The article lays out Jonathan Israel’s central ideas on the European Enlightenment, as they have been developed in his Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006) and A Revolution of the Mind (2009). I explain his ‘controversialist method’ of intellectual history and point out the advantages and faults of this approach. Israel’s model of the heterogeneous Enlightenment is shown as a response to A. MacIntyre’s postmodern criticism, and to the older models of a ‘single Enlightenment’, as presented by P. Gay, or older models of multiple enlightenments, as presented by J. G. Pocock. However, Israel’s heterogeneous Enlightenment recognizes just one progenitor of the positive ‘modern values’, which is identified with the Radical wing. The article reviews Israel’ s narrative of the development and spread of the Radical Enlightenment in Europe and the struggles with the Enlightenment mainstream and within the Enlightenment mainstream. However, I also show some faults in Israel’s argument, mainly his view of the ‘secular morality’, which should have been the outcome of the Radical Enlightenment’s campaign. In conclusion, I point at the inconsistency of Israel’s reconstruction of the Enlightenment morals and the differences between his view and J. Schneewind’s interpretation., Ivo Cerman., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
This essay is a response to the discussion paper by Daniela Tinková on Enlightenment and vernacularization. The author welcomes the approach that sees Enlightenment as a debate, since to see it as a battle is to confuse logical truth with fiction. It should be said, however, that Tinková’s model attributes an active role only to the elites, and overstates the idea of the disappearance of the state. In the 18th century we may not have had a national state, but we did have a state. A common fallacy among Czechs regarding the timing and mechanism of the emergence of the National Revival is to ignore that state and consequently espouse the unrealistic thesis that the national agitation arose among a free people in the repressive period preceding March 1848. They also fail to appreciate the importance of the constitutional monarchy post-1861, when for the first time Czechs were able to engage in free political debate. As a result it was not until the late 19th century that a belated Czech Enlightenment took hold, inspired largely by France and Scotland. Home-grown Enlightenment traditions had by then been forgotten.