De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 41

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Toleration, Spinoza's ‘realism’ and Patriot modernity: replying to Van Eijnatten, Van Bunge and Velema
Jonathan Israel

I would like to begin my response to the three sets of learned, detailed and very thoughtful comments presented by Joris van Eijnatten, Wiep van Bunge and Wyger Velema in the lively debate that we participated in together at Utrecht in October 2008 by expressing my appreciation. While the substance of their comments, as opposed to their courteous introductory remarks, was rather critical of my own work and, if fully justified, would raise very extensive doubts as to the validity of my arguments, something bound to make any author just a little defensive, I want to acknowledge without reservation the importance and the seriousness of the points they raise and the difficulties, real, partial or apparent, that they point to in my work and say straight out that all three have given me abundant reason to pause for serious reconsideration. And this I can only regard as a benefit for which I am grateful certainly for myself and hopefully also for all those interested in furthering our understanding of these complex historical and philosophical issues. In replying, I shall do my best to stick strictly to the point and neither beat about the bush nor resort to rhetorical devices designed to dilute the force of their critical observations.

Joris van Eijnatten may well be right to object that I have wrongly given readers the impression that those participating in debates about toleration in the Netherlands, and elsewhere, in the late eighteenth century were altogether more concerned with the ideas of Spinoza, or alternatively Locke, than they in fact were. Certainly, he is right to say that the question which of the two theories of toleration, that of Spinoza or Locke, was the more influential is not well posed. It may even be that neither of them was particularly influential. Further, I think he is absolutely right to argue that there were many writers and spokesmen in the later eighteenth century, like Johannes Stinstra, who neither mentioned Spinoza nor took any interest in any radical writer. His statement in his conclusion that ‘Stinstra and the many, many minor authors who disseminated theories of toleration in the eighteenth century did not need Spinoza, and yet they helped us get to where we are now’ seems to me well-grounded.

He is doubtless also right to say that those who paid no attention to Spinoza and radical thought nevertheless produced ‘a theory and, perhaps more importantly, a practice of toleration’ that was entirely ‘acceptable to a majority of the population’. But he is greatly mistaken, in my view, in thinking that this theory and practice was ‘equitable’ and did most of the work of bringing us to a modern conception of toleration which is indeed one, as he says, quoting Paine, that would rid us of ‘toleration’ as well as intolerance. Paine, in fact, was one of the most radical of all late eighteenth-century democratic republican writers and relatively few in America, Britain or Holland agreed with any of his views let alone his plea for a comprehensive toleration. There was of course a tremendous pressure in all western European countries in the

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later eighteenth century for a greater degree of toleration. But nowhere was a full toleration delivered, nor could it have been because most people as well as most governments and churches were opposed to unrestricted freedom of thought and expression.

Under the famous Toleranzpatent (1781) in the Austrian lands, the Catholic Church remained specially privileged whilst many fringe groups such as Deists, atheists, Moravian brethren and Unitarians remained banned. In Holland, there was no question of putting the Jews on an equal basis with the rest of the population whilst in Britain and British-controlled Ireland, the Unitarians and other Dissenters, as well as the Catholics continually complained even more of the practice of intolerance than they did of institutionalized intolerance in mainstream society. Oxford and Cambridge continued to discriminate against all who refused to swear oaths of submission to the dominant Anglican Church. Meanwhile, atheists, as another notable radical of the era, the prominent surgeon and lecturer on chemistry, Matthew Turner, a key figure in the Liverpool Enlightenment, complained, in 1781, had good reason to fear harsh persecution - and even more, perhaps, from the populace than the law. In other kinds of philosophical dispute the vanquished had to fear only disappointment and contempt, in arguing for atheism, however, any opponent of Britain's ‘religionists’ whether victor or vanquished in the debate, must, as he expressed it in his answer to Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever (1780), ‘dread, beside ecclesiastical censure, the scourges, chains and pillories of the courts of law.’¹ Few were as brave as Turner but even he had to publish under a pseudonym.

