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A far more convincing account of the initial stages of the Age of
Reason is now to be found in Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment:
Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750. The sheer size of
the volume, eight hundred pages as compared to Jacob’s seventy,
and the narrower focus alone allow for a much more nuanced analysis.
More importantly, however, Israel, a well-known expert on the
Dutch Republic in the early modern period, structured his book as
broadly as possible right from the start. Enviably polyglot and erudite,
he set out to trace the development of the radical Enlightenment
not only in England, the Dutch Republic, and �rance, but also in the
Baltic, the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Based on
a huge number of printed and unprinted sources, his account thus
provides the reader with a truly European panorama of radical
Enlightened thinking, which in parts even widens into a history of
the Enlightenment as a whole. Within the limits of this article it is
impossible to do justice to the multi-layered narrative and the scope
of the study. But a brief outline of the main argument may at least
indicate its importance.
Like Jacob, Israel dates the beginning of the Enlightenment to the
1680s. Yet the story he tells starts in the 1650s when the spread of
Descartes’ philosophy triggered—to use Paul Hazard’s phrase—a
crisis of the European mind, a kind of prelude to the Enlightenment
proper. Until the middle of the seventeenth century, according to
Israel, debates and controversies had taken place in a relatively stable
framework. Intellectual war had raged between different confessional
camps which all claimed a monopoly on God’s truth, but never
questioned the principles of the Christian religion or of the divinely
ordained social and political order itself. This all began to change
with the advent of Cartesianism and its mechanistic world-view. The
pillars of Christianity were shaken, but not yet overthrown. Cartesianism
lacked the internal unity and strength to supplant the old
modes of thinking. The last step was only taken by a new generation
of radical writers after 1680. They pushed the bounds of reason further
than ever before and for the first time rejected the central tenets
of the Christian religion and, in consequence, the fundamental laws
of the traditional political structure. The audaciousness of their ideas,
as Israel states, made them the driving force behind the intellectual
revolution of the late seventeenth century. They distanced themselves
from a more moderate version of the Enlightenment which
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A War of Words?