Jonathan Israel To Lecture At Institute For Advanced Study

Jonathan Israel, Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, will speak on "Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, and the Postmodernist Critique of Modernity" on February 13 at 4:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the Institute campus. A reception in the Common Room of Fuld Hall will follow the lecture.

"The Enlightenment has often been claimed to be one of the greatest changes in the history of humanity, and perhaps the most decisive in the making of 'modernity' understood as a set of secular social, political, and moral values," says Israel. "Among the latter are democracy, equality, individual liberty, the disestablishment of ecclesiastical authority, secular education, and freedom of expression."

However, he points out, "The philosophical justification of these values propounded by Enlightenment philosophers from Spinoza and Locke down to Kant and Bentham has been subject to attacks since the 18th century by successive waves of 'Counter-Enlightenment'—culminating since the 1960s in the 'Postmodernist' critique. Drawing strength from both the French Poststructuralist and Deconstructionist philosophical streams, and American Postmodernists and Liberal Pragmatists, the new Counter-Enlightenment has certainly succeeded in rendering the Enlightenment suspect."

Israel will discuss "whether the current tendency to reject and condemn the Enlightenment project is at all justified intellectually."

Much of Israel's work, though by no means all, has focused on early modern Europe as a formative phase in the development of modernity and of modern Western civilization. His most recent book is Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2001), which the Times Literary Supplement called "a great achievement—one that entitles [Israel] to the gratitude of the entire world of learning." The book recently received the American Historical Association's Leo Gershoy Prize, awarded to the author of "the most outstanding work in English on any aspect of 17^th- and 18^th-century European history."

Israel received his undergraduate education at Queens College, Cambridge, and did his graduate work at Oxford University and the Colegio de Mexico, Mexico City. He received his Ph.D. from Oxford in 1972. Named Sir James Knott Research Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1970, he moved to the University of Hull in 1972, where he was an Assistant Lecturer and then Lecturer in Early Modern Europe. From 1974 to 1981 he was Lecturer in Early Modern European History at University College, London, becoming a Reader in Modern History in 1981; in 1984, he was appointed Professor of Dutch History and Institutions.

Israel joined the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in 2001.

Israel's lecture is one of a series of lectures by Institute faculty members presented throughout the academic year.