The great majority were not interested in radical thought because they were not interested in having a comprehensive toleration that would end the persecution of homosexuals and atheists and make dissenters and Jews full citizens, as well as create a free press in the modern sense. The few who were so interested were usually either basically secular freethinkers, like Paine, Gerrit Paape, or the German publicist, Wekhrlin, writers who knew perfectly well that radical ideas were the main if not quite the only source and set of theoretical justifications for their conception of freedom of thought and expression. For one could also get at least close to a full toleration, if not democracy, by adopting Unitarianism and nurturing, as Stinstra was suspected of doing,² Socinian tendencies. But if one did become a consistent Unitarian and wanted to make one's religion and plea for full toleration at all compatible with philosophy then one was apt to end up like Priestley or another prominent English radical, John Jebb, with a one-substance doctrine very close to Spinoza's, supplemented, however, by a belief in divine providence and miracles which, as Turner pointed out, is really quite impossible to square with a one-substance philosophy.

Spinoza looked indispensable to the thoughtful radical-minded in the late eighteenth century chiefly because his system seemed more consistent, unified and con-

1 Matthew Turner, Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters, 60

2 Joris van Eijnatten, Liberty and Concord, 143.

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vincing than any other available kind of monism. This is why Lessing, Goethe and Herder, for instance, were profoundly drawn to it. Spinoza's Ethics was intensively studied in Germany, and in the 1780s also hugely discussed; but the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was by no means forgotten. Wilhelm Ludwig Wekhrlin pronounced the latter, in his radical journal, Das Graue Ungeheuer, in 1786, Spinoza's ‘best and most useful work’. ‘We still have no book’, he wrote, ‘which combats prejudice and superstition with more force and emphasis than this treatise’.³ It seemed so uniquely useful to the radical-minded, to earnest materialists, like himself and his equally radical collaborator, Carl Von Knoblauch, not just because it advocated toleration, individual liberty, press freedom and democracy but because it showed how what they considered a true morality could be projected into legislation and society. Spinoza on account of his undeniable virtues deserved to be placed in the register of saints far more than many a zealot or Bethbruder (prayer brother) such as would usually, suggested Wekhrlin (a non-Catholic writing at Nuremburg surrounded by Catholic Germany), owe his canonization to nothing more than ‘fanaticism’.⁴ Likewise, Spinoza had explained better than any other philosopher how it is that in their choices men imagine that they possess free-will when they are actually determined to seek what they think is in their own best interest to pursue.

Turning now to answer Van Bunge, but keeping Wekhrlin's remarks in mind, I will do my best to answer him on a philosophical basis (in which he has more training than I). But let me begin by making a historical observation. Nearly all the anti-philosophes in France, such as Bergier, Crillon, Marin, Maleville, and Jamin, and other late eighteenth-century writers (including Voltaire) who condemned and loudly declaimed in public against the spread of atheistic materialism and especially the ideas of Diderot, Helvétius and d'Holbach, that is against the hard core of the late eighteenth century Radical Enlightenment, identified either Spinoza alone (as Voltaire routinely did), or else Spinoza and Bayle, as the founding fathers and chief codifiers of what was often referred to at the time as la philosophie moderne. This is an important historical fact. Although Hobbes was sometimes also mentioned in passing in this connection neither he nor anyone else ever came anywhere near Spinoza and Bayle as category one culprits in this regard. Although this point is sometimes disputed (eg. by Noel Malcolm and Justin Champion) I do not believe that it can be disputed by anyone who had actually read the relevant literature of the 1750s, 1760s, 1770s and 1780s. In fact, this proposition seems to me, on the basis of the evidence, to be totally indisputable for all of these decades. Hobbes does not play even one hundredth of the role Spinoza does in the post-1750 debate about who was responsible for the rise of la philosophie moderne. Spinoza and Bayle (with Bayle being interpreted as a crypto-Spinozist) were

3 Wekhrlin, Graue Ungeheuer viii, 211; Tilgner, Lesegesellschaften, 254.

4 Wekhrlin, Graue Ungeheuer viii, 211; Lauermann and Schröder, ‘Textgrundlagen’, 80-81.

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almost always perceived as the founding fathers of la philosophie moderne, often also labeled dismissively philosophisme or la philosophie nouvelle.

