Aegis 2012
Book Review >>> Emmy Hammond
A Revolution of the Mind Jonathan Israel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2010. 276 pp.
In A Revolution of the Mind, a book both of ideas and about ideas, Jonathan Israel traces the chief origins of the ideas that form the core of modern principles of democracy and civil liberty to the “Radical Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century. He argues persuasively for an understanding of modern democracy as the brainchild of these radical intellectuals—those who advocated a true “revolution of the mind” and were part of a movement that grew up not only separate from but in opposition to the “Moderate Enlightenment,” whose adherents—whatever their own brilliant contributions to society and liberty—stopped short of supporting the intellectual or real overthrow of the status quo. Israel explores a basic—and in his view, often under-acknowledged—rift within eighteenth-century intellectual life between the mainstream Moderate Enlightenment dominated by men such as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the Baron de Montesquieu, and the “Radical Enlightenment” dominated by, among others, the Baron d’Holbach, Denis Diderot, and Thomas Paine. The “two conflicting ways of improving the world,” as seen by the moderates and the radicals, was at heart a difference of opinion over whether progress could be made through incremental reform built on existing institutions and traditions, or whether progress could only be made through a comprehensive re-building of institutions and traditions that would be fully egalitarian and just, a “General Revolution” in which the people would “tear down the existing edifice of institutions and then rebuild it from scratch on purely rational principles” (17). As it grew from an “originally clandestine movement of ideas,” the Radical Enlightenment grew in the shadow of, and actually in opposition to, widely-known Enlightenment thinkers of a more moderate variety, and only became a truly viable and influential force in the volatile period of the 1770s to 1790s. One of Israel’s main theses is that our understanding of the Enlightenment, and by extension the modern traditions grounded in Enlightenment ideas, has been obscured by a failure to distinguish sufficiently between the moderate, mainstream Enlightenment which sought reform of traditional institutions and supported only a very limited democracy, and the Radical Enlightenment which advocated a complete restructuring of society and a level of democracy much more closely resembling that which we have in most democratic nations today. Radical, not moderate, Enlightenment served as “the current of thought (and eventually political action) that played the primary role in grounding the egalitarian and democratic core values and ideals of the modern world” (vii). Further, however, the second part of his central thesis is that the modern understanding of Enlightenment principles and their role in helping create modern democracy and justice has been crippled by the tendency to search for a common ground between the moderate and
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