ENLIGHTENMENT CONTESTED This page intentionally left blank Enlightenment Contested Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 JONATHAN I. ISRAEL 1 1 Great Clarendon Street,Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department ofthe University ofOxford. It furthers the University’s objective ofexcellence in research,scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark ofOxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc.,New York © Jonathan I.Israel 2006 The moral rights ofthe author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved.No part ofthis publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted,in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing ofOxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law,or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization.Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope ofthe above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press,at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library ofCongress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd.,Chennai,India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Clays Ltd.,St Ives plc ISBN 0–19–927922–5 978–0–19–927922–7 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 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.