De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 41

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[2009/2]

Heinekenprijs Jonathan Israel
Foreword
Wijnand W. Mijnhardt

On 3 October 2008, the Descartes Centre at Utrecht University in collaboration with the Werkgroep Achttiende Eeuw organized a festive colloquium on the occasion of the awarding of the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize to Professor Jonathan Israel of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The Heineken prize, established in 1990, is administered by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. It is awarded bi-annually to outstanding researchers in the historical sciences. Israel was honoured ‘for his vitally new perspective on the history of the Enlightenment’. The Royal Netherlands Academy has a special relationship with the Enlightenment topic. The first Heineken prize winner, Peter Gay of Yale University, in 1990 received his award for his groundbreaking synthesis The Enlightenment: an Interpretation (1965-1970). Jonathan Israel already for a very long time has been recognized as a great historian of Early Modern Europe, the author of many books on an impressive variety of historical subjects. From the late 1970s onwards he published on colonial politics in Mexico, the Jews in early modern Europe and world trade in the age of mercantilism. His rise to fame for a larger audience than the specialist historian was the publication in 1995 of The Dutch Republic: its rise, greatness and fall, 1477-1806, a 1000 page bestseller that still is one of the best surveys of early modern Dutch history available.

However, it is not for these influential books alone that Israel was awarded the Heineken Prize. The admiration of the Royal Academy Jury for the Heineken Prizes focuses on his work on the European Enlightenment that has captured the imagination of a large audience, layman and specialist alike. Jonathan Israel does not like the small monograph and the two books of the Enlightenment trilogy he has already published equally number about a 1000 pages each. In the first one, published in 2001 and entitled Radical Enlightenment: philosophy and the making of modernity (1650-1750), he laid the foundations, presenting the Dutch Republic as the cradle in which Descartes and Spinoza found a host of followers and tried to establish the hegemony of reason over religion. In the second volume, published in 2006 and entitled Enlightenment Contested: philosophy, modernity, and the emancipation of man (1670-1752), he charted the triumph of a Spinozist and radical Enlightenment throughout continental Europe, and in the third volume, which is now under preparation and provisionally entitled Democratic Enlightenment: philosophy and the making of the modern world (1750-1790), he will tackle the issues of political rights and social equality.

Why is Jonathan's Israel's work important? The reasons can be summarized under two headings. First of all he has presented a new geography for the Enlightenment. Its origins shifted from Voltairean France and the England of Locke and Newton to the

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‘Randstad’, the region made up by Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam and The Hague, in the Dutch Republic. But the timetable has also shifted. According to accepted wisdom in Enlightenment historiography, the radical phase of the movement only occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century, just prior to the French Revolution. But as Israel points out, time and again, its radicalism was there from the beginning in the Spinozist circles of the Dutch Republic. Jonathan Israel was not the first to focus on the importance of the Dutch Republic. American historians such as Margaret Jacob and a host of Dutch researchers such as Wim Klever, Theo Verbeek and Wiep van Bunge already had published widely on the subject, but his work easily surpasses theirs in scope.

Jonathan Israel's well written books are not just the specialist's fare. He made the Spinozist Enlightenment into a history that matters, a history that is politically relevant, as in his view the early radical Enlightenment already embodied all decisive elements of modern democratic, secular and tolerant society. No wonder that his work has also found large audiences outside the circles of Enlightenment historians, especially in Western Europe where as a result of large-scale immigration politicians, philosophers and citizens alike are forced to rethink and even reinvent the society they live in. For many of them Jonathan Israel's Enlightenment exemplifies the will to transform the world through ideas and politics, a mission we all need to contribute to if we want to keep the Enlightenment as the quintessence of Western liberal thought alive.

Great books almost automatically become the subject of great debates and Jonathan Israel's work is no exception. The more so as he seeks debate, enjoys it and thrives on it. We therefore decided that we could honour his work best by inviting a few Dutch historians to comment on parts of his work. Wiep van Bunge of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam focused on issues related to the first volume of the Enlightenment trilogy, Joris van Eijnatten of the Free University of Amsterdam questioned some central themes of Enlightenment Contested and Wyger Velema examined Jonathan Israel's work on Dutch political patriotism in the second half of the 18th century. Jonathan Israel responded to these criticisms in ‘Toleration, Spinoza's “realism” and Patriot modernity: replying to Van Eijnatten, Van Bunge and Velema’. Before the Dutch commentators got the floor, Jonathan Israel delivered the A.H. Heineken lecture 2008, the privilege of those awarded the prize: ‘Equality and Inequality in the late Enlightenment’.

I want to thank the editors of De Achttiende Eeuw for their willingness to accommodate the papers of this colloquium.