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A NEW INTELLECTUAL HISTORY? JONATHAN ISRAEL'S ENLIGHTENMENT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2009

ANTHONY J. LA VOPA
ANTHONY J. LA VOPA*
Affiliation:
North Carolina State University
*
Department of History, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8101anthony_lavopa@ncsu.edu
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Abstract

This review points out the dangers of taking Jonathan Israel's volumes on the Enlightenment as a new framework for Enlightenment studies. Despite Israel's claim in Enlightenment contested to have historicized our understanding of the Enlightenment, his modus operandi is fundamentally unhistorical, and the result is a presentist interpretation with an oversimplified classification of thinkers into ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ camps. The review suggests more effective ways to make a truly historicized Enlightenment present for us now, especially by devoting more attention to the literary and rhetorical properties of Enlightenment texts.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , September 2009 , pp. 717 - 738
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: philosophy and the making of modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001); idem, Enlightenment contested: philosophy, modernity, and the emancipation of man (Oxford, 2006). References in parentheses are to Enlightenment contested.

2 Ernst Cassirer, The philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ, 1951); Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: an interpretation (2 vols., New York, NY, 1966–9).

3 Though I cannot claim prescience, I did raise some of the issues discussed here in my review of Radical Enlightenment in the Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), pp. 389–93.

4 Particularly important on this subject is Thomas L. Haskell, ‘Objectivity is not neutrality: rhetoric versus practice in Peter Novick's That noble dream’, in idem, Objectivity is not neutrality: explanatory schemes in history (Baltimore, MD 1998), pp. 145–73. There is also a lucid parsing of the meanings of ‘objectivity’ in Allan Megill, Historical knowledge, historical error: a contemporary guide to practice (Chicago, IL, 2007), pp. 107–24.

5 See the comments on ‘making at least some use of the Enlightenment’ in David A. Hollinger, ‘The Enlightenment and the genealogy of cultural conflict in the United States’, in Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill, eds., What's left of Enlightenment? A postmodern question (Stanford, CA, 2001), pp. 7–18.

6 The locus classicus is Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and understanding’, in James Tully, ed., Meaning and context: Quentin Skinner and his critics (Princeton, NJ, 1988), pp. 29–67. Some recent examples of a more socially contextualized approach to the history of political thought are Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva (Cambridge, 1997); John Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680-1760 (Cambridge, 2005), p. 44.

7 Robertson, The case for the Enlightenment, p. 44.

8 Thomas Nagel, The view from nowhere (New York, NY, 1986).

9 There is now a considerable literature on whether and how philosophy ought to historicize its engagement with its own past. See my ‘Doing Fichte: reflections of a sobered (but unrepentant) contextual biographer’, in Hans Erich Bödeker, ed., Biographie schreiben (Göttingen, 2003), pp. 107-71.

10 On the complexities of processes of reception, see Chartier, Roger, ‘The order of books revisited’, Modern Intellectual History, 4 (2007), pp. 509–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and David D. Hall, ‘What was the history of the book: a response’, in ibid., pp. 537–44.

11 Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley, CA, 2005); Robert J. Richards, The romantic conception of life: science and philosophy in the age of Goethe (Chicago, IL, 2002), esp. pp. 207–29.

12 Alasdair MacIntyre, After virtue: a study in moral theory (2nd edn, Notre Dame, 1984); Charles Taylor, Sources of the self: the making of the modern identity (Cambridge, MA, 1989).

13 An exceptionally balanced discussion of the complexities of Bayle's thought is Ruth Whelan, ‘Bayle, Pierre’, in Alan Charles Kors, ed., Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, i (Oxford, 2003), pp. 121–5.

14 David Hume, ‘Of the middle station of life’, in Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar, eds., David Hume: selected essays (Oxford, 1993), pp. 5–9.

