The University of Washington Press has published
Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx: The Fight for a
Secular World of Universal and Equal Rights by Jonathan Israel
in June 2021:
“In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a small
but...
Early on in the French Revolution, in his memoir on press
freedom submitted to the Estates-General in June 1789, Jean-Pierre
Brissot (1754–93), later a prominent revolutionary leader,
proclaimed liberty of the press “un droit naturel à
l’homme.”...
“Freedom is the ultimate virtue of mankind”; “Democracy is the
only political system of modern man and modern society”;
“Therefore, Egypt must be committed to freedom and democracy.”
These are the words of ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad in his book
Hitlar...
To what extent did Islamic freethinking contribute to the
development of Western Radicalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries? Or how far were Islamic and European freethinking simply
parallel developments on the basis of similar heritages...
In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the Dutch
philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677) explained the
fundamental principles of the state he had defined:
“But its ultimate purpose is not to dominate or control people
by fear or subject them to...