Van Bunge prefaces his remarks about Spinoza's political thought with a more general comment on Spinoza's ‘modernity’. With justice he points out that Spinoza is not in the main line of modern philosophy in important respects since he refuses to start with the problems of epistemology and how knowledge is possible, and by rejecting the trajectory adopted by Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant in this regard proceeds in a way which ‘from a philosophical perspective [is] not a modern procedure at all’. This is perfectly true if one surveys the scene from a Kantian perspective or that of the modern Anglo-American analytical philosopher. But if one adopts this ‘philosophical’ perspective not only is Spinoza not modern but neither are any of those philosophes, like Diderot, Helvétius and d'Holbach, or their successors - Volney and the ideologues or for that matter Paine or Turner, who proclaimed philosophical reason the main tool for determining how a society and politics organized in the interest of the majority and for the greatest good can be made viable, durable, and given appropriate institutions and laws.

When Jacobi argued that Kant's doctrine of ‘practical reason’ and the moral imperative is just as much an abandonment of the field of philosophy in the eighteenth-century sense, that is as the application of reason to reality and the science of man, society, morality and legislation, as his own system, he surely had a point. Herder too rejected Kant's philosophy because he saw his ‘practical reason’ as a form of theology useless for the science of man, history and society. He wanted a different kind of philosophy, one that focuses on society and man. Does that mean that Herder, or Lessing who thought similarly, is not modern? Modern analytical philosophers in America and Britain, quite rightly from their point of view, take no interest in history of thought, or indeed history itself, because they recognize that what they mean by ‘philosophy’ cannot tell us anything about society, politics or man's past. Theirs is a purely technical subject with a very, very restricted reach, mainly concerned with epistemology and a highly peculiar notion of ethics. Is that not however a huge objection to the analytical and the Kantian notions of ‘philosophy’?

I disagree with any implication that Spinoza, Bayle, Diderot, Helvétius, d'Holbach and Herder are not ‘modern’ because they refuse to begin with epistemological issues like Locke and Kant. It may even be that they have a more relevant and interesting conception of what l'esprit philosophique really is than our ‘modern’ philosophers hung up as they are with epistemology. I prefer to say that the distinguishing mark of modern thought is a preoccupation with discernible realities or facts, expressly excluding supernaturalia rather than beginning with metaphysical entities that no-one can see, as pre-modern philosophers did. If one accepts this definition then history and philosophy have to be brought very closely together and Spinoza is more modern than Kant because his philosophy is to a much greater extent applied philosophy concerned with reforming the human condition, and with man in society. The Tractatus

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Theologico-Politicus as Wekhrlin pointed out is obviously applied philosophy and something the radical-minded deemed extremely useful as a weapon against the prevailing realities. Its aim is to analyze and reveal the historical evolution of a highly complex set of facts - namely the phenomenon of Bible authority and religious authority more generally conceived as something divinely-given. The Ethics looks and in one way is far more metaphysical but it is just as much intended to shatter metaphysics as traditionally understood as was Kant's Kritik and its main subject, I would argue, is still the relationship of man to nature, the natural history of man, and the implications of this relationship for understanding human behavior and for morality, law and authority.

Van Bunge is right to say of Spinoza's exclusion of women from political participation that ‘liberal and left-wing admirers of Spinoza have always felt slightly if not seriously embarrassed by these pages’. He is correct too (with Mirian van Reijen) in saying that this contention fits with Spinoza's equation of power with right, a concept that lies at the heart of his metaphysics. I agree with him also that Spinoza was a nominalist, suspicious of generalities like ‘society’ and ‘mankind’. ‘Nature certainly does not create peoples’, asserts Spinoza in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ‘individuals do, and individuals are only separated into nations by differences of language, law and morality. It can only be from these latter factors, namely law and morality, that each nation has its unique character, its unique condition, and its unique prejudices’.⁵ But precisely this was one of his most powerful tools in demonstrating that no aspect of the moral order is God-ordained or intended, and also that there is nothing fixed or innate in the differences between human cultures and religions.

