Jonathan Israel Research Articles

Of Israel, Forst & Voltaire: Deism, Toleration, and Radicalism

ABSTRACT In the recent progressive reappraisals of the enlightenment by Jonathan Israel and Rainer Forst, Voltaire figures as almost a reactionary thinker, opposing the radical dimensions of the enlightenment pushing forwards secularisation, democratisation, and toleration. Part 1 examines Israel’s and Forst’s accounts of Voltaire, showing their striking proximity. Part 2 is divided into the three subheadings of (i) Voltaire’s deism, (ii) the pivotal subject of toleration, and (iii) the decisive question of what philosophical radicalism, in the direction of democratising reform, involves. At issue in Israel’s and Forst’s claims that Voltaire’s deism represents a step backwards from Bayle’s and Spinoza’s more radical conceptions of reason and toleration, we will claim, is a shared, anachronistic failure to duly credit Voltaire’s deism’s distance from the revealed religions, and the radicalism of Voltaire’s anti-clericism. In the key claim of the paper, however, we will argue that the larger issue in Israel’s and Forst’s positioning of Voltaire as almost reactionary are a deeper set of assumptions about how we should assess philosophical texts which aim to act in the world, and (evoking Feuerbach) to change it (2, iii). Both Israel and Forst, despite the former’s extensive labours in contextualisation, read the texts of eighteenth century philosophers for their arguments alone, rather than as rhetorical and political acts and interventions which aimed to reach, entertain, and reform an expanding reading public through esprit, art, satire, and rhetoric, as well as by making argumentative contributions to the controversies of the day.

Searching for ‘Moderate Enlightenment’: From Leo Strauss to J. G. A. Pocock

ABSTRACT The meaning of ‘moderate enlightenment’ has been monopolised by Jonathan Israel. In this guise, ‘moderate enlightenment’ is built atop a compromise between authority and innovation, between reason and revelation, and amounts to an intellectually subordinate counterpart to the Radical Enlightenment. This ‘negative’ definition obstructs serious interpretation of what ‘moderate enlightenment’ can mean. This essay progresses instead an enquiry into a ‘positive’ definition of ‘moderate enlightenment’ – an enlightenment defined by moderation. It does so by surveying key lineaments within a century of historiography on the enlightenment, from the 1920s to the present. It focuses on the contributions to that historiography by two titanic figures of twentieth-century scholarship and political thought: Leo Strauss and J.G.A. Pocock. Strauss and Pocock are shown to have advanced equally substantive, if fundamentally distinct, concepts of ‘moderate enlightenment’. Searching for ‘moderate enlightenment’, aided by Strauss and Pocock, raises new vistas in both eighteenth century intellectual history and twentieth century historiography – and the pertinence of both for the history of political thought. It also brings into question the political-philosophical substance of the ‘moderation’ which underpins a positively defined ‘moderate enlightenment’.

‘What was moderate about the enlightenment?’ Moderation in eighteenth-century Europe

ABSTRACT : What does it mean to refer to the enlightenment as ‘moderate’? One answer to this question, and the one which abounds in historiography of enlightenment in the past two decades, is that of Jonathan Israel. For Israel, the ‘moderate enlightenment’ is the half-baked counterpart to the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. Where the Radical Enlightenment, in Israel’s version of events, was the crucible within which progressive modernity was forged, the ‘moderate enlightenment’ was the regressive vehicle for accommodating elements of this agenda within the social, political and intellectual structures of the ancien regime. This essay, and the special issue it introduces, seeks alternative ways to understand the prospect of a moderate enlightenment by inviting reflection on currents of moderation in eighteenth-century Europe. Turning the tables on moderate enlightenment, and framing it as an episode in a history of moderation, it proposes a range of lenses onto the intellectual culture of eighteenth-century Europe.

