A Revolution of the Mind Quotes

“In a passage penned for the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire philosophique des deux Indes, lines written shortly after the Revolution’s onset in 1776, Diderot, confident that they would succeed, urges the insurgents to remember in building their new world not to allow inequality of wealth to become too great. He admonished them to “fear a too unequal division of wealth resulting in a small number of opulent citizens and a multitude of citizens living in misery, from which there arises the arrogance of the one and the abasement of the other.”13”
― Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy

“Priestley, who was well known on both sides of the Atlantic for his researches into electricity and chemistry, called for the total abolition of the aristocracy on the grounds that this would prove a moral blessing not only for society but also for the nobility themselves.42”
― Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy

“Without classifying radical thought as a Spinozistic tendency, combining one-substance doctrine or philosophical monism with democracy and a purely secular moral philosophy based on equality, the basic mechanics of eighteenth-century controversy, thought, and polemics cannot be grasped.”
― Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy

“The central tenet in politics of the radical philosophes was that a good government is one where legislation and the lawmakers lay aside all theological criteria and ensure by means of laws that education, individual interest, political debate, and society’s moral values “concourir,” as Helvétius, a leading French materialist,”
― Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy

“Mirabeau held that the basic source of the threat to equality in the United States were the traditions and much cherished “prejudices” Americans had inherited from the English. The most damaging of these, in his opinion, were the Americans’ inexplicable love of aristocracy, formal and informal, and their boundless respect for (and willingness to pay high fees to) lawyers.15 Deference to men of rank and noble birth, however fundamental”
― Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy

“Lessing held that the highest goal, theoretical and practical, of those striving to bring enlightenment to humanity, and philosophy’s supreme gift to mankind, is to minimize as far as humanly possible the three principal causes of strife and division among men: religious differences, class differences, and national differences.”
― Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy

“Radical Enlightenment, then, was the primary intellectual source of the dynamic rhetoric of democratic egalitarianism propagated during the twenty years before 1789 by the numerous disciples of Diderot, Helvétius, and d’Holbach, most obviously Mirabeau, Brissot, Condorcet, Cerisier, Raynal, Maréchal, Cloots, and Volney, besides Jefferson, Paine, Priestley, and Price, but also including numerous other British, American, Dutch, and German as well as French writers.”
― Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy

“If one wished to attract the support of governments, churchmen, and magistrates in the eighteenth century one had to couch proposals for reform in terms of support for monarchy, for the existing social hierarchy based on privilege, and for the existing moral norms—in other words, propose only slight repairs to the existing edifice. Every Enlightenment writer had to choose either broadly to endorse the existing structure of law, authority, and privilege, whatever incidental repairs he proposed, or else denounce them more sweepingly.”
― Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy

“un-Hobbesain, Spinozistic idea that the equality of man in the state of nature, far from being dissolved, is carried over and reinforced in society.”
― Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy

“Radical Enlightenment is the system of ideas that, historically, has principally shaped the Western World’s most basic social and cultural values in the post-Christian age. This in itself lends the history of the movement great importance. But this type of thought—especially in many Asian and African countries, as well as in contemporary Russia—has also become the chief hope and inspiration of numerous besieged and harassed humanists, egalitarians, and defenders of human rights, who, often against great odds, heroically champion basic human freedom and dignity, including that of women, minorities, homosexuals, and religious apostates, in the face of the resurgent forms of bigotry, oppression, and prejudice that in much of the world today appear inexorably to be extending their grip.”
― Jonathan I. Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy