… zoals trouwens ook al te zien is in books.google van het boek dat binnenkort verschijnt van
Jonathan I.
Israel, The Enlightenment that Failed. Ideas, Revolution, and Democratic
Defeat, 1748-1830. Oxford University Press, 28 November 2019 [volgens Amazon January 1, 2020] – 1088 pages – cf. books.google
Radical
and conservative Enlightenment ideologies began to break apart as the desire
for a fair society clashed with questions of religion and secularization. The
Enlightenment that Failed shows how ideas promoting the interest of society as
a whole came to be almost defeated by ideas buttressing the interests of the
privileged few. [Cf. Athenaeum boekhandel]
The Enlightenment that Failed explores the growing rift between those
Enlightenment trends and initiatives that appealed exclusively to elites and
those aspiring to enlighten all of society by raising mankind's awareness,
freedoms, and educational level generally. Jonathan I. Israel explains why the
democratic and radical secularizing tendency of the Western Enlightenment,
after gaining some notable successes during the revolutionary era (1775-1820)
in numerous countries, especially in Europe, North America, and Spanish
America, ultimately failed. He argues that a populist, Robespierriste tendency,
sharply at odds with democratic values and freedom of expression, gained an
ideological advantage in France, and that the negative reaction this generally
provoked caused a more general anti-Enlightenment reaction, a surging
anti-intellectualism combined with forms of religious revival that largely
undermined the longings of the deprived, underprivileged, and disadvantaged,
and ended by helping, albeit often unwittingly, conservative anti-Enlightenment
ideologies to dominate the scene.
The Enlightenment that Failed relates both the American and the French
revolutions to the Enlightenment in a markedly different fashion from how this
is usually done, showing how both great revolutions were fundamentally split
between bitterly opposed and utterly incompatible ideological tendencies.
Radical Enlightenment, which had been an effective ideological challenge to the
prevailing monarchical-aristocratic status quo, was weakened, then almost
entirely derailed and displaced from the Western consciousness, in the 1830s
and 1840s by the rise of Marxism and other forms of socialism.
