Introduction

AS THE HISTORIAN Jonathan Israel has shown, the early Enlightenment represents the single most significant revolution in culture and philosophy since the conversion of Western Europe to Christianity in the fourth century. The last quarter of the seventeenth century and the first quarter of the eighteenth saw the transformation of a traditional society and culture still hierarchical, theocratic, and agrarian into a community that was cosmopolitan, city-oriented, secular, commercial-industrial, and scientific. In this sense the early Enlightenment marks the transition from the premodern to the modern age.

The Enlightenment was not in fact a single coherent development but rather two rival movements. There was the moderate mainstream, which managed to reconcile old and new, science and Christianity, and there was the radical Enlightenment, which rejected any possibility of compromise and therefore had to be propagated in secret. Both movements had enormous faith in the future. The people of the eighteenth century coined the term “Enlightenment” because they were convinced that increased medical, scientific, and technical knowledge would lift the darkness of previous centuries. Progress heralded a new era of modernity, in which happiness would finally come within everyone's reach.

The nerve center from which these radical, democratic, antimonarchical, anti-aristocratic, and anti-Christian ideas flowed was not Paris or London but the network of towns centered on Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Rotterdam in the northern Netherlands, the most prosperous region of Europe at the time and the busiest hub of European trade, shipping, high finance, and publishing.