15 François Poullain de la Barre, Three Cartesian feminist treatises, introd. Marcelle Maistre Welch and trans. Vivien Bosley (Chicago, IL, and London, 2002). On the Education of ladies (1674) is usually treated as an elaboration of Poullain's position in On the equality of the two sexes (1673), but in fact represents a retreat from his advocacy of equality of opportunity for women in the first text.

16 Denis Diderot, Sur les femmes, in Oeuvres, ed. André Billy (Paris, 1951), pp. 949–58. See also Lieselotte Steinbrügge, The moral sex: woman's nature in the French Enlightenment, trans. Pamela E. Selwyn (New York, NY, 1995), pp. 44–7; Jenny Mander, ‘No woman is an island: the female figure in French Enlightenment anthropology’, in Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, eds., Women, gender, and Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 97–116.

17 On this approach to an intellectual ‘field’, see Fritz K. Ringer, Fields of knowledge: French academic culture in comparative perspective (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 1–25; Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche on language, consciousness, and the body (Urbana, IL, 2005), pp. 1–7.

18 One need only compare Israel's readings with the interpretation of Mary Wollstonecraft's critique of Edmund Burke's rhetoric in Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the feminist imagination (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 58–70.

19 An example is my ‘Thinking about marriage: Kant's liberalism and the peculiar morality of conjugal union’, Journal of Modern History, 77 (2005), pp. 1–34.

20 On the varied usages of ‘enthusiasm’ see Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. La Vopa, eds., Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650–1850 (San Marino, CA, 1998).

21 Montesquieu, Persian letters, trans. C. J. Betts (London, 1973), p. 280.

22 Shaftesbury, Characteristics of men, manners, opinions, times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge, 1999).

23 This concept of an Enlightenment ‘disposition’ is indebted to Emma Rothschild, Economic sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2001), esp. pp. 15–17, 250–2.

24 David Hume, ‘Of essay writing’, in Copley and Edgar, eds., David Hume: selected essays, pp. 1–5.

25 David Hume, A treatise of human nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford, 2003), esp. pp. 121–78. Particularly illuminating on Hume's self-identity as philosopher and author are Donald W. Livingston, Philosophical melancholy and delirium: Hume's pathology of philosophy (Chicago, IL, 1998), esp. pp. 17–52. Susan Manning, Fragments of union: making connections in Scottish and American writing (Basingstoke, 2002).

26 The notion of ‘witnessed’ writing is from Richard Holmes, Footsteps: adventures of a romantic biographer (New York, NY, 1985), esp. pp. 66–9. The phrase ‘transactions of the social realm’ is from Nancy Struever, ‘Philosophical problems and historical solutions’, in Bernhard P. Dauenhauer, ed., At the nexus of philosophy and history (Athens, GA, 1987), p. 91. Gerald N. Izenberg has theorized something like the approach I am advocating in ‘Text, context, and intellectual history’, in H. Kozicki, ed., Developments in modern historiography (New York, NY, 1993), pp. 40–62, and has provided impressive examples of its practice in Impossible individuality: romanticism, revolution, and the origins of modern selfhood (Princeton, NJ, 1992), and Modernism and masculinity: Mann, Wedekind, Kandinsky through World War I (Chicago, IL, 2000). I have argued for this rhetorical approach to texts in ‘Doing Fichte.’

27 See esp. ‘Sensus communis’, ‘Soliloquy, or advice to an author’, and ‘The moralists, a philosophical rhapsody’, all in Shaftesbury, Characteristics. Shaftesbury, Exercises, trans. and ed. Laurent Jaffro (Paris, 1993), is a well-translated and annotated French edition of the Stoic meditations. On the relationship between the meditations and the essays see Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the culture of politeness (Cambridge, 1994); Laurent Jaffro, Ethique de la communication et art d'écrire: Shaftesbury et les Lumières anglaises (Paris, 1998).

28 An instructive example is the discussion of John Locke's relationship with his patron Alexander Popham in Jerrold Seigel, The idea of the self: thought and experience in western Europe since the seventeenth century (Cambridge, 2005), esp. pp. 108–9.