Aegis 2013 Israel’s narrative, the rise of an economic science functions as one of the most important insights into the rift between radical and moderate Enlightenment because this rise was almost exactly contemporaneous with the incipience of the radical critique of inequality as a social, as opposed to a moral or political, reality.40 Diderot, Helvétius, and d’Holbach, three of Israel’s leading radical figures, he describes as insisting that “It is useless to strive for the moral improvement of men and society…as long as the material interests and prejudices of the strongest are organized in such a way as to pervert both morality and society.”41 On the other side, he says of Turgot and Smith that they were “unquestionably economic geniuses and the preeminent founders of classical economics, but they were also, and not unconnectedly, amongst the chief conservative social theorists of the mainstream Enlightenment.”42 The debate he sees here in the eighteenth century clearly underlies his concern about the ‘informal aristocracy’ of modern America. Modern economics of runaway, deregulated capitalism and the vast disparities of wealth (living standards, education, etc.) that it has engendered both in America and globally are an integral piece of the crisis of modernity that Israel intends to combat through the values of radical Enlightenment. We are currently living through a crisis precipitated by the kind of economics that Israel not only links to the moderate Enlightenment but regards as one of its greatest “triumphs.” If these economics stem from the Moderate Enlightenment, then logically Israel’s solution to combat them is the system that he argues so forcefully as being “diametrically opposed” to them, the Radical Enlightenment. As I have argued in this paper, the recent historiographical division of the Enlightenment into Radical and Moderate camps, begun by Jacob and in the last decade amplified by Israel, can be read as serving to address intellectual and political needs of the current era, particularly a perceived crisis in democratic and egalitarian ideals. Israel’s arguments in A Revolution of the Mind, and this purpose that they serve, can be most insightfully understood through a comparison with Becker and The Heavenly City. One is the ultimate manifestation of disenchantment with the Enlightenment, the other attempts almost desperately to rescue the Enlightenment from its critics; one is the ultimate argument of relativism, the other takes a disappointingly presentist approach to a historical phenomenon; one is a kind of precursor to postmodernist analysis, the other deeply concerned with postmodernism’s assault on the Enlightenment and modern ideals. It is for one of the cardinal sins that Becker finds in the eighteenth-century philosophes that Israel himself can perhaps be most criticized for: an utter conviction in his own principles and a willingness at times to bend history into whatever shape needed to fit those principles, laudable though the principles themselves may be. This paper has explored several aspects of how Israel’s work is meant to address the general crisis of the twenty-first century, as in education and economics. Further, it has shown some of the weaknesses that manifest in Israel’s work as a result of these philosophical and political convictions and the oversimplified division of Radical and Moderate Enlightenment that Israel supports his convictions with.
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