There is much to admire in Jonathan Israel's 'Revolutionary Ideas' (2014), not the least of which is the tremendous amount of research and information that it contains, as would be expected from an elite scholar of the Enlightenment. A quick glance at the Bibliography reveals nearly 270 primary sources and an estimated 425 secondary sources, much of which was probably material also used in the previous volumes he authored on the subject of the Enlightenment. There is no question as to the level of erudition of the author … it is impressive and illuminating to a reader. As a resource for comprehending the Enlightenment in France, or more properly, Israel's primary focus of the Radical Enlightenment in France, the text is outstanding. He rises to the challenge of his sub-title, 'An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from 'The Rights of Man' to Robespierre'.
If approached as a general history, however, 'Revolutionary Ideas' presents a distorted perspective on the French Revolution (which Alfred Cobban called "the strategic center of modern history" … a sentiment with which Israel would likely agree). In arguing his case, Israel appears to overstate the singular importance of "ideas" over other critical dynamics that originated and drove the Revolution forward. In his closing argument Israel writes, "… Radical Enlightenment was incontrovertibly the one "big" cause of the French Revolution" (p. 708). 'Incontrovertibly' is a very bold claim.
Several years earlier Israel authored
A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy
(2011), which you could consider as an easy warm-up lap for the more recent marathon-like tome, 'Revolutionary Ideas'. In it, he observes, "Spinoza's role as a key progenitor of the Radical Enlightenment was unparalleled" (p. 240). Spinoza's materialism and monism, in Israel's analysis, underpinned the Radical Enlightenment, or "the system of ideas that, historically, has principally shaped the Western World's most basic social and cultural values in the post-Christian age" (p. xi). When applied to government, the Radical Enlightenment, "sees the purpose of the state as being the wholly secular one of promoting the worldly interests of the majority and preventing vested minority interests from capturing control of the legislative process" (p. viii).
In 'Revolutionary Ideas' Israel sees this Radical Enlightenment thinking as the engine that drove early revolutionaries to seek "democracy, freedom of thought, expression, and the press, human rights, secularism, sexual liberation, gender and racial emancipation, individual liberty, and equality before the law" (p. 9). In this, perhaps, he is correct. The Enlightenment mattered (and still matters), and ideas have consequences. Certainly "ideas" offered mankind alternative 'social imaginaries' that served to spur changes to existing political and social structures. What seems problematic, though, is the severing of such ideas from any kind of lived reality.
Israel cites both Diderot and Rousseau (the latter, per Israel, "taught readers to think about .. the rights of man" - p. 9) as two of several influences upon revolutionary leaders, and writes, "… the two great thinkers nurtured one particularly subversive political doctrine that Rousseau derived from Diderot, namely, that all of the ills and crimes of the world arise not from innate defects of human nature (which both saw as fundamentally good) but from the "radical viciousness" [that] Diderot was the first to see in all [yes, all!] existing institutions, systems of government, morality, and society" (p. 9). Couldn't that be reasonably paraphrased as, "Human beings are fundamentally good, it's only when they interact with one another that problems arise"?
There is a significant distinction made between the Moderate Enlightenment and the Radical Enlightenment: the distinction being, according to Israel, that "[for] "moderate" enlighteners, equality was an artificial and illicit concept" (p. 26), apparently because they stopped short of fully "[denying] the validity of ideas, customs, institutions, or laws inherited from the past absolutely and totally" (p. 11). Any sense of accommodation with existing social and political structures, no matter how pragmatic, is apparently a betrayal of the grand ideas from which modernity depends.
Israel treats the deviation of the French Revolution from the chaste and righteous path of the Radical Enlightenment revolutionaries as a hijacking. Marat and Robespierre, with good cause, are the arch-villains of his history. But shouldn't the Radical Enlightenment revolutionaries bear some responsibility for having turned their back on opportunities for which may have offered a more gradual transformation of society, and instead creating an unmoored government susceptible to veering off course? Didn't the French government established by Radical Enlightenment ideas rather quickly devolve into intolerance and "radical viscousness" too?
In terms of the French Revolution, shouldn't one consider the dithering and duplicitous behavior of Louis XVI as consequential as the existence of Radical Enlightenment ideas? Shouldn't the fear, hunger and social unrest of the common man be accorded more importance than being only "wind in the sails" (p. 73) of the revolutionaries? Shouldn't the role Jansenists and parliamentaires played in challenging royal absolutism be credited with creating the fissures later exploited by the revolutionaries? Is it really "incontrovertible" that there is only one "big" cause rather than the coincidence of several significant contingencies causing the French Revolution?
Whether one subscribes to the theological concept of Original Sin or a secular alternative explanation of our human incapacity to achieve perfection, history must account for the gap between intellectual ideals and the realities of human existence. More than ideas and reason, aren't humans compelled to act by emotions such as status, power, envy, etc.? If ideas were sufficient to form human behavior, couldn't mankind have simply lived by the Decalog of the Hebrew Bible or Jesus of Nazareth's Sermon on the Mount and made do? Rather than waiting for Spinoza to articulate his philosophy, mankind could have saved several millenniums of strife.
'Revolutionary Ideas' is a thought-provoking book that offers much to the interested reader, even if one has reservations about the author's "incontrovertible" conclusion and his one-dimensional perspective on history. In Israel's tidy world of "ideas" and pristine "intellectual history" there is apparently very little room for doubt. Meanwhile, back in reality, ambivalence and prudence have proven of some value. If nothing else, they provide a check on hubris.
Addendum 9/4/17: The following quote from Immanuel Kant appeared in the NYTs crossword puzzle recently: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
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Thomas
une passionnante histoire intellectuelle de la révolution
Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on June 25, 2017
