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This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of radical thought in the Early Enlightenment. It argues that Europe's war of philosophies during the Early Enlightenment down to 1750 was never confined to the intellectual sphere and was never anywhere a straightforward two-way contest between traditionalists and moderni. Rather, the rivalry between moderate mainstream and radical fringe was always as much an integral part of the drama as that between the moderate Enlightenment and conservative opposition. In this triangular battle of ideas what was ultimately at stake was what kind of belief-system should prevail in Europe's politics, social order, and institutions, as well as in high culture and, no less, in popular attitudes. The discussion then turns to the ‘Crisis of the European Mind’, which denotes the unprecedented intellectual turmoil which commenced in the mid-17th century, with the rise of Cartesianism and the subsequent spread of ‘mechanical philosophy’ or the ‘mechanistic world-view’, an upheaval which heralded the onset of the Enlightenment proper in the closing years of the century.

This chapter discusses how libraries served as the workshop of the early Enlightenment, both moderate and radical. It describes the contribution of the private ‘universal’ library to the progress of the early Enlightenment in Italy, where the impact of censorship, the unavailability of foreign books, and the decay of the great libraries all conspired to create a situation in which a few medium and large private libraries containing rare foreign works and ‘libri prohibiti’ provided the indispensable channel through which flowed the philosophical ferment of the late 17th century, and later. It also discusses how multivolume encyclopaedias, dictionnaires, and lexicons — the most striking manifestations of the intellectual revolution of the period — enhanced the comprehensiveness of Early Enlightenment libraries, especially those of smaller and medium sizes.

One of the best known and most striking features of the Early Enlightenment is a cultural and intellectual movement which swept the continent from France to Russia, and Scandinavia to Sicily, in the 1730s and 1740s. This was the so-called anglomanie of the 18th century — a near universal fashion for English ideas, influences, and styles. Suddenly, virtually everything English was in demand in Europe. For the first time, English poetry and plays were widely studied. English grammars and dictionaries, rare in the past, became commonplace. British constitutional monarchy began to be widely admired. Above all, Newton and Locke were almost everywhere eulogized and lionized.

Radical deism in the English Enlightenment is generally considered in modern historiography an essentially home-grown product, rooted in Hobbes and Herbert of Cherbury, as well as the religious and social radicalism of the Civil War and Cromwellian commonwealth, which, not infrequently, as with Gerard Winstanley, had been tinged with pantheism. Even in the late 17th century, there were claims that English philosophical incredulity was essentially different from the continental variety, and its intellectual roots were to be found far more in Hobbes than Spinoza. But there are cogent reasons for urging a different view. One is that several leading English deists manifestly did not derive their ideas from a purely indigenous context but, on the contrary, incontrovertibly betray extensive borrowing from continental and especially Dutch thought.

This chapter suggests that a nuanced account of early Enlightenment natural law theory may have something to offer modern debates that swing between a liberal emphasis on individual rights and a communitarian emphasis upon group rights. An examination of Pufendorf's work reveals that his natural law theory embraces two connected ways of thinking about toleration. One the one hand, his theory underpins the power of the magistrate to tolerate pragmatically for reasons of state. On the other, his account of natural religion defines a sphere that cannot be invaded legitimately by the state. Pufendorf's distinction between churches (as voluntary associations) and states (as guarantors of individual rights) offers resources for rethinking contemporary discussions that struggle to balance claims by religious communities to maintain their identities with the claims of their vulnerable members not to be oppressed.

The pre-1750 Enlightenment fundamentally transformed political thought as it did every other aspect of western civilization and, here, Montesquieu has always rightly been identified as a key innovative thinker. Certainly no one had a greater impact than he on the discussion of political theory in mid-18th-century Europe. But while granting Montesquieu’s originality and incomparable impact, which remain undeniable, in the context of a general reassessment of the western Enlightenment such as this, it is requisite not to ‘isolate’ him, or leave the impression that he springs from nowhere, but rather adequately ‘situate’ him, which means we must view his oeuvre as a response partly to his own experiences but even more to his reading and to prior developments in French and French exile thought. This chapter examines the relationship between Montesquieu and Bayle’s monarchism, and the aristocratic republicanism of Boulainvilliers.