With this and similar passages urging a naturalistic approach to social realities as well as morality, freedom of thought and toleration, Spinoza prefigures the basic profile of the Radical Enlightenment as a whole. For it is by insisting that all humanity has the same interests and vulnerabilities and is in the same condition when it comes to looking for the best laws, institutions and forms of government that he helped destroy the idea, so dominant in England and America in the eighteenth century, for instance, that ancient constitutions are the key to all that is good and are what make Englishmen a completely different breed from everyone else. Indeed, precisely Spinoza's kind of nominalism is what is requisite for a true egalitarianism based on a universal secular morality and conception of human rights and democratic politics as universal benefits for everyone equally. On these grounds the undoubted fact that Spinoza was the first great philosopher to hold that democracy is the best form of government seems to me hugely relevant both to his modernity per se and his oft denied but actually unquestionable historical role as the key originator in Voltaire's, and in late eighteenth-century eyes generally, of la philosophie moderne, to use the term Rousseau also employs in several of his works to label the kind of Diderotian-d'Holbachian hylozoism that he too flatly rejected from 1757 onwards.

5 Benedict de Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 225.

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Finally, let me turn to the question of the Patriottenbeweging. Wyger Velema begins by suggesting that the interpretation of the Dutch democratic revolution that I put forward in my Dutch Republic, in 1995, is quite different from and wholly contradicts that which I tried to formulate in my KB lecture of 21 June 2007, entitled ‘Failed Enlightenment: Spinoza's Legacy and the Netherlands’. I disagree. While I do now put more emphasis on the novelty of some aspects of Patriot ideology than I did then, I still think, as I put it in 1995, that ‘while Patriot ideology was rooted in the Dutch past, and based on what were taken to be the essential principles of the Revolt and the Republic, it displayed several strikingly new features. Especially important were its idealization of the “people”, an ideological tendency which was marked in the Dutch context since the middle of the eighteenth century and, closely linked to this, its democratic tendency and a form of national feeling more akin to the liberal nationalism of early nineteenth century Europe than any sense of identity which prevailed in the United Provinces during the Golden Age.’ I still think this is basically correct and, I might add, in forming this judgment I expressly acknowledged (ironically) being guided by Velema and N.C.F. van Sas. My mistake in 1995, as I see it now, was in not making it clear that by ‘Patriot ideology’ here, I meant the public consensus as formulated in documents such as the Grondwettige Herstelling and what the Patriot press presented as Patriot ideology rather than the individual views of certain more advanced Patriot leaders like Gerrit Paape, Cerisier, Bernard Nieuhoff, and Irhoven van Dam. The vast majority of Patriots certainly were ‘traditionalists, hopelessly stuck in endless and futile ruminations about the glories of the Dutch national past.’ In the lecture, on the other hand, I was trying to focus more on the individual thinking of the very few theoretically adventurous leaders than on the public notion of what Patriot ideology was.

Equally, the other way around. Velema remarks that I now think that the Patriots ‘were unambiguous moderns, deriving their political vision not from eighteenth-century English and American political thought, nor from the arch-conservative Montesquieu, nor even from the explosive treatises of Rousseau, but from French nouveaux Spinosistes such as Diderot and d'Holbach, and ultimately from the founding fathers of the Radical Enlightenment itself, the great Spinoza and his circle.’ Ignoring for a moment the ironic touches and slight exaggeration - I certainly do not regard Montesquieu as an ‘arch-conservative’, far from it - I am not here referring to the Patriottenbeweging as a mass movement but the thinking of a few advanced leaders and theorists. As far as the mass movement is concerned, I still think as I did in 1995 except that I would add more of Paape's notion of the Patriottismus of the fatherland-loving masses being an utterly ‘fantastic thing’, containing so many internal ‘contradictions and strange, unexpected and false conclusions’ that it is impossible to describe it as a coherent set of ideas.⁶

