Spinoza, Bayle, Socinians
Russ Leo (Review of Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750. Oxford University Press, 2002. 832 pp. ISBN 978-0199254569. Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752. Oxford University Press, 2006. 983 pp. ISBN 978-0199279227) In her study $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan (2007), A. Kiarina Kordela reads Jonathan Israel alongside Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt as proponents of “Neo-Spinozism” in contemporary philosophy and political theory. While offering scant praise for this “Neo Spinozist” camp Kordela recognizes Israel’s intervention beyond the field of intellectual history. Of Israel in particular she writes, “To praise Spinoza as the most philosophical force of secular modernity on the ground of arguments such as [in Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (2001)] only makes one wonder whether it would have been better to have left him in quasi-anonymity.” In other words, she recognizes the importance of Radical Enlightenment (and subsequently Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 (2006)), the extent to which both works argue for a certain modernity as well as a revised history of modernity. Kordela’s treatment of Israel exemplifies the degree to which the concept “Radical Enlightenment” currently enjoys cross-disciplinary vogue. It provides a useful point of entry into Israel’s attempt to retrace the Enlightenment, an attempt that is as much a critique of reigning forms and fantasies of modernity as it is an historical corrective. For Israel, Benedictus de Spinoza is the intellectual progenitor of “the only kind of philosophy which could (and can) coherently integrate and hold together such a far-reaching value condominium in the social, moral, and political spheres, as well as in ‘philosophy’” (EC 867). It is Spinoza and Spinozism which promotes the adoption of secular reason and government, universal toleration and shared equity among all men, personal liberty, freedom of expression, and democratic republicanism. Israel’s vision of modernity, grounded in his reconfigured Enlightenment history, is a polemical statement buttressed by an historical archive – one which critics and philosophers across disciplines, including Kordela, seem interested in recruiting or dispelling. Given the scope of his archive as well as his argument, the appeal of Radical Enlightenment is perhaps unsurprising. In both Radical Enlightenment and its companion text Enlightenment Contested Israel challenges existing approaches to and histories of the Enlightenment based on his identification of a single, coherent and continuous “radical” stream of thought. This radicalism emanates from Spinoza and his Dutch circle during the mid-seventeenth century. Israel takes issue with national histories of the Enlightenment and claims to multiple Enlightenments as well as with unsophisticated and insular histories glorifying later eighteenth-century French and/or English innovations. In their stead he introduces a single history of Enlightenment marked by three competing trends or forces – those of Radical Enlightenment, Moderate Enlightenment, and Anti Enlightenment, all of which are set to work as early as 1650. Radical Enlightenment ideas cut across national, regional and confessional lines as their Spinozism takes shape (much earlier than has been accorded by historians of the Enlightenment) throughout Europe as the most thorough, systematic, and rigorous critique of the “shared core of faith, tradition, and authority” of the Middle Ages and Early Modernity (until around 1650) (RE 3). Illustrating Moderate and Anti-Enlightenment trends, Israel identifies numerous reactionary movements working to stop the torrent of Spinozistic claims and illegal texts. These reactionary movements understand Spinozist claims as anarchic and atheistic innovations that quickly breach the limit of what is necessary to maintain order and morality in a civil (and religious) society. Israel’s is a history where radical philosophers stand at odds not only with absolutism, tyranny, superstition, and intolerance but with an emergent Moderate Enlightenment as well. Here we encounter an apologetic and ultimately conservative philosophical cohort working to reconcile philosophy and reason with faith, including such hallowed figures as Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire. For Catholics, Protestants, monarchs, limited-republicans, humanists, scholastic philosophers, and philosophers of the Moderate Enlightenment alike it is the spread of Spinozism that marks the greatest threat to a well-ordered, pious, and increasingly-rational European world. Israel’s determination of Spinoza and Spinozism first takes shape in Radical Enlightenment. Indeed, detailed investigations of related figures and controversies surround the exegesis of Spinoza’s oeuvre, particularly the 1670 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the posthumously-published 1677 Ethics, and the 1660-1 Korte Verhandeling. Israel’s reading of the Korte Verhandeling in particular supports his crucial claim that Spinoza’s system was essentially determined by 1660 which, in turn, buttresses the underlying claim for Spinoza’s primacy. He introduces such key philosophers as Franciscus Van den Enden, Johan de la Court, Peter Cornelius Plockhoy, Johannes and Adriaen Koerbagh, and Lodewijk Meyer, as well as debates and events concerning early modern science, political theory, and the (unsuccessful) efforts on behalf of Anti- and Moderate Enlightenment forces alike to curb the publication and distribution of radical texts and ideas. Israel’s treatment of Johannes Bredenburg and the so-called “Bredenburg Debates,” of Balthasar Bekker, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontanelle, and the heated disputations over superstition, oracles, and the existence of the devil reveal the degree to which Spinozism and the very name “Spinoza” became watchwords for disruptive or impious challenges to existing beliefs and institutions. This is even the case in controversies where the so-called “Spinozists” act in the name of religion and deny the influence of such a notorious atheist and innovator. This is perhaps nowhere as evident as in the case of Pierre Bayle, a figure who in his conflicting allegiances to the Reformed Church, to Catholicism, and to Spinozism throughout his life comes to exemplify the complex protean tenor of Radical Enlightenment debate and exegesis. Despite his avowed hatred for Spinoza and his declared piety, Bayle’s careful (and lengthy) treatment of Spinozism across his works led contemporary and future readers to suspect the motivation of his philosophical and theological projects. Controversial issues such as tolerance and the stated virtue of atheists led Bayle’s readers to Spinoza in spite of (or, as Israel suggests, in accord with) his declared intentions. Much of the work of Radical Enlightenment – indeed, what makes it an invaluable intervention in the history of Enlightenment thought as well as in the history of religion – lies in Israel’s attention to lesser-known figures and, ultimately, to the lesser-known Dutch context of early modernity. This is