[lbo-talk] Spinoza v. Locke

Chris Brooke chris.brooke at magdalen.oxford.ac.uk
Mon Jan 23 07:59:58 PST 2006


On 24/1/06 03:37, "Chuck Grimes" <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:


> Anyway, has anybody read Israel's book on Spinoza?

Yes. Radical Enlightenment is superb.

It's not really a book about Spinoza, but more about the diffusion of Spinozist ideas across Europe in the decades after his death.

Israel's overall argument is that there was a coherent European Enlightenment, with "moderate" and "radical" sections to it, and that the radical Enlightenment had less to do with France in the 1740s (following more old-fashioned scholarship) and rather more to do with the Netherlands in an earlier generation. The key period for Enlightenment in Israel's view is the half-century or so following the death of Spinoza in 1677.

The book is based on a vast amount of erudition, but remains (I thought) surprisingly readable.

And the book's been out for long enough now that the main lines of criticism of Israel's overall approach are reasonably focused:

1. Too much attention to ideas, not enough to concrete social and cultural contexts in which particular kinds of intellectual inquiry were going on.

For example: <http://www3.uakron.edu/hfrance/reviews/shank.html>

2. Not enough attention to the ability of state power to clamp down on unorthodox religion and intellectual heterodoxy, which makes post-1740s developments in secular intellectual culture far more important than Israel recognises.

For example: <http://www.cambridge.org/aus/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521847877&ss=exc
>

3. General overestimation of the importance of the Netherlands, a characteristic bias of somebody who has been a Netherlands specialist for many years.

4. Like a lot of people with a single big thesis, Israel seems to have a tendency to assimilate rather too much to his overall argument. Lots of small, radical movements around Europe get assimilated to "Spinozism", when they might just have been small, radical, local movements that didn't have a great deal to do with it.

5. Finally, there's a bit of an excessive focus on Spinoza, which crowds out the significant influences of Pierre Bayle in particular, but also Thomas Hobbes on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. (See the second link, above.) Apparently Israel is working on a follow-up book on Bayle now, or so someone told me, I think.

But a tremendous book, and a terrific read.

Chris



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