Democratic enlightenment

Jonathan I. Israel

The Enlightenment shaped modernity. Western values of representative democracy and basic human rights and freedoms form an interlocking system that derives directly from the Enlightenment's philosophical revolution. This is uncontested--yet remarkably few historians or philosophers have attempted to trace the process of ideas from the political and social turmoil of the late eighteenth century to the present day. This is precisely what Jonathan Israel does in the third part of his revisionist series. He demonstrates that the Enlightenment was an essentially revolutionary process, driven by philosophical debate. From 1789, its impetus came from a small group of philosophe-revolutionnaires. Not aligned to any of the social groups represented in the French National Assembly, they nonetheless forged "la philosophie moderne"--In effect Radical Enlightenment ideas--into a world-transforming...