The Expanding Blaze

With The Expanding Blaze Jonathan Israel has written an unapologetically contentious book with a deep sense of purpose. The subtitle says it all. The Expanding Blaze argues that the American Revolution “ignited” a series of revolutionary movements across the Atlantic world, including most notably the French Revolution, as well as rebellions in the Netherlands, Greece, Ireland, and a host of other places. The “how” in the subtitle is the point Israel is at pains to make throughout the book. The ideals of liberty that revolutionary actors espoused proved alluring to others far away anxious to free themselves and their fellow subjects from the shackles of tradition, oppressive social structures, ossified theology, and authoritarian regimes. Revolutions in America and France were appreciated “as essentially a joint enterprise with broadly identical aims: to liberate and ameliorate humanity on a democratizing basis” (p. 327). On the face of it, this is hardly a revolutionary observation. About fifty years ago, R. R. Palmer argued in his magisterial study The Age of Democratic Revolution (1959) that these two revolutions turned on the same struggle between “democracy” and its antithesis “aristocracy.” Israel suggests the “Palmer Thesis” needs “vindicating, vigorous reaffirmation, and broadening beyond where Palmer himself took it” (p. 600). What defines Israel's “broadening” is what he sees as the salient issue of the age. For Israel, revolution in America touched off a civil war not between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries but between two groups vying for supremacy in the former camp, what he calls “radicals” and “moderates.” These represented “the two principal competing ideological trends, conservative and democratizing, within the American Revolution” (p. 4). To appreciate how and why America would set off a transatlantic blaze entails understanding the difference between moderate and radical proponents of enlightenment. According to Israel, there was much to distinguish them. All could be republicans, but only the radicals wanted to create societies premised on true equality and an end to religious superstition. This camp championed “universalizing, secularizing, and egalitarian” ideals (p. 5). The other labored to create an “intolerant conservative consensus” (p. 6). Moderates, it seems, could live with some holdovers from the older world. Radicals could not

Ancient history · Aristocracy (class · Democracy · Economic history · Humanity · Millenarianism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law

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