Maar ook dit gaat over zijn eigen thema: de impact van de
verlichting op het denken. Hij werkte een recente serie lezingen
uit, voordat hij weer verder gaat met 'deel 3'.
Uitgever Princeton University Press schetst de inhoud en bedoeling
van het nieuwe werk als volgt: "Democracy, free thought and
expression, religious tolerance, individual liberty, political
self-determination of peoples, sexual and racial equality--these
values have firmly entered the mainstream in the decades since they
were enshrined in the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.
But if these ideals no longer seem radical today, their origin was
very radical indeed--far more so than most historians have been
willing to recognize. In A Revolution of the Mind,
Jonathan Israel, one of the world's leading historians of the
Enlightenment, traces the philosophical roots of these ideas to
what were the least respectable strata of Enlightenment
thought--what he calls the Radical Enlightenment.
Originating as a clandestine movement of ideas that was almost
entirely hidden from public view during its earliest phase, the
Radical Enlightenment matured in opposition to the moderate
mainstream Enlightenment dominant in Europe and America in the
eighteenth century. During the revolutionary decades of the 1770s,
1780s, and 1790s, the Radical Enlightenment burst into the open,
only to provoke a long and bitter backlash.
A Revolution of the Mind shows that this vigorous
opposition was mainly due to the powerful impulses in society to
defend the principles of monarchy, aristocracy, empire, and racial
hierarchy--principles linked to the upholding of censorship, church
authority, social inequality, racial segregation, religious
discrimination, and far-reaching privilege for ruling groups.
In telling this fascinating history, A Revolution of the
Mind reveals the surprising origin of our most cherished
values--and helps explain why in certain circles they are
frequently disapproved of and attacked even today.'
Het gesprek van ScienceGuide met de gelauwerde Britse
historicus die ongeveer alles weet over Spinoza en onze Gouden Eeuw
leest u hier. Hij onthult er zelfs over de plannen om
hem een rol te doen spelen in een film: "Hoe weet u nou dat ik in
een film over Spinoza ga optreden? Nou ja, goed. Het is waar. Rudolf van
den Berg gaat de film regisseren. Ik moet als verteller
optreden, daar hebben we samen indringend over gepraat."