Table of Contents

1. Introduction; PART 1: THE RADICAL CHALLENGE; 2. Nature and Providence: Earthquakes and the Human Condition; 3. The Encyclopedie Suppressed (1752-60); 4. Rousseau against the Philosophes; 5. Voltaire, Enlightenment and the European Courts; 6. Anti-Philosophes; 7. Central Europe: Aufklarung divided; PART II: RATIONALIZING THE ANCIEN REGIME; 8. Hume, Scepticism, and Moderation; 9. Scottish Enlightenment and Man's Progress; 10. Enlightened Despotism; 11. Aufklarung and the Fracturing of German Protestant Culture; 12. Catholic Enlightenment: the Papacy's Retreat; 13. Society and the Rise of the Italian revolutionary Enlightenment; 14. Spain and the Challenge of Reform; PART III: EUROPE AND THE RE-MAKING OF THE WORLD; 15. The Histoire Philosophique, or Colonialism Overturned; 16. The American Revolution; 17. Europe and the Amerindians; 18. Philosophy and Revolt in Ibero-America (1765-92); 19. Commercial Despotism: Dutch Colonialism in Asia; 20. China, Japan, and the West; 21. India and the Two Enlightenments; 22. Russia's Greeks, Poles, and Serfs; PART IV: SPINOZA CONTROVERSIES IN THE LATER ENLIGHTENMENT; 23. Rousseau, Spinoza and the 'General Will'; 24. Radical Break-Through; 25. The Pantheismusstreit (1780-87); 26. Kant and the Radical Challenge; 27. Goethe, Schiller and the new "Dutch Revolt against Spain"; PART V: REVOLUTION; 28. 1788-9: the "General Revolution" begins; 29. The Diffusion; 30. 'Philosophy' as the Maker of Revolutions; 31. Aufklarung and the Secret Societies (1776-92); 32. Small State Revolution in the 1780s; 33. The Dutch Democratic Revolution of the 1780s; 34. The French Revolution: from 'Philosophy' to Basic Human Rights (1788-90); 35. Epilogue: 1789 as an Intellectual Revolution

About the Author

Jonathan Israel is Professor of Modern History at the Institute for Advance Study, Princeton. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and corresponding fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. His previous books include The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477-1806, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, and Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752.

Reviews

Israel has turned up evidence of the Radical Enlightenment's influence in surprising places, and that labor alone should ensure that this book finds a place on every specialist's shelf. New York Times Book Review a brave and ambitious historian...Israel has found a way of dramatising the debates and attitudes which eventually lay the foundations for something we can call modernity. BBC History Magazine Taken either singly or as part of a trilogy, Democratic Enlightenment is a remarkable achievement, and deservedly places Israel among the finest intellectual historians of our day. Times Literary Supplement