The Enlightenment
Letters on “The Nation, Jonathan Israel and the Enlightenment”
June 15, 2010
A selection of letters sent to the World Socialist Web Site on a recent essay by Ann Talbot and David North.
The Nation, Jonathan Israel and the Enlightenment
By Ann Talbot and David North, June 9, 2010
On 12 May this year, the Nation magazine published an article entitled “Mind the Enlightenment.” It is an intellectually unprincipled and vindictive attack on Professor Jonathan Israel’s multi-volume history of the development of the Enlightenment and its relationship to social and political radicalis
The ghost of Thomas Hobbes
By Ann Talbot, May 12, 2010
A comment on an article by Corey Robin in the Nation magazine that lined up seventeenth century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes alongside the Italian Futurists and Friedrich Nietzsche as a “blender of cultural modernism and political reaction”.
Spinoza Reconsidered
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 Oxford University Press
By Ann Talbot, August 26, 2003
I last reviewed Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment on this site in 2001 just after it came out in hardback. Why return to it now? The book itself would justify another review since it is a large and rich work that delves deeply into early Enlightenment history and repays reading and rereading. There
Investigating the foundations of equality
God, Locke and Equality by Jeremy Waldron
By Ann Talbot, June 16, 2003
Professor Jeremy Waldron’s latest book is an examination of the theory of equality put forward by the seventeenth century English philosopher John Locke. This is a subject that is highly relevant today as the widening social gulf between the super rich and the rest of the population increasingly undermine
Spinoza revisited
Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity1650-1750, by Jonathan I. Israel, Oxford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-19-820608-9, £30.00
August 7, 2001
To talk favourably of the Enlightenment has become something of a taboo in recent years. Some writers deny its existence, while others present it as a reactionary development. It is therefore refreshing to find a serious treatment of the intellectual trends of the late 17th and early 18th century that is no
Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism
By David North, October 24, 1996
The following is a lecture given by David North, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on 24 October 1996.
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