Liberalismo e independencia en la era de las revoluciones: México y el mundo hispánico

Liberalismo e independencia en la era de las revoluciones: México y el mundo hispánico

“Una casa divisa”: conflitto civile e identità rivoluzionarie in America

Moving from the most recent literature, not only the academic one, this essay analyzes the current status of internal unrest in the United States, which could even result in a new Civil War according to many analysts. Therefore, the crisis that is affecting the American emocracy is examined mainly with respect to the capability of the American revolution of igniting the world (as Jonathan Israel has notoriously argued) at the end of the 18th entury, and keeping it until few years ago.

On reading the Histoire des deux Indes (1780) by Raynal and Diderot: exploring tensions between European expansion and Enlightenment values

This contribution will engage with a key question concerning the Histoire des deux Indes (1780) by Raynal and Diderot, viz. What can the ideas and the writings of these two philosophes still teach us today? In our discussion we will focus first on Raynal’s Histoire and its 18th-century Europeans, their commerce and colonies outside Europe, with special attention to what at the time was almost a paradigm case: the global maritime merchant empire of the Dutch. Secondly, we will consider what Diderot’s many contributions have added to the Histoire’s power and impact, especially his critique of European colonial, commercial and civilisational endeavour around the world. At the time, as Diderot and Raynal gave voice to the discontents arising from the ongoing global expansion of Europe, their Histoire – as Jonathan Israel has shown in his magnum opus – became a major vehicle for the dissemination of their Radical Enlightenment. The question that will concern us here is the one posed by Anthony Pagden: What relevance do those radical ideas still have in our postcolonial and globalised world of today, where the former colonial empires and their peoples are today writing back themselves, clamouring to be heard?

A Unifying Enlightenment: Institutions of Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Spain (1700–1808)

A Unifying Enlightenment: Institutions of Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Spain (1700–1808)

Catharine Macaulay and the concept of “radical enlightenment”

ABSTRACT 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.

Identity Dilemmas: Nation, Religion and Race Among the Portuguese Jews from Holland to Colonial Brazil

This article discusses the identity dilemmas of the Sephardic community settled first in Amsterdam, after in the Colonial Brazil during the 17th century. It reviews the the classical historians dedicated to research on the Sephardic Diaspora in Early Modern History, like Arnold Wiznitzer, Daniel Swetschinsky, Jonathan Israel, Mirian Bodian and, mainly Yosef Kaplan, who proposed the concept of new to designate the New Christians who returned to their ancestors Judaism in Amsterdam and Brazil. It is based on sources from the Kahal Kadosh Zur Israel, the Jewish congregation founded in the city of Recife under the Dutch rule during the 1630s, particularly the records and also the regulation of 1648. It analyses, mainly, several Holy office's charges against Jews who, during the Dutch rule in Brazil, converted themselves to Judaism, comiting the crime of apostasy from Catholicism. Many of them tried to scape from Pernambuco after the Dutch defeat, in 1654, but were catched by the Portuguese Inquisition during the 1650's and the 1660's. The focus of the discussion lies on the relationship between the concept of Men of the Nation (Gente da Nacao in Portuguese) and religious and race identities adopted by this diasporic community. A community persecuted in for religious and racial reasons in the Iberian world, but that also owned his proper prejudices against some minorities, like the mulattos and the Ashkenazi Jews, whether in Holland, whether in Colonial Brazil.

