The Radical Enlightenment was a revolutionary set of ideas which helped lay the foundations of the modern world on the basis of equality, democracy, secular values, and universality. This controversial and original study by the internationally renowned cultural historian Jonathan I. Israel shows how Spinoza and his thought set the intellectual current towards the intellectual and political revolutions of the later eighteenth century.

Jonathan Israel is a professor in the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

• I. The 'Radical Enlightenment'


• 1: Introduction


• 2: Government and Philosophy


• 3: Society, Institutions, Revolution


• 4: Women, Philosophy, and Sexuality


• 5: Censorship and Culture


• 6: Libraries and Enlightenment


• 7: The Learned Journals


• II. The Rise of Philosophical Radicalism


• 8: Spinoza


• 9: Van den Enden: Philosophy, Democracy, and Egalitarianism


• 10: Radicalism and the People: The Brothers Koerbagh


• 11: Philosophy, the Interpreter of Scripture


• 12: Miracles Denied


• 13: Spinoza's System


• 14: Spinoza, Science, and the Scientists


• 15: Philosophy, Politics, and the Liberation of Man


• 16: Publishing a Banned Philosophy


• 17: The Spread of a Forbidden Movement


• III. Europe and the 'New' Intellectual Controversies 1680-1720


• 18: Bayle and the 'Virtuous Atheist'


• 19: The Bredenburg Disputes


• 20: Fontenelle and the War of the Oracles


• 21: The Death of the Devil


• 22: Leenhof and the 'Universal Philosophical Religion'


• 23: The 'Nature of God' Controversy


• IV. The Intellectual Counter-Offensive


• 24: New Theological Strategies


• 25: The Collapse of Cartesianism


• 26: Leibniz and the Radical Enlightenment


• 27: Anglomania: The 'Triumph' of Newton and Locke


• 28: The Intellectual Drama in Spain and Portugal


• 29: Germany and the Baltic: 'The 'War of the Philosophers'


• V. The Clandestine Progress of the Radical Enlightenment 1680-1750


• 30: Boulainvilliers and the Rise of French


• 31: French Refugee Deists in Exile


• 32: The Spinozistic Novel in French


• 33: English Deism and Europe


• 34: Germany: The Radical Aufklaerung


• 35: The Radical Impact in Italy


• 36: The Clandestine Philosophical Manuscripts


• 37: From La Mettrie to Diderot


• 38: Epilogue: Rousseau, Radicalism, Revolution