Enlightenment Contested

Jonathan Israel presents the first major reassessment of the Western Enlightenment for a generation. Continuing the story he began in the best-selling Radical Enlightenment, and now focusing his attention on the first half of the eighteenth century, he returns to the original sources to offer a groundbreaking new perspective on the nature and development of the most important currents in modern thought. Israel traces many of the core principles of Western modernity to their roots in the social, political, and philosophical ferment of this period: the primacy of reason, democracy, racial equality, feminism, religious toleration, sexual emancipation, and freedom of expression. He emphasizes the dual character of the Enlightenment, and the bitter struggle between on the one hand a generally dominant, anti-democratic mainstream, supporting the monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical authority, and on the other a largely repressed democratic, republican, and ´materialist´ radical fringe. He also contends that the supposedly separate French, British, German, Dutch, and Italian enlightenments interacted to such a degree that their study in isolation gives a hopelessly distorted picture.A work of dazzling and highly accessible scholarship, Enlightenment Contested will be the definitive reference point for historians, philosophers, and anyone engaged with this fascinating period of human development.
Contents: I: INTRODUCTORY; 1. Early Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Modern Age; 2. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity; II: THE CRISIS OF RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY; 3. Faith and Reason: Bayle versus the Rationaux; 4. Demolishing Priesthood, Ancient and Modern; 5. Socinianism and the Social, Psychological, and Cultural Roots of Enlightenment; 6. Locke, Bayle, and Spinoza: A Contest of Three Toleration Doctrines; 7. Germany and the Baltic: Enlightenment, Society, and the Universities; 8. Newtonianism and Anti-Newtonianism in the Early Enlightenment: Science, Philosophy, and Religion; III: POLITICAL EMANCIPATION; 9. Anit-Hobbesianism and the Making of ´Modernity´; 10. The Origins of Modern Democratic Republicanism; 11. Bayle, Boulainvilliers, Montesquieu: Secular Monarchy versus the Aristocratic Republic; 12. ´Enlightened Despotism´: Autocracy, Faith, and Enlightenment in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe 1689-1755; 13. Popular Sovereignty, Resistance, and the ´Right to Revolution´; 14. Anglomania, anglicisme, and the ´British Model´; 15. The Triumph of the ´Moderate Enlightenment´ in the United Provinces; IV: INTELLECTUAL EMANCIPATION; 16. The Overthrow of Humanist Criticism; 17. The Recovery of Greek Thought; 18. The Rise of ´History of Philosophy´; 19. From ´History of Philosophy´ to Histoire de l´Esprit humain; 20. Italy, the Two Enlightenments, and Vico´s ´New Science´; V: THE PARTY OF HUMANITY; 21. The Problem of Equality; 22. Sex, Marriage, and the Equality of Women; 23. Race, Radical Thought, and the Advent of Anti-Colonialism; 24. Rethinking Islam: Philosophy and the ´Other´; 25. Spinoza, Confucius, and Classical Chinese Philosophy; 26. Is Religion Requisite for a Well-Ordered Society?; VI: RADICAL PHILOSOPHES; 27. The French Enlightenment prior to Voltaire´s Lettres Philosophiques (1734); 28. Men, Animals, Fossils: French Hylozoic materialisme before Diderot; 29. Realigning of the parti philosophique: Voltair, Voltairemanie, antivoltairianisme 1733-1747; 30. From Voltaire to Diderot; 31. The ´Unvirtuous Atheist´; 32. The parti philosophique Embraces the Radical Enlightenment 1747-1752; 33. The ´War of the Encyclopedie: The First Stage 1745-1752; 34. Postscript; Bibliography; Index