"For Israel, resurrecting the Radical Enlightenment is part of a project designed to save the Enlightenment more generally. Both as a moment and as a political project, he thinks it must be rescued from political relativism under the guise of academic postmodernism. He also wants to salvage the French Revolution and its connections to Radical as well as moderate Enlightenment from generations of Marxist historians who see it simply in terms of class conflict, as well as their revisionist liberal critics, who see the logic of terror inscribed into revolutionary catechisms from the outset."
In the Financial Times, Duncan Kelly reviews Jonathan Israel's Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre.
Saturday, March 22, 2014
"Three Revolutions All at Once"
Labels:
books,
eighteenth century,
French Revolution,
historians,
history,
philosophy
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