
Jonathan Irvine IsraelInstitute for Advanced Study | IAS · Historical Studies
Jonathan Irvine Israel
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Publications (74)
Field focuses on the role in political theory of the concept of potentia of the people—power understood as the informal, natural power of the people—as distinct from potestas understood as the formal arrangement of power under the constitution of a given state. In a close analysis of the arguments of Hobbes and Spinoza on popular power and sovereig...
The Amsterdam theater society Nil Volentibus Arduum, which was founded in 1669 and remained active for some years, was not just a circle meeting regularly to discuss theater theory and practice, but was devoted to discussion of all the arts as well as language theory in relation to society. As far as the Amsterdam theater was concerned, its main pu...
The Cambridge Companion to the Dutch Golden Age - by Helmer J. Helmers August 2018
The highly abstract style of Spinoza’s philosophy has encouraged some interpretations of him as a thinker with little immediate connection with the whirl of social and cultural affairs around him. This article shows that all three major Western revolts - those of the Netherlands, Portugal and Aragon - against Philip II (his principal symbol and emb...
This article seeks to outline the main elements in the historiographical controversy over the significance of 'Spinozism' as an eighteenth-century Enlightenment category and the validity or otherwise of the concept of 'Radical Enlightenment' as well as the relationship between these two categories. Defining 'Radical Enlightenment' as the philosophi...
Whereas during the first half of the eighteenth century the expression ‘
oświecony
’ in Polish was nearly always a religious metaphor, between the 1760s and the early nineteenth century the noun ‘
oświeconie
’ became secularized, broadened and given a quite revolutionary new meaning, denoting an intellectually grounded, rational and true understand...
Brothers in arms, partners in trade: Dutch–indigenous alliances in the Atlantic world, 1595–1674 By Meuwese Mark. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Pp. xiii+367. 18 illustrations. Hardback £110.00, ISBN 978-90-04-21083-7. - Volume 10 Issue 2 - Jonathan Israel
"Radical Enlightenment" and "moderate Enlightenment" are general categories which, it has become evident in recent decades, are unavoidable and essential for any valid discussion of the Enlightenment broadly conceived (1650-1850) and of the revolutionary era (1775-1848). Any discussion of the Enlightenment or revolutions that does not revolve aroun...
Historians of the French Revolution used to take for granted what was also obvious to its contemporary observers-that the Revolution was caused by the radical ideas of the Enlightenment. Yet in recent decades scholars have argued that the Revolution was brought about by social forces, politics, economics, or culture-almost anything but abstract not...
After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann. By John R.Betz. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. xvi + 360 pp. $121.95 cloth. - Volume 82 Issue 4 - Jonathan Israel
Although Rousseau was certainly the towering figure in educational theory in the later Enlightenment, his educational theories proved more serviceable to the Counter-Enlightenment. The moral order on which society depends rests in his view on a natural sentiment which education should cultivate in the child and allow to develop uncorrupted by socie...
The Politics of Jewish Commerce is an important and stimulating contribution to at least three areas of study—Jewish history, modern economic thought, and the Enlightenment. Its value lies in the originality of its perspectives, which flow from the author's excellent decision to adopt an intellectual-historical approach to European economic thought...
Democracy, free thought and expression, religious tolerance, individual liberty, political self-determination of peoples, sexual and racial equality--these values have firmly entered the mainstream in the decades since they were enshrined in the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. But if these ideals no longer seem radical today, their origin wa...
This account of crypto-Jewish martyrdom in the Iberian world provides a skilful, informative, and extensive (but by no means comprehensive) survey and interpretation of what is by any reckoning a most remarkable phenomenon in the history of the Inquisition, early-modern religiosity, and crypto-Judaism. Moreover, the author is quite right to say thi...
This valuable and interesting study is the first genuinely scholarly investigation of tulipmania. It uses archival and other contemporary records rather than the usual, mostly scandalized contemporary pamphlet literature, which often verges on anti-tulipmania propaganda. Goldgar shows that the Dutch tulipmania of the 1630s was a highly complex soci...