6 Gerrit Paape, De onverbloemde geschiedenis, 37, 45-46, 51.

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Like all modern revolutionary ideologies, Dutch democratic ideology in the 1780s and 1790s needs to be studied as a social movement but also, and equally, as an intellectual phenomenon. The vast majority of Patriots, according to Paape, supported the Patriot leaders, initially, merely because Patriottismus was a protest movement directed against the house of Orange. Later many people came to support it also as a campaign directed against the Republic's high bureaucracy and gens en place, now disparagingly labeled the ‘Aristocraaten’; but, in addition, there were also many non-Reformed people who supported the Patriottenbeweging chiefly because it promised equal rights to Catholics and to Protestant dissenters. But whether they supported the movement for this reason or for that or, alternatively, opposed Patriot ideology, as the less literate sections of the urban population mostly did, the great majority had only the very haziest, most fragmentary awareness of how the different Patriot goals coalesced into what - in the minds of a Cerisier, Irhoven or Paape - was essentially a Radical Enlightenment intellectual system. Intellectually coherent accounts, explanations and interpretations of what Dutch radical Patriottismus sought to accomplish, however, were inevitably chiefly the work of the movement's more literate and articulate leaders appealing to the public, so that, in the main, those who edited the opposition newssheets, and delivered the principal speeches at its meetings, were also those who predominantly developed and propagated both its public face and their own in some respects very different, or at least much more systematic, private core philosophy.

Wyger Velema is much mistaken when he attributes to me the contention ‘that the language of modern democratic republicanism [...] originated in the writings of Spinoza’. I did not say anything about the ‘language’ of modern democratic republicanism. I am not a Pocockian in history of political thought as he is to a considerable extent and while I think that Pocock's claims about the languages of discourse are not unimportant or uninteresting they are of very little use if what one wants to know is how democratic, egalitarian and comprehensively tolerant thinking emerged in the eighteenth century. While I agree that many eighteenth-century political theorists were steeped in the texts and concerns of classical antiquity by no means all of them were - what did it mean to Paape, Paine, Priestley, Price, Wollstonecraft, Godwin or Condorcet? Not much I would suggest. Furthermore, there is a fundamental disagreement between Wyger Velema and myself in that he believes that the ‘by now thoroughly researched revival of classical thought’ is the main source of late eighteenth-century democratic and egalitarian thinking embedded as it is in tolerantisme. With this I simply disagree. In my opinion, classical republicanism is a wholly overrated commodity in discussion of eighteenth-century political thought and one that explains next to nothing about the democratic and I would add fiercely anti-aristocratic tendencies of the new pre-1789 rhetoric and ideology. I know that there are many scholars deeply fascinated by this use of ‘classical political language revolving around the dichotomies of virtue and corruption, frugality and luxury, and free citizenship and political slavery’, but I am not one of them and I do not think that any of this is of

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much help in understanding how the late eighteenth-century Radical Enlightenment of Raynal's Histoire philosophique or a Diderot, d'Holbach, Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Paine, Cerisier, Irhoven van Dam, or Gerrit Paape, with their claim that ‘philosophy’ is what drives the emancipation of man from oppression and tyranny came about. The language of classical republicanism does not teach the primacy of ‘philosophy’ in human affairs, or that equality is the basis of a purely secular morality, or that freedom of thought and expression, a full toleration, representative democracy (Schimmelpenninck's main concern), the unity of mankind, and the destruction of religious authority are the other great leading principles. The only plausible source for these tendencies is the Radical Enlightenment tradition which on all these issues offers credentials much more convincing and much clearer than those of classical republicanism.

Sources and Literature

Joris van Eijnatten, Liberty and Concord in the United Provinces. Religious Toleration and the Public in the eighteenth-century Netherlands (Leiden 2003).

Manfred Lauermann and Maria-Brigita Schröder, ‘Textgrundlagen der deutschen Spinoza-Rezep tion im 18. Jahrhundert’, in Eva Schürmann, Norbert Waszek and Frank Weinreich (ed.)

Spinoza im Deutschland des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts: zur Erinnerung an Hans-Christian Lucas (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 2002) 80-1.

Gerrit Paape, De onverbloemde geschiedenis van het Bataafsch Patriottismus (Delft 1798).

Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, Jonathan Israel (ed.) translated by Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge University Press 2007).

Hilmar Tilgner, Lesegesellschaften an Mosel und Mittelrhein im Zeitalter des aufgeklärten Absolutismus: ein Beitrag zur Sozialgeschichte der Aufklärung im Kurfürstentum Trier (Stuttgart 2001).

Matthew Turner, Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever (London 1782).

Wilhelm Ludwig Wekhrlin, Das Graue Ungeheuer (periodical: 12 vols. Nuremberg, 1784-1787) viii (1786).