Content area
Full Text
Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment . Edited by Steffen Ducheyne . Pp. xii + 318 incl. 8 figs. New York-London : Routledge , 2017. £95. 97 1 472 45168 2
Reviews
The term 'Radical Enlightenment' denotes a section of Enlightenment culture consisting of authors and currents that adopted deism, pantheism, atheism or materialism and rejected providence, miracles and revelation in religious matters, while advocating republican, egalitarian and fundamentally democratic political ideasￂ -ￂ thus opposing the divine right system of power. This term was used well before the twentieth century, but it first obtained its current semantics in the work of Leo Strauss. More recently, the concept of 'Radical Enlightenment' has played an important role in historiography, particularly regarding the relationship of the Radical Enlightenment to the Moderate Enlightenment (which attempted to combine rationality with religious tradition and the political status quo), its contributions to the Age of Revolutions, and its significance in the development of modern secular societies. Starting in the 1970s, virtually all students of the philosophical, scientific and political thought of the Enlightenment have paid attention to the Radical Enlightenment. Nevertheless, Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment is the first collection of essays specifically devoted to clarifying this concept.
In the first part of this book, Jonathan Israel and Margaret Jacob explain their respective notions of 'Radical Enlightenment'. Israel argues that 'eliminating miracles, Revelation and divine providence, and proclaiming scientific and philosophical "reason" the exclusive criterion for determining truth, this wing of the Enlightenment sought to reconceive and reorganize the entire moral...