Vico and China by Daniel Canaris

Reviewed by: Vico and China by Daniel Canaris Harry Liebersohn Daniel Canaris, Vico and China ( Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 2020). In the series Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. Pp. 296. £65.00 paper. Seeking the sources of modern scientific thought, Ernst Cassirer in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29) turned first to theories of language—and, within the history of linguistic theory, he gave special pride of place to the writings of Giambattista Vico as the forerunner of later theories of language. From the relative obscurity of his home in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Naples, Vico pioneered a philosophy of history that has been cited during the past century by an impressive cluster of commentators, including Cassirer, Benedetto Croce, Edmund Wilson, Isaiah Berlin, Erich Auerbach, Jonathan Israel, and Edward Said—all of whom, in different ways, looked to him as the founder of something leading up to the thought of their own time, possibly the Counter-Enlightenment or radical Enlightenment or a culturally diverse cosmopolitanism. Vico has become a favorite choice for twentieth and twenty-first century genealogies of the present. In his erudite study of Vico and China, Daniel Canaris calls into question such appropriations of Vico for later intellectual movements. Instead he follows up leads that contextualize Vico in his own time and place. Canaris sharply defines his monograph around Vico's changing assessments of China; within this topic his choice of context is Vico's relationship to the theological debates of his time, especially those swirling around the Jesuits and their enemies. Without being wholly dismissive, Canaris's introduction criticizes recent post-colonial studies, as well as scholarship invoking the Enlightenment or Counter-Enlightenment, as having lost sight of dimensions of Vico's thought that emerge when it is taken more seriously on its own terms. Naples, writes Canaris, was a center of transmission of knowledge about China. As such, it could not avoid the polemics surrounding the Jesuits and their approach to Chinese missionary work. Their policy of accommodationism, closely associated with Matteo Ricci, took as point of departure the notion of a shared natural philosophy guiding both pre-Christian thinkers in the West and Confucius; Jesuits also argued for tolerance toward Confucian rites, which they maintained were purely civil and did not interfere with the work of conversion. The arguments for and against these Jesuit positions culminated in "three authoritative papal declarations in 1704, 1715 and 1742" (18–19); they were reinforced by the founding of the Collegio de Cinesi in the late 1720s by an opponent of the Jesuits, Matteo Ripa, in the late 1720s. According to Canaris, Vico had good contacts on both sides of the pro- and anti-Jesuit controversies. His monograph traces how Vico's views on China took shape through his initial attraction to, and later repudiation of, Jesuit writings, a process Canaris relates to a wider campaign to delegitimize Jesuit thought. Canaris's book is organized with close attention to the changes over time in Vico's view of China. Chapters one to three examine the highly favorable view of Chinese civilization in Vico's study of law, the Diritto Universale (Universal Right, 1720–22). As chief sources for his understanding of China, Vico had at his disposal works that included both Ricci's diaries and his dialogue between a Confucian and a European scholar, On the True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (1603). Canaris praises Ricci's writings, and more generally those of the early Jesuit missionaries, for their nuanced portrayal of China, noting Ricci's special admiration for both Confucius as the equal of any Western pagan philosopher and China's political [End Page 742] system, with its meritocratic selection of mandarins. Another source that shaped Vico's understanding of China was a Jesuit response to the order's detractors in the form of a monumental translation of neo-Confucian works, the Confucius Sinarum philosophus (1687). The compilers of this work, according to Canaris, went beyond Ricci and tried to present Confucian texts as part of "a coherent philosophical system" (114). With an impressive body of Jesuit works as guide, how did Vico initially account for the ethical and political excellence of...

Adam Smith: Radical Neo-Roman and Moderate Realist

AbstractThere is long-standing disagreement about how radical Adam Smith should be taken to be. Recently, Jonathan Israel’s work on the enlightenment situates Smith as a moderate enlightenment thinker. This article challenges that assessment. Smith sees aristocrats as largely devoid of competence, wisdom, and virtue and thinks they do not wield significant political power in commercial societies. He is also highly critical of their economic power; and uses a neo-Roman concept of liberty to provide a powerful critique of slavery and feudalism. In so doing, he extends discussions of liberty and focuses them on economic relations in ways that prefigure labour republicanism. Finally, I show how these more radical commitments can be reconciled with his moderate proposals for political reform through his epistemology and realist anti-utopianism. These are aspects of Smith’s thought that are essential for understanding it correctly and have much to teach us today.

