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This chapter begins with a discussion of whether there is a social dimension that helps explain the timing and psychological origins of the rise of radical thought. It cites the invaluable role of Spinoza in furnishing more, better, and pithier arguments and proofs against revealed religion, divine Providence, and supernatural forces than any other philosopher of the age. It then describes the many nobles that figured among the ranks of the radical writers and thinkers of the early Enlightenment, including Lahontan, Boulainvilliers, d' Argens, Vauvenargues, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Conti, Radicati, and Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus. This is followed by a discussion of the revolutionary impulse.

As in France and England, it was specifically in the 1670s that academics, theologians, and philosophers in Germany first became seriously alarmed by what was perceived as a sudden, powerful upsurge of philosophical sedition against authority, tradition, and revealed religion. This intellectual rebellion powered by philosophy was diversely classified as ‘Naturalismus’, ‘Deisterey’ (deism), ‘Freydenkerey’ (freethinking), and ‘Indifferentisterey’, but these names all refer to the same disturbing phenomenon. Various books and writers were denounced but, invariably, much the fiercest outcry was in reaction to Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, copies of which arrived in Leipzig, the chief book distribution centre of northern Germany, immediately following the work's clandestine publication in Amsterdam, early in 1670.

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.

During the last third of the 17th century, the scene was set for a vast triangular contest in Europe between intellectual conservatives, moderates, and radicals over the status of the supernatural in human life and the reality of the Devil, demons, spirits, and magic. The intellectual battle was heralded by Naude and Hobbes, the latter, despite being celebrated for his personal timorousness and ‘fear of phantoms and demons’ — as Bayle and, later, d'Holbach delighted in informing readers — nevertheless injecting a measure of scepticism about diabolical power and the reality of spirits. Then, proceeding several steps further, from the 1660s, the founding fathers of philosophical radicalism initiated their campaign, negating Satan, spirits, and supernatural forces altogether in complete defiance of received ideas.

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) and Paolo Mattia Doria (1662–1746) are often characterized as ‘anti-moderns’ and it is not hard to see why. Cartesianism initiated the assault on received ideas and tradition in Italy in the last two decades of the 17th century. But having first espoused Descartes' ideas, like the rest of the Neapolitan philosophical coterie at that time, both philosophers subsequently abjured Cartesianism — Vico during the first decade of the new century, Doria rather later. In his On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710) Vico roundly rejects Descartes' ideas on substance, mind, matter, and motion. Later, in the 1730s, as Locke's ideas penetrated Italy, Doria became the leading opponent of the new empirical philosophy in Italy; while his learned colleague, if less outspoken in this regard, at any rate has nothing positive to say about Locke or the Lochisti.

This chapter focuses on the idea of equality, one of the most divisive and potentially perplexing of all basic concepts introduced by the Radical Enlightenment into the make-up of modernity. Assertion of universal and fundamental equality was undoubtedly central not just to the Radical Enlightenment but to the entire structure of democratic values espoused by the modern West. The principle of basic equality after the ‘state of nature’ was from the outset, and throughout, fundamental to the Radical Enlightenment and was forcefully and eloquently expressed by an impressively large number of writers, beginning in the 1660s with Spinoza, Meyer, Koerbagh, and van den Enden. After 1700, this legacy is further nurtured in the writings of Bayle, Mandeville, Vico, Doria, Radicati, Du Marsais, Meslier, Boureau-Deslandes, and Hatzfeld, and then, in the 1740s and 1750s, in Diderot, d’Alembert, Mably, Morelly, Boulanger, Helvétius, and others.

Spinoza's prime contribution to the evolution of early modern Naturalism, fatalism, and irreligion was his ability to integrate within a single coherent or ostensibly coherent system, the chief elements of ancient, modern, and oriental ‘atheism’. No one else in early modern times did this, or anything comparable, and it is primarily the unity, cohesion, and compelling power of his system, his ability to connect major elements of previous ‘atheistic’ thought into an unbroken chain of reasoning, rather than the novelty or force of any of his constituent concepts, which explains his centrality in the evolution of the whole Radical Enlightenment. With his system Spinoza imparted shape, order, and unity to the entire tradition of radical thought, both retrospectively and in its subsequent development — qualities it had lacked previously and were henceforth perhaps its strongest weapons in challenging prevailing structures of authority and received learning and combating the advancing moderate Enlightenment. It was a system which reached its fullest and most mature expression only with the completion of his Ethics in 1675, but which was in essentials extant as early as 1660.

