ABSTRACT
I In a mammoth, much-discussed trilogy of books, Jonathan Israel has argued for a sharp distinction between “radical” and “moderate” strands in the Enlightenment. The radicals, he says, opposed colonialism, slavery, and an array of other social ills, grounding their egalitarian ideals in the monism, rationalism, and rejection of traditional religion that they learned from Spinoza.1 The moderates were, by contrast, either not as egalitarian or less willing to push for the implementation of their ideals in practice. They held back from a thorough-going egalitarianism out of an attachment to sentiment or tradition, a residual faith in a providential God who would improve the world irrespective of whether we acted, and a residual idealism that led them to hope for an afterlife, and hence to care less than the radicals did about human happiness in this world.2
