A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy
Jonathan Israel
Princeton University Press (2011)

On Radical Enlightenment’s ongoing, multidimensional “opposition to mainstream thinking”  

Having read two of Jonathan Israel’s recent works, The Enlightenment That Failed (2010) and The Expanding Blaze (2017), I decided to check out an earlier work, A Revolution of the Mind (2010), and am deeply grateful for his examination of intellectual origins of what was once viewed as “modern” democracy (in the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s), notably in America, France, Britain, Ireland, and the Netherlands as well as in several underground democratic opposition circles elsewhere.

What we have in this volume are six chapters of material based on a series of lectures delivered by Israel at Oxford University (January through March, 2008) “in commemoration of the life and work of Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997).” He is generally credited with establishing in his time “the virtually new discipline of ‘intellectual history,'” a discipline to which Israel has also made substantial contributions.

Here are three excerpts that suggest the thrust and flavor of Israel’s style as well as erudition:

“The last three decades of the eighteen century were an age of much turmoil, instability, and revolutionary violence. But they were also an age of promise. The emancipation of man via forms of government promoting ‘the general good’ and life in a free society that accords protection to all on an equal basis, argued [Paul-Henri Thiery] d’Holbach in 1770, is not an impossible dream: ‘if error and ignorance have forged the chains that bind peoples in oppression, if it is prejudice which perpetuates those chains, science, reason, and truth will one day be able to break them.” Chapter 1, Page 36

“‘Government on the old system,’ as [Thomas] Paine summed it up, ‘is an assumption of power, for the aggrandizement of itself, on the new, a delegation of power, for the common benefit of society.’ This ‘revolution of the mind’ of the 1760s and 1770s was plainly one of the greatest and most decisive shifts in the entire history of humanity and one that cannot be comprehended without investigating the content of the great philosophical controversies of the age and the way these impacted, especially after 1770 and on both sides of the Atlantic, on society and culture.” Chapter 3, Page 91

“Despite the great variety of the world’s religions, affirms [Denis] Diderot, all people have felt, more or less along the same lines, that it is necessary to be just. All nations have honored such virtues as goodness, friendship, loyalty, sincerity, and gratitude. Consequently, we should not look to any particular event or revelation for the source of what ia so general and unalterable.” Chapter 5, Page 154

In the Conclusion, Israel urges the modern historian and philosopher “to explore the ‘revolution of the mind’ of the 1770s and 1780s in all its aspects and richness and to trace it back to the origins [as Israel has done] that, we have seen, lie in the late seventeenth century. For it was a revolution that was a century in the making,” one whose scope and depth of impact continue to generate controversy.

It was Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677, Jonathan Israel insists, the philosopher who, “more than any other, forged the basic metaphysical ground-plan, exclusively secular moral values, and culture of individual liberty, democratic politics, and freedom of thought ad the press that embody today the defining core values of modern secular egalitarianism: that is to say, of Radical Enlightenment.”

Read the book and then decide whether or not your choice would also be Spinoza or another. There are at least a few worthy candidates. They await the pleasure of your company.