Of all the European powers, the Dutch were considered the most tolerant of minority religious practices in their colonies. In The Expansion of Tolerance, a pair of historians examines this unusual sensitivity in the case of the seventeenth-century Dutch colonies of Brazil. Jonathan Israel demonstrates that religious tolerance under Dutch rule in Br...
The author presents the first major reassessment of the Western Enlightenment for a generation. Continuing the story he began in Radical Enlightenment, and now focusing his attention on the first half of the 18th century, he returns to the original sources to offer a new perspective on the nature and development of the most important currents in mo...
Journal of the History of Ideas 67.3 (2006) 523-545
On the surface it might well seem that during the last fifteen or twenty years the Enlightenment understood as a new way of thinking about reality and society has receded more and more from its former privileged status as a pivotal turning-point in the making of the modern world, and especially as...
Shaping Modernity - DupréLouis: The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture. (New Haven: Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2004. pp. xiv, 397, $45.00.) - Volume 67 Issue 2 - Jonathan Israel
Arguably, the tradition of democratic republican theory which arose in the Dutch Republic in the years around 1660 in the writings of Johan and Pieter de la Court, Franciscus van den Enden and Spinoza played a decisively important role in the development of modern democratic political theory. The tradition did not end with Spinoza but continued to...
During the 1620s, 1630s and early 1640s there was a marked tendency in Dutch painting, well known to art historians, towards smaller, more modest pictures and more sober colouring. This period, sometimes called the ‘monochrome phase’, and the subsequent shift back to larger, more splendid and more highly coloured painting in the late 1640s, can arg...
Dutch society has enjoyed a reputation, or notoriety, for permissiveness from the sixteenth century to present times. The Dutch Republic in the Golden Age was the only society that tolerated religious dissenters of all persuasions in early modern Europe, despite being committed to a strictly Calvinist public Church. Professors R. Po-chia Hsia and H...
Book InformationEl Acercamiento hispano-neerlandés (16481678). By Manuel Herrero Sánchez. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Madrid. 2000. Pp. 427. Paperback.
The Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth-century . By J. R. Jones. London: Longman, 1996. Pp. 242. ISBN 0-582-05631-4. £42.00.
Oliver Cromwell . By Peter Gaunt. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Pp. 263. ISBN 0-631-18356-6. £25.00.
Cromwellian foreign policy . By Timothy Venning. London and New York: St Martin's Press and Macmillan, 1995. Pp. 324. ISBN 0-333...
This survey history of Jewish life and culture in early modern Europe is the first to focus on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a radically new phase in Jewish history. The book lays particular emphasis on the reversal of trends in western and central Europe in the late sixteenth century, which was followed by a rapid increase in Jewish n...
1st Publ. Bibliogr. s. 1131-1188
Introduction. Peddling and Trading in the Dutch Republic: The Jews in Their Upward Struggle. The Special Significance of the Textile Industry for The Netherlands in the 19th Century. From Pedlars to Textile Entrepreneurs: The Development of Jewish Entrepreneurship in the First Half of the 19th Century. From Trading to Textile Manufacturing: The Jew...
2nd Ed, repr Bibliogr. s. 275 - 297
Despite the wealth of published studies on individual German, Austrian, and Czech Jewish communities of the early modern era, it is remarkable how rare have been the attempts to synthesize the material and reach an overall assessment of the impact of the Thirty Years' War on Central European Jewish life. This gaping lacuna was noted some years ago...
PalmerColin A.: Slaves of the White God. Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1976, $13.50). Pp. 234. RoutLeslie B.Jr,: The African Experience in Spanish America. 1502 to the Present Day. Cambridge University Press, 1976, £12.50. Pp. 404. Cambridge Latin American Studies, No. 23. - Volume 9 Issue 2 - J...
Traducción de: Race, Class and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610-1670 Incluye índice Incluye bibliografía El presente estudio investiga las diversas tensiones que afectaron a la sociedad mexicana a mediados de la época colonial y de las distintas maneras en que dichas tensiones influyeron en el curso de la vida pública de Nueva España.