Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 16

Arguably, the most decisive shift in the history of ideas in modern times was the complete demolition during the late-17th- and 18th-centuries - in the wake of the Scientific Revolution - of traditional structures of authority, scientific thought, and belief, by the new philosophy and the philosophies, culminating in Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau.In this revolutionary process, which effectively overthrew all justification for monarchy, aristocracy, slavery, and ecclesiastical authority, as well as man´s asendancy over woman and theology´s domination over education and study, substituting the modern principles of equality, democracy, and universality, the Radical Enlightenment played a crucially important part. Despite the present-day interest in the revolutions of the late-18th-century, the origins and rise of the Radical Enlightenment have been astonishingly little studied, doubtless largely because if its very wide international sweep and the obvious difficulties of fitting it into the restrictive conventions of ´national history´ which until recently tended to dominate all historiography.
Contents: Part I The Radical Enlightenment: Government and Philosophy; Society, Institutions, Revolution; Women, Philosophy, and Sexuality; Censorship and Culture; Libraries and Enlightenment; The Learned Journals. Part II The Rise of Philosophical Radicalism: Spinoza; Van den Enden - Philosophy, Democracy, and Egalitarianism; Radicalism and the People - The Brothers Koerbagh; Philosophy, the Interpreter of Scripture; Miracles Denied; Spinoza´s System; Spinoza, Science, and the Scientists; Philosophy, Politics, and the Liberation of Man; Publishing a Banned Philosophy; The Spread of a Forbidden Movement. Part III Europe and the "New" Intellectual Controversies 1680-1720: Bayle and the "Virtuous Atheist"; The Bredenburg Disputes; Fontenelle and the War of the Oracles; The Death of the Devil; Leenhof and the Universal Philosophical Religion; The ´Nature of God´ Controversy. Part IV The Intellectual Counter-Offensive: New Theological Strategies; The Collapse of Cartesianism; Leibniz and the Radical Enlightenment; Anglomania: The "Triumph" of Newton and Locke; The Intellectual Drama in Spain and Portugal; Germany and the Baltic: The "War of the Philosophers". Part V The Clandestine Progress of the Radical Enlightenment 1680-1750: Boulainvilliers and the Rise of French; French Refugee Deists in Exile; The Spinozistic Novel in French; English Deism and Europe; Germany, The Radical Aufklaerung; The Radical Impact in Italy; The Clandestine Philosophical Manuscripts; From La Mettrie to Diderot; Epilogue - Rousseau, Radicalism, Revolution.