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.

This chapter discusses the impact of censorship — secular and ecclesiastical — on the rise of the radical thought in Europe, as well as, in a different way, on the moderate Enlightenment. While it is true that Europe's intellectual censorship in early modern times was unsystematic and frequently inefficient, providing minimal scope for coordination across political and jurisdictional borders and exhibiting all the chaotic, bewildering, institutional, and procedural variety characteristic of the ancien regime, one must not underestimate either its broad impact or the degree of ideological convergence all varieties of institutionalized censorship manifested in fighting radical ideas. All across the continent, albeit with varying degrees of intensity, unacceptable views were suppressed and publishers, printers, and booksellers, as well as authors of books embodying illicit ideas punished.

By the mid-1670s Spinoza stood at the head of an underground radical philosophical movement rooted in the Netherlands but decidedly European in scope. His books were illegal but yet, paradoxically, excepting only Descartes, no other contemporary thinker had enjoyed, over the previous quarter of a century, so wide a European reception, even if in his case that reception was overwhelmingly (though far from exclusively) hostile. During the last years of his life, the chief focus of Spinoza's own endeavours to advance his philosophy and widen his following were his attempts to arrange the clandestine publication and distribution of his chief work, the Ethics. In some ways this was an even more difficult undertaking than preparing the ground for the Tractatus in 1669.

Leibniz was unsurpassed as a philosophical critic and observer of his age. He showed consummate discernment in interpreting new intellectual developments wherever in Europe they arose, often, as with his early appreciation of Locke and Newton, preceding most contemporary continental savants by decades. It is therefore of some significance in the history of ideas that Leibniz, more than any other observer of contemporary thought except perhaps Bayle, understood from the outset the wide-ranging implications for all mankind of the new radical philosophical movement. Committed, as he was, to upholding princely authority and religion, and eager to reunite and strengthen the Churches, Leibniz emerged as the foremost and most resolute of all the antagonists of radical thought, as well as the pre-eminent architect of the mainstream, moderate Enlightenment in Germany, Scandinavia, and Russia.

The French Revolution overtly challenged the three principal pillars of medieval and early modern society — monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church — going some way to overturning all three. Inevitably in the context, ideology — and linked to ideology, radical philosophy and political thought — were prime factors in the complex of pressures and impulses which shaped the Revolution. The revolutionaries assigned a ‘radically critical function to philosophy’, thereby constructing a conceptual if to some extent an unhistorical ‘continuity that was primarily a process of justification and a search for paternity’. In the perceptions of the revolutionaries themselves there was no need to look beyond France and little need to look further back than the middle of the 18th century. Furthermore, they showed a distinct propensity to lionize, and to some extent radicalize, certain key philosophical heroes, of whom Voltaire and Rousseau were much the most celebrated.

The most important and exceptional element in Spinoza's scientific thought is simply that natural philosophy, or science, is of universal applicability and that there is no reserved area beyond it. This implied a stark contrast between Spinoza's scientific rationality and that of every other leading philosopher and scientist of the age, not least Descartes. Various contemporaries attested to Spinoza's skill in preparing lenses and building microscopes and telescopes. Among those most aware of Spinoza's work with microscopes was the preeminent scientist of the Dutch Golden Age, Christian Huygens. Below the surface, the barely suppressed rivalry between Huygens and Spinoza extended far beyond lenses and microscopes. For both men, the central issue in science at the time was to revise and refine Descartes' laws of motion and mechanics. Another central strand of Spinoza's scientific thought is his critique of Boyle. Spinoza relegated observation and experiment to the secondary role of confirming or contradicting hypotheses, and it was on this ground that he was drawn into criticizing Boyle and the empiricism of the Royal Society.

This chapter begins with a discussion of how the shift of intellectual debate in Europe from Latin to French, and from the academic sphere to courts, coffee-houses, clubs, and salons, enabled some women — especially noble ladies supplemented with a sprinkling of escaped nuns, actresses, female singers, courtesans, and others who were relatively well-educated — to discover the new philosophy and science and by means of intellectual ‘enlightenment’ transform their outlook and lives. It then turns to the conversational and sexual freedom brought about by philosophy.