Radical, Sceptical and Liberal Enlightenment

Abstract We still ask the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Every generation seems to offer new and contradictory answers to the question. In the last thirty or so years, the most interesting characterisations of Enlightenment have been by historians. They have told us that there is one Enlightenment, that there are two Enlightenments, that there are many Enlightenments. This has thrown up a second question, ‘How Many Enlightenments?’ In the spirit of collaboration and criticism, I answer both questions by arguing in this article that there are in fact three Enlightenments: Radical, Sceptical and Liberal. These are abstracted from the rival theories of Enlightenment found in the writings of the historians Jonathan Israel, John Robertson and J.G.A. Pocock. Each form of Enlightenment is political; each involves an attitude to history; each takes a view of religion. They are arranged in a sequence of increasing sensitivity to history, as it is this which makes it possible to relate them to each other and indeed propose a composite definition of Enlightenment. The argument should be of interest to anyone concerned with ‘the Enlightenment’ as a historical phenomenon or with ‘Enlightenment’ as a philosophical abstraction.

The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason ed. by Jeffrey D. Burson and Anton M. Matytsin

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...

The Radical Enlightenment in Germany: A Cultural Perspective ed. by Carl Niekerk

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...

The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775‐1848. By JonathanIsrael. Pp. x, 755, Princeton/Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2017, £32.95.

The Heythrop JournalVolume 60, Issue 6 p. 934-934 Book Review The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775-1848. By Jonathan Israel. Pp. x, 755, Princeton/Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2017, £32.95. Patrick Madigan, Patrick Madigan Campion Hall, OxfordSearch for more papers by this author Patrick Madigan, Patrick Madigan Campion Hall, OxfordSearch for more papers by this author First published: 21 October 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.13355Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume60, Issue6Special Issue: POLITICAL CASUISTRYNovember 2019Pages 934-934 RelatedInformation

A Meta‐Analysis Of Critiques Of Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment

Few recent works have ruffled the feathers of intellectual historians in the way that Jonathan Israel's presentation of radical thought has in his four books, Radical Enlightenment, Enlightenment C...

The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon, by Christy Pichichero

Despite the best efforts of Jonathan Israel and John Robertson to salvage some sense of unity and common purpose for the eighteenth-century enlightenment, its fragmentation seems set to continue for the foreseeable future. Scholars, for many decades, have drawn attention to a number of sub-enlightenments that highlight the diversity, and lack of intellectual focus, that characterised the republic of letters during the age of reason. The most notable contributions have included Sorkin’s religious enlightenment, MacMahon’s counter-enlightenment and the national enlightenments sketched in the collection edited by Teich and Porter several decades ago. In her first book, Christy Pichichero adds to the growing mix of enlightenments by adding a category; namely the military enlightenment. Building on the work of David Bien, John Lynn, Jay M. Smith, Rafe Blaufarb and many others, Pichichero identifies how an animated intellectual debate surrounding military culture emerged during the eighteenth century. According to the argument presented...

Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in Spanish America. Debating Historiographic Categories

This article gives an overview of the historiographic revolution that the study of the Enlightenment has gone through in the last fifteen years in the Western world and assesses part of the recent bibliography on the Spanish and Spanish American Enlightenments. It is also a critical analysis not only of Jonathan Israel’s perspective on the Spanish American Enlightenment, but mainly, in a more general sense, of the a-critical application of the categories ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Counter- Enlightenment’ to Spain and, particularly, to the Spanish American case. As the Spanish American Enlightenment shows, this was a social and intellectual process with a series of peculiarities or specificities that complicate the indiscriminate application of the aforementioned categories. A critical review of Israel’s interpretation of the Spanish American Enlightenment and especially the ambiguous character of the Spanish American Counter-Enlightenment brings to the fore the need for a more subtle and profound debate on these issues.

Refugee “nations” and Empire-Building in the Early Modern Period

Abstract This article investigates to what extent the early modern period as the Confessional, Imperial and Economic Age was also an age of tolerance, how much early modern empires depended on religious minorities willing to migrate and settle overseas, how much in the words of Jonathan Israel religious migrants were “agents and victims of empire”. Jonathan Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World of Maritime Empires, 1540–1740 (Leyden: Brill 2002), 1. I will take the example of Sephardi Jews and Huguenots to analyse the agencies of persecuted religious minorities in negotiating terms and conditions for their (re-)settlement – more often than not as separate nations or at least separate communities within the ever-growing European empires.

The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob

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...