[Abstracts] Conference at Nantes, France, January 20-21, 2016 - Jonathan Israel

Jonathan Israel

 

“Anti-Theological Foundations of Modern Constitutional Theory:

The Dutch Revolt and the Dutch Republican Tradition in European Context (1572-1688)”

 

American “exceptionalism” has always played a large part in the way historians have understood the American Revolution and the American Enlightenment. British “exceptionalism” has played an arguably even bigger role both in explaining the American Enlightenment and especially in describing the alleged seventeenth-century roots of the Western Enlightenment as a whole. Hobbes, Newton and Locke are widely regarded as the essential intellectual roots of Western ‘modernity’ in a political as well as general sense. But ‘mixed government’ in the characteristic Anglo-American eighteenth century sense existed before 1688 only in the Dutch Republic and the striking lack of attention paid by historians generally to the theories of Dutch republicanism before 1688 has arguably led to a very high degree of distortion in our thinking about the origins of the Enlightenment including the foundations of modern constitutional theory, distortion that urgently needs correcting.