Democratic enlightenment : philosophy, revolution, and human rights 1750-1790
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Democratic enlightenment : philosophy, revolution, and human rights 1750-1790
Oxford University Press, 2011
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Democratic enlightenment
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Includes bibliographical references (p. [953]-1029) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The Enlightenment shaped modernity. Western values of representative democracy and basic human rights, gender and racial equality, individual liberty, and freedom of expression and the press, form an interlocking system that derives directly from the Enlightenment's philosophical revolution. This fact is uncontested - yet remarkably few historians or philosophers have attempted to trace the process of ideas from the political and social turmoil of the late eighteenth century to the present day. This is precisely what Jonathan Israel now does. He demonstrates that the Enlightenment was an essentially revolutionary process, driven by philosophical debate. From 1789, its impetus came from a small group of philosophe-revolutionnaires, men such as Mirabeau, Sieyes, Condorcet, Volney, Roederer, and Brissot.
Not aligned to any of the social groups who took the lead in the French National assembly, the Paris commune, or the editing of the Parisian revolutionary journals, they nonetheless forged 'la philosophie moderne' -- in effect Radical Enlightenment ideas -- into a world-transforming ideology that had a lasting impact in Latin America and eastern Europe as well as France, Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries. Whilst all French revolutionary journals clearly stated that la philosophie moderne was the main cause of the French Revolution, the main stream of historical thought has failed to grasp what this implies. Israel sets the record straight, demonstrating the true nature of the engine that drove the Revolution, and the intimate links between the radical wing of the Enlightenment and the anti-Robespierriste 'Revolution of reason'.
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction
- PART 1: THE RADICAL CHALLENGE
- 2. Nature and Providence: Earthquakes and the Human Condition
- 3. The Encyclopedie Suppressed (1752-60)
- 4. Rousseau against the Philosophes
- 5. Voltaire, Enlightenment and the European Courts
- 6. Anti-Philosophes
- 7. Central Europe: Aufklarung divided
- PART II: RATIONALIZING THE ANCIEN REGIME
- 8. Hume, Scepticism, and Moderation
- 9. Scottish Enlightenment and Man's Progress
- 10. Enlightened Despotism
- 11. Aufklarung and the Fracturing of German Protestant Culture
- 12. Catholic Enlightenment: the Papacy's Retreat
- 13. Society and the Rise of the Italian revolutionary Enlightenment
- 14. Spain and the Challenge of Reform
- PART III: EUROPE AND THE RE-MAKING OF THE WORLD
- 15. The Histoire Philosophique, or Colonialism Overturned
- 16. The American Revolution
- 17. Europe and the Amerindians
- 18. Philosophy and Revolt in Ibero-America (1765-92)
- 19. Commercial Despotism: Dutch Colonialism in Asia
- 20. China, Japan, and the West
- 21. India and the Two Enlightenments
- 22. Russia's Greeks, Poles, and Serfs
- PART IV: SPINOZA CONTROVERSIES IN THE LATER ENLIGHTENMENT
- 23. Rousseau, Spinoza and the 'General Will'
- 24. Radical Break-Through
- 25. The Pantheismusstreit (1780-87)
- 26. Kant and the Radical Challenge
- 27. Goethe, Schiller and the new "Dutch Revolt against Spain"
- PART V: REVOLUTION
- 28. 1788-9: the "General Revolution" begins
- 29. The Diffusion
- 30. 'Philosophy' as the Maker of Revolutions
- 31. Aufklarung and the Secret Societies (1776-92)
- 32. Small State Revolution in the 1780s
- 33. The Dutch Democratic Revolution of the 1780s
- 34. The French Revolution: from 'Philosophy' to Basic Human Rights (1788-90)
- 35. Epilogue: 1789 as an Intellectual Revolution
by "Nielsen BookData"