The interchange between the Netherlands and France which played so large a part in the formation of Early Enlightenment radical thought was a two-way transmission, not only of works of philosophy and Bible criticism, of scientific theories, theology, and political thought, but also of an entirely new phenomenon, thoroughly characteristic of the new era — the philosophical or deistic travel novel. If the Spinozistic novel in Dutch begins with Philopater in the 1690s, and assumes the guise of a travel romance with Smeeks' Krinke Kesmes (1708), the radical philosophical novel in French began in the late 1670s with two utopian travel stories set in the remote South Pacific — Gabriel de Foigny's La Terre australe connue (1676) and, more especially, the ‘dainty’, widely read, and notorious Histoire des Sévarambes (1677) by Denis Vairesse d'Alais.

Spinoza emerged as the supreme philosophical bogeyman of Early Enlightenment Europe. No one else during the century 1650–1750 remotely rivalled his notoriety as the chief challenger of the fundamentals of revealed religion, received ideas, tradition, morality, and what was everywhere regarded, in absolutist and non-absolutist states alike, as divinely constituted political authority. Having dedicated himself fully to philosophy, Spinoza endeavoured not just to find the ‘highest good’ for himself but also, he intimates at the end of the Korte Verhandeling, to teach the path to ‘salvation’ to others, his object being, to paraphrase Marx, not just to meditate but to change the world, a goal in which eventually — and in a most extraordinary manner — he succeeded.

A discerning observer of the world of learning, contemplating Europe's war of philosophies in 1700, might well have concluded that Cartesianism and its offshoot, Malebranchisme, were most strongly placed to win and, sponsored by governments and Churches, to construct a new general hegemony of ideas in Europe's culture. Yet of the three rival versions of moderate, mainstream Early Enlightenment — Neo-Cartesianism, Newtonianism, and Leibnizian-Wolffianism, that which in 1700 appeared most formidable, and enjoyed the widest support amongst Europe's ruling elites — Cartesianism rapidly proved the most precarious intellectually and was the first to collapse under the strain of escalating philosophical and scientific strife. Many of Europe's acutest minds discarded Cartesianism during the opening years of the new century.

The two authors who most effectively summed up the radical thought of the early Enlightenment era in the middle of the 18th century were both Frenchmen — La Mettrie and the famous chief editor of the Encyclopédie, Diderot. In their published writings a tradition of thought stretching back a century to the 1650s was powerfully restated and rendered into one of the central planks of the European Enlightenment as a whole. Both writers, and especially Diderot, also added some original touches of their own. But the essential ideas making up their radicalism were those of a late 17th- and early 18th-century tradition which culminated in their work.

The most enigmatic and controversial, as well as probably the single most widely read and influential thinker of the Early Enlightenment, was the ‘philosopher of Rotterdam’ — Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). Though banned in France and the rest of Catholic Europe, his works were read everywhere and by everyone who claimed any sort of acquaintance with contemporary European intellectual life. Bayle is strictly speaking neither a sceptic nor a ‘fideist’. His position is that philosophical reason is the only tool we have to separate truth from falsehood, the only secure criterion, and that, consequently, by its nature religious faith can never be based on reason.

This chapter surveys the antiquarians of the Late Renaissance to Early Enlightenment periods. It shows how Italy in the sixteenth century saw an even deeper and broader engagement with the antiquities, and the identification of a group of people devoted to the study of its material remains. Through objects, Renaissance scholars gained access to parts of the past that were not discussed in texts or were discussed in texts that no longer survived. By the end of the sixteenth century, antiquarianism had spread across Europe, and the chapter pinpoints these waves of progress in the history of antiquarianism through a number of key individuals: Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637), Jacob Spon (1647–1685), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).