Radical, Sceptical and Liberal Enlightenment

We still ask the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Every generation seems to offer new and contradictory answers to the question. In the last thirty or so years, the most interesting characterisations of Enlightenment have been by historians. They have told us that there is one Enlightenment, that there are two Enlightenments, that there are many Enlightenments. This has thrown up a second question, ‘How Many Enlightenments?’ In the spirit of collaboration and criticism, I answer both questions by arguing in this article that there are in fact three Enlightenments: Radical, Sceptical and Liberal. These are abstracted from the rival theories of Enlightenment found in the writings of the historians Jonathan Israel, John Robertson and J.G.A. Pocock. Each form of Enlightenment is political; each involves an attitude to history; each takes a view of religion. They are arranged in a sequence of increasing sensitivity to history, as it is this which makes it possible to relate them to each other and indeed propose a composite definition of Enlightenment. The argument should be of interest to anyone concerned with ‘the Enlightenment’ as a historical phenomenon or with ‘Enlightenment’ as a philosophical abstraction.

Refugee “nations” and Empire-Building in the Early Modern Period

This article investigates to what extent the early modern period as the Confessional, Imperial and Economic Age was also an age of tolerance, how much early modern empires depended on religious minorities willing to migrate and settle overseas, how much in the words of Jonathan Israel religious migrants were “agents and victims of empire”. Jonathan Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World of Maritime Empires, 1540–1740 (Leyden: Brill 2002), 1. I will take the example of Sephardi Jews and Huguenots to analyse the agencies of persecuted religious minorities in negotiating terms and conditions for their (re-)settlement – more often than not as separate nations or at least separate communities within the ever-growing European empires.

Religion and Colonization

For the process of European expansion and the colonial endeavors from the late 15th century to the 19th, historians of the Atlantic world have more often than not identified the imperial states as the most powerful players: the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English (later British). From these empires’ perspectives, colonization was also about converting the “heathen” to, first, Catholicism, and then, with the Reformation and the rise of different varieties of Protestantism, to other denominations as well. Colonization in the early modern period was as much about religious missions, about “the harvest of souls,” as it was about expanding territorial boundaries and economic resources (Lachenicht, et al. 2016, cited under General Overviews). What Lauric Henneton has dubbed the “spiritual geopolitics” of the Atlantic world (Henneton 2014, cited under Puritan Colonization Schemes) is an important feature in the conquest and colonization of the Atlantic world. While Catholic and Protestant institutions supported the imperial powers’ colonization schemes, the former had agendas of their own, which at times clashed with more worldly colonization schemes. Among the most powerful of these religious enterprises, we find next to the Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Capuchins a number of Protestant churches and communities. This is especially true for the later 17th and 18th centuries with so-called evangelical Protestantisms: Quakers, Halle Pietists, Moravians, and others. Many of these religious orders and communities had not only Atlantic but global networks that stretched from European to African, American, and Asian worlds—in the 19th century also to areas within the Pacific including Australia and New Zealand. In the early modern period, many religious minorities were heavily persecuted for their faith. Forced to migrate, a number of imperial states decided to “make use” of these religious minorities to populate their overseas colonies, to strengthen their might and prosperity. Tolerance, then, was about “suffering” the “religious other”—and about utilitarian motives that included colonization schemes (Lachenicht 2017, cited under General Overviews). Not only Sephardi Jews but also Huguenots, Quakers, Moravians, and others became—as Jonathan Israel has put it for Sephardi Jews—“agents and victims of empire” (Israel 2002, cited under Sephardi Jews and Colonization).

Spinoza: o sujeito oculto das disputas entre iluministas radicais e moderados na fundação dos EUA

Resumo: Este trabalho analisa uma questão pouco explorada sobre o processo de formação da federação e da república dos EUA, ao final do século XVIII. Trata-se da presença de teses spinozanas nos debates que conduziram tal processo. Para demonstrar essa presença, o trabalho se valerá do cenário apresentado por Jonathan Israel, no qual se verifica uma divisão entre radicais e moderados, dentro do próprio iluminismo, e o protagonismo de Spinoza na formação do iluminismo radical. Esse conflito teria alcançado os EUA justamente no período que envolveu a independência das treze colônias inglesas e os anos subsequentes à fundação constitucional dos EUA.