Jonathan Israel

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...

Jonathan Israel, Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies, has authored The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775–1848 (Princeton University Press, 2017), a sweeping history of how the American Revolution...

In this public lecture, Jonathan Israel, Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies, discusses the American Revolution and its enormous, but bitterly divisive impact on European (and Canadian and Latin America) political thought and...

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.”...

Princeton University Press has published Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre (2014) by Jonathan Israel, Professor in the School of Historical Studies. Israel explores how the...

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 the 1660s and onward, the Radical Enlightenment pushed for full freedom of thought, religious freedom, and personal liberty together with democracy and the principle of equality. In this public lecture, Jonathan Israel, Andrew W. Mellon Professor...

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...