Interpreting the Enlightenment

This article addresses a number of issues relevant to the interpretation of the Enlightenment raised by Jonathan Israel in his recent book, Enlightenment Contested. After a brief summary of the main points of the book it considers whether, as Israel claims, the core of the Enlightenment is a materialist monist metaphysic first fully articulated by Spinoza, and whether it is convincing to make materialism and atheism the main criteria of Enlightenment thought. The argument that Spinoza and Pierre Bayle should be seen as co-founders of the Enlightenment is also examined. The article further questions the cogency of the sharp distinction drawn between the moderate and radical wings of the movement, and seeks to determine whether the model of radicalism used by Israel has the consistency ascribed to it, whether it was as widely disseminated as claimed, and whether thinkers described as radical argued and wrote as Israel's model of radicalism would lead us to expect.     

On the Margins of the Enlightenment: Blacks and Jews

The postmodern critique of the Enlightenment is much concerned with what it regards as the unwillingness of progressive thinkers of the eighteenth century to accept the legitimacy of national or cultural groups that differed significantly from norms in Western Europe. My aim is to examine how eighteenth-century thinkers, including Hume, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Condorcet, and the Abbé Grégoire, perceived prototypical “others” such as Blacks and Jews, by looking at the sources—from contemporary medical science to travel literature, proto-anthropology, history, biblical scholarship and reformist projects—on which these views were based. Perceptions of Blacks cannot easily be separated from the issue of slavery, nor that of the Jews from biblical history and theology. I argue that those who wanted to exclude these groups from mainstream society generally based their arguments on a one-dimensional, self-referential empirical methodology, while those who argued for their eventual inclusion usually posited a multidimensional reality in which a shift from one dimension to the other was a matter of will and planning. While the inclusionists tended to use general categories, such as humanity or a universal spiritual order, the exclusionists tended to use particularizing categories such as race or nation.     

Book reviews

The Portable Kristeva. Edited by Kelly Oliver New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), xxix + 410 pp., $21.00, £13.95 paper.

The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the Present. Edited by Timothy Unwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xxiii + 281 pp. £37.50, $59.95 cloth £13.95, $18.95 paper.

Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune. By Roger V. Gould (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), viii + 253 pp. $40.95, £32.75 cloth $15.95, £12.75 paper.

The State of the Nation: Government and the Quest for a Better Society. By Derek Bok (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 493 pp. $35.00 cloth.

The Darwinian Paradigm: Essays on its History, Philosophy, and Religious Implications. By Michael Ruse (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 299 pp. £11.99 paper.

Economic Laws and Economic History. By Charles P. Kindleberger (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xi + 191 pp. £14.95, $18.95 paper £32.50, $54.95 cloth.

An Introduction to the Philosophy of History. By Michael Stanford (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1998), viii + 292 pp. $54.95, £45.00 cloth $29.95, £14.99 paper.

The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain. By Kevin J. H. Dettmar (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) xv + 276 pp. £45.00 cloth £20.50 paper.

The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel. By Patricia Ingham (London: Routledge, 1996), ix + 197 pp. n.p.g.

The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit. By Leo Damrosch (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), xiv + 384 pp. $39.95, cloth.

Sovereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and Mixed Government in the English Civil Wars. By Arihiro Fukudo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), xiii + 175 pp. £35.00.

Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals. By Creighton E. Gilbert (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), xiii + 316 pp., $85.00, £76.50.

Leaving the Cave: Evolutionary Naturalism in Social‐Scientific Thought. By Pat Duffy Hutcheon (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1996), xvi + 504 pp. $55.00 cloth.

The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England. By M. Lindsay Kaplan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature & Culture, xii + 137 pp. £32.50, $49.9 cloth.

The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780. By Margaret R. Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), xiii + 353 pp.n.p.g.

History Continues. By Georges Duby, translated by A. Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), xvi + 149 pp. $14.95, £ 11.95 paper.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations. Edited by Daniel Breazeale, translated by R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997). xlvii + 276 pp. $49.95 cloth $15.95 paper.

Weakness of the Will in Medieval Thought: From Augustine to Buridan. By Risto Saarinan (Leiden: Brill, 1994), viii + 207 pp. $77.25, £35.00 cloth.

Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034. By Richard Landes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), Harvard Historical Studies, 117, xii + 404 pp. $55.00 cloth.

Chronicles of the Vikings: Records, Memorials and Myths. Edited by R. I. Page. (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 239 pp. $50.00 cloth $17.95 paper.

Ideas and Policies Under Labour 1945–1951. By Martin Francis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), vi + 269 pp. £40.00 cloth.

Aesthetics: The Classic Readings. Edited by David E. Cooper (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), vi + 276 pp. $ 54.95 cloth $ 19.95 paper.

Adorno's Aesthetics of Music. By Max Paddison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xii + 378 pp. £15.95 paper.

Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism. By Robert Chazan (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997), xiii + 189 pp. $35.00 cloth.

Umwelt‐Lesebuch: Green Issues in Contemporary German Writing. Edited by Axel Goodbody (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), ix + 197 pp. £35.00, £9.99 paper.

Understanding Contemporary Germany. By Stuart Parkes (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), xxxii + 247 pp., £13.99 paper.

Cultural‐Political Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment. Edited by Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 314 pp. n.p.g.

Reflections of Change: Children's Literature Since 1945. Edited by Sandra L. Beckett (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997), xi + 203 £ 43.95 cloth.

The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van Eyck's Double Portrait. By Edwin Hall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), xxi + 180 pp. $50.00.

Nineteenth‐Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking Glass. By Katherine Kearns (Cambridge University Press, 1996), X + 310 PP. £40.00, $59.95.

Socrates and Aristophanes. By Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 332 pp. $15.95, £12.75 paper.

The Clock and the Mirror. Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine. By Nancy G. Siraisi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), xiv + 361 pp. cloth $49.50, £37.50 cloth.

The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope. By Catherine Wilson (Princeton University Press, 1998), 280 pp., $18.95, £14.95 paper.

Intelligence de l'anticommunisme: Le Congrès pour la liberté de la culture à Paris (1950–1975). By Pierre Grémion (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 645 pp. 240 FF.

A City in Conflict: Troyes During the French Wars of Religion. By Penny Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), Studies in Early Modern History, x + 228 pp., £40.00 cloth.

Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity. By Alison Weber (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), xi + 183 pp., $15.95 paper.

Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530. Edited by Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xxv + 313 pp., $19.95, £13.95, paper.

The Commercialization of English Society, 1000–1500. 2nd ed. By Richard H. Britnell (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), Manchester Medieval Studies, xvi + 281 pp. $24.95, £35.00 cloth £12.00 paper.

Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. By Rogers Brubaker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 202 pp. n.p.g.