While the decisive split in the mainstream moderate Enlightenment in Germany and the Baltic occurred only with the banning of Wolff's philosophy by the Prussian Crown in 1723, signs of growing tension were evident well before this. Academic feuding over philosophy spread through the universities, dismaying many by displaying publicly the general loss of intellectual cohesion. Some German universities, such as Duisburg, still broadly adhered to Cartesian, and others, such as Cologne or Heidelberg, preferred scholastic Aristotelian ideas. Halle meanwhile, or at least its philosophy faculty, tended by 1720 towards Wolffian ideas. But most simply languished in a state of chronic disarray. Thomasius' influence was widespread, but while this promoted an enquiring, eclectic outlook, it provided little or no intellectual coherence. The old philosophia recepta was disintegrating, but nothing stable or widely acceptable took its place.

This chapter takes up this notion of politics outside the state, showing the relevance of this idea to continental radical thought today and situating anarchism within debates among continental thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciére, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. It shows that many of the themes and preoccupations of these thinkers reflect an unacknowledged anarchism. The chapter also shows that anarchism can make important interventions around these questions, and argues that radical politics today should be conceived of in terms of rupture with the existing order, rather than emerging as an immanent dimension within it. However, the politics of the ‘event’, which this notion of rupture implies, should be conceived of in ways that avoid the violent, terroristic, and potentially authoritarian revolutionary forms of the past.

Neither Cartesianism nor its offshoot Malebranchisme, nor any indigenous French philosophical tradition survived beyond the first quarter of the 18th century as a serious contender in the fight to conquer the middle ground in what was increasingly an international war of philosophies. The patent contradictions and discrepancies undermining Aristotelianism, and the systems of Descartes and Malebranche, compelled those seeking viable answers to the intellectual issues of the age to turn either to English empiricism, or the Leibnizian–Wolffian model contending for hegemony in Germany, Scandinavia, and Russia. Alternatively, one might come to terms intellectually and spiritually with the unsettling and revolutionary ideas of the radicals and Spinosistes. Some of the most enquiring minds of the French Early Enlightenment did indeed turn in this direction, including the second founding father of the French Radical Enlightenment, the eminent, if reticent, Norman nobleman, Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722), comte de Saint-Saire. Though it is sometimes claimed the count was at least residually a Catholic and not in any genuine sense a ‘Spinosiste’, recent research has invalidated this notion, proving he did develop into a fully-fledged Spinozist who rejected not just revealed religion but all notion of a providential God and an absolute morality. He was to exert during his last years, and still more posthumously, a remarkable influence on the dissemination of radical ideas throughout western Europe.

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.

This chapter discusses how periodicals emerged as a powerful machine undermining traditional structures of authority, knowledge, and doctrine. Everywhere, awareness of new ideas and knowledge, new books, and debates had been enhanced and enriched. Through the journals, Europe had, for the first time, amalgamated into a single intellectual arena. Henceforth, debates, controversies, the reception of new books and theories and their evaluation, were not just facilitated and accelerated but also projected beyond the national contexts hitherto determining the reception of new publications and research, and thereby transformed into an international process of interaction and exchange.

The first of the great public intellectual controversies generated by the rise of radical thought erupted in 1666 with the appearance of a short anonymous book entitled Philosophia S. Scripturae Interpres. The author of this sensational and inflammatory work — though his identity remained unknown during the furore and subsequently for many decades — was a prominent member of the philosophical coterie gathered around Spinoza and Van den Enden, the Amsterdam physician, Latinist, lexicographer, and man of the theatre, Lodewijk (Louis) Meyer. Meyer, like Spinoza, Van den Enden, and the brothers Koerbagh, positively gloried in the power of philosophy and science to transform the world. Though often called an ardent Cartesian, his total discarding of Descartes' two-substance doctrine shows that he is not in any meaningful sense a Cartesian. Nevertheless, he considered Cartesianism a potent tool not just for demolishing outmoded intellectual structures but for helping to create a new universal outlook, shaped by science and scholarship, which would fundamentally change daily life and society.