but also how literature and culture have their own roles to play in the debates about these movements." This perspective addresses areas overlooked by Israel, who tends to subordinate the heterogeneity of cultural history to canonical thinkers and big ideas. For Israel, the essence of true Enlightenment is Spinozist philosophy, adherence to which distinguishes the movement's subsequent radical and moderate representatives. The essays in The Radical Enlightenment in Germany demonstrate that this is not so simple, though the volume is not expressly polemical in nature. The case against Israel has already been made vigorously by Anthony La Vopa, Keith Baker, and Samuel Moyn, among others. Instead, the contributions in this collection lend necessary complexity to Israel's categories and narrative, while granting that his theory may likewise have something of value for German literary and cultural studies. One cue the volume takes from Israel is to broaden the range of figures typically considered representative of the Enlightenment. Chunjie Zhang's essay on Matthias Christian Sprengel argues that this relatively obscure historian pioneered a form of "historical realist" writing that communicated radical Enlightenment ideas in a sober, nonincendiary style. Similarly, Peter Höyng takes Israel's work as an opportunity to present the biography of monk-turned-Jacobin Eulogius Schneider as emblematic of Enlightenment's often violent dialectic. Both essays complicate Israel's distinction between radical and moderate Enlightenment, the porousness of which is a running theme throughout the volume. John McCarthy proposes Christoph Martin Wieland as an archetypal "radical moderate" who promoted the ideals of radical Enlightenment within existing institutions. Paul Spalding argues it is likewise with French General Lafayette and those who supported him during his imprisonment in Prussia and Austria: despite class, military distinction, and other markers of establishment, all did their part to advance radical values. The volume further challenges the division between radical and moderate Enlightenment in the contexts of literature, gender and sexuality, and media. Niekerk's piece reads Lessing's domestic dramas as vehicles for communicating, problematizing, and otherwise reconfiguring the categories of the radical, moderate, and counter-Enlightenment. The essay reinforces Niekerk's argument from [End Page 376] the introduction that literature offers a platform for staging Enlightenment ideals in concrete situations, and thus constitutes a privileged site for considering questions of theory and practice. Continuing this line, Gabriela Stoicea reads Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Frauleins von Sternheim (1771) as an illumination of Enlightenment tensions surrounding the education, autonomy, and wider social role of women, topics on which iconic Enlightenment males (including, Stoicea points out, Spinoza) are notoriously inconsistent in their radicalism. La Roche's novel is also significant for Monika Nenon, whose essay examines the radicalization of the epistolary form in the German reception of Rousseau's Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Ann Schmiesing's essay shows radical and moderate Enlightenment blended in the career of Theodor...

Reviewed by: The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob John D. Eigenauer Margaret C. Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). Pp. 339, 13 b/w illus. $29.95 cloth. The great debate in Enlightenment studies in the past twenty-plus years has centered on the causes of secular modernity: What happened to move the world from the Middle Ages to our Secular Age? One dominant answer, propounded by Jonathan Israel across three massive volumes (Radical Enlightenment [2001], Enlightenment Contested [2006], and Democratic Enlightenment [2011]), is that our modern values arose from the world's wholesale acceptance of the materialist philosophy that undergirds Baruch Spinoza's (1632–1677) complex thought. A second answer is that our modern world was born of myriad factors ranging from global expansion (and the ensuing contact with unknown peoples) to increased literacy (making people more worldly and informed) to expanding economies (enhancing quality of life and freeing people from the cares of quotidian struggles). While Israel's thesis is enticing and powerfully argued, the majority of scholars see advances toward secularism as irreducible to the forces of philosophy; they therefore embrace a more complex system of causes. Margaret Jacob stands firmly in the latter camp. In her most recent work, The Secular Enlightenment, Jacob argues for a view of the Enlightenment that encompasses many factors that added impetus to increasing secularism across the long eighteenth century. These include "new spatial realities": politics, "the spread of money," imperialistic expansionism, "subversive literature," "travel literature," the expansion of cities, increased sociability, the growth of luxury goods, heightened literacy, and encounters with new peoples in faraway lands. Jacob's argument seems to be that new uses of and encounters with "space" (think of expanding cities and intercontinental exploration) opened up ways of seeing the world that contrasted with traditional views and invited increased secularism (9–24). Encounters with formerly unknown peoples outside Europe, for example, led people to speculate in travel literature (both real and fictional) about what it meant that some peoples had no conception of God—a possibility that denied a longstanding orthodox tradition that claimed that everyone possesses an innate idea of the divinity. Increased sociability in cities (in pubs, clubs, cafes, and masonic lodges, for example) created the possibility for expressions of "the outrageous, daring, and free" (20). And growing literacy made these dangerous ideas more widely available. However, even though these ideas certainly lend support to social history (over against a history that emphasizes ideas as primary motive forces), the account in the first chapter leaves a number of questions unanswered. While it is certainly true that encounters with non-European peoples invited many questions, we do not [End Page 443] learn what those questions were or how they were answered. As Andrew Curran notes in his essay on "Anthropology" in The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment (2014), these travelogues speculated on "human diversity, human origins, human comportment, human anatomy and (supposedly different types of) human minds" (30). How did secular attitudes emerge out of discussions of these topics? What answers were forwarded that moved the world towards increasing secularism? These are the type of questions that should be addressed in a discussion that theorizes that new conceptualizations of "space" promoted a more secular worldview in the long eighteenth century. There is no doubt that eighteenth century Europeans encountered conceptions and uses of "space" that forced them to rethink their worlds. But we do not learn in Jacob's chapter on space what those conceptions were or how they emerged. In fact, after a discussion on "space" in the first chapter—a discussion that ends with the assertion that "space had truly become emptied" (32)—the term virtually disappears from the book. Jacob announces in the second chapter another major theme in her view of the secular eighteenth century: time. Jacob sees time before 1680 as being understood in a decidedly non-modern way. Unfortunately, she does not explain what that experience was like or attempt to define the pre-Enlightenment concept of time. She makes references to changing ideas about the age of the earth, but does not explain how these new ideas relate to a more modern sense...