A Revolution of the Mind – Emmy Hammond

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

radical Enlightenment, where such common ground did not and could not exist, particularly as social and political events in the late eighteenth century continually polarized the two movements. Between the moderate and radical conceptions of society and government, Israel declares, “no compromise or half-way position was ever possible, either theoretically or practically” (17-18). It is often the work of historians, particularly intellectual historians, to find connections between phenomena and ideas that appear prima facie unrelated, to find the ways in which ideas or trends worked together to form today’s world. In this way Israel takes a rarer approach, arguing fiercely for the idea that there cannot be any synthesis between the ideas of the radical and moderate Enlightenment intellectuals, and that it was, in fact, the polarization of their ideas and the very divide between them that laid the framework for “the egalitarian and democratic core values” of today (vii). He looks at the ways in which this unbridgeable divide functioned in several specific ways, each a part of the larger debate. For example, he analyzes the role that contemporary economic ideas played in theories of (in) equality among the two Enlightenments; classical laissez-faire economics being a child of the moderate Enlightenment and an object of much skepticism and disapproval from radicals (94). Through the radicals did not advocate complete economic equality, the work of Diderot and d’Holbach (perhaps the two most leading radical figures) did contain the idea that a “better, more equitable society” such as they envisioned was likelier to materialize by way of the poor than the rich, an idea decidedly not taken up in the mainstream Enlightenment works (101). Situated in a critical and necessary place between more esoteric monographs written exclusively for an academic audience in history, and the plethora of popular books aimed at understanding and defending modern democracy against perceived threats in the modern world, A Revolution of the Mind should appeal to anyone keen to understand not only the workings of but the ideas behind modern democracy. Those already with some background in eighteenth-century history will undoubtedly be able to gain a deeper knowledge and understanding from Israel’s arguments, however, the writing is clear and engaging enough and themes and connections clearly enough set forth that the book would make an absorbing and an illuminating read for historians and laypeople alike. History enthusiasts and general readers alike may be surprised at some of the realities that Israel bares, namely that such Enlightenment figures as Voltaire, a writer more than once exiled for his views and generally considered to be a radical himself, were actually mainstays of the moderate Enlightenment and in opposition to Israel’s radical figures. A Revolution of the Mind is an elegant consideration of the Radical Enlightenment, its principles, its influence, and most of all how it was fundamentally different from, and opposed to, the mainstream Enlightenment. It is an argument, moreover, convincingly chained to the growth and path of modern democratic ideas and institutions, rendering it a book that should appeal to all who would agree that the most democratic and just society is maintained by understanding the intellectual development of modern democratic and egalitarian ideals.