THE RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT: PANTHEISTS, FREEMASONS AND REPUBLICANS

Margaret C. Jacob, Revised Second Edition, The Temple Publishers, Morristown ( N.J), 2004. Paperback, 307 pages, £17.50. ISBN 0-9724445-4-8.

The popular image of the eighteenth-century cultural movement known as the Enlightenment is of a group of periwigged philosophers, mostly French, who urbanely satirised Christianity and promoted a belief in progress and the power of reason which nowadays seems superficial and naive.

In recent years, a number of historians have reshaped our view of the Enlightenment. They have shown how there was no single ‘Enlightenment project’, but a broad range of modernising opinion promoted by an extraordinary network of hack writers, aristocrats, civil servants, engravers, clergymen, booksellers, merchants and others, who met in clubs, bookshops and coffee houses to debate fervently how society could be improved. This movement was not exclusively a French affair. Much of its inspiration was English and its heroes included such figures as Locke and Newton.

One of the most influential of the scholars who have reinvented the Enlightenment is Professor Margaret Jacob who, in a series of studies beginning with The Newtonians and the English Revolution (1976), has shown how this cultural movement was rooted in the achievements of English science and society after 1689. The most influential of Professor Jacobs’s books is The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans , first published in 1981.

Surprisingly, this fundamental study has been out of print for sometime, so this reprint is very welcome, especially as Professor Jacob has revised and updated the book. She has honed its message in the light of her subsequent research and taken account of studies by others since 1981, such as Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment (2001).

It is a pity that the care taken by Professor Jacob in revising the book was not matched by her publishers; it is marred by formatting errors and misprints.

In The Radical Enlightenment, Professor Jacob points to the importance of Freemasonry as a vehicle for the transmission of Newtonian values in Europe. Moreover, she suggests that, just as there was a major radical component to the Enlightenment, so there was likewise a radical element in early Freemasonry.

Professor Jacob emphasises the activities of a group known as the Knights of Jubilation which met at the Hague in 1710 and included the pantheist John Toland. The Knights of the Jubilation used ritual, issued constitutions and appointed a Grand Master. In Professor Jacobs’s view, the Knights of Jubilation represented an early form of Freemasonry which promoted the radical Enlightenment. Professor Jacobs’s work is of fundamental importance for anyone wishing to understand the intellectual and cultural context of the emergence of modern Freemasonry in England after 1717. However, there are some problems in Professor Jacobs’s analysis of Freemasonry. It is surprising that in revising her book Professor Jacobs did not include any substantial discussion of Professor David Stevenson’s work on early Scottish Freemasonry, which differs in important respects from her analysis, offering for example a different interpretation of the means by which freemasonry became infused with Neo-Platonic and Rosicrucian ideas and the mechanisms underpinning the development of British Freemasonry in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Jacobs’s failure to give sufficient weight to Scotland creates a further difficulty, since those Scottish Freemasons who followed the Jacobite court into exile provided another significant means by which freemasonry was spread on the continent, and the cultural values transmitted by these freemasons differed from those propounded by a Toland or Delafaye. Jacobs’s brief discussion of Jacobite freemasonry on the continent does not do justice to the complexity of early masonic politics on continental Europe. Although the Freemasonry of Chevalier Ramsay was far from Newtonian, it is more recognisable as Freemasonry than the activities of the Knights of Jubilation, and doubt must be felt as to whether this group was masonic or even proto-masonic. Many other English clubs and societies of the time issued constitutions and practised ritual. The Knights of Jubilation look more like such a group than an early radical version of Freemasonry.

Notwithstanding these reservations, the importance of Professor Jacobs’s achievement cannot be overstated. The Enlightenment is one of the most important of the various cultural strands which make up modern Freemasonry. Professor Jacobs has put Freemasonry back at the heart of the Enlightenment, and has helped Freemasons understand their Enlightenment inheritance. However, the most sobering aspect of Professor Jacobs’s study is hidden away in the introduction (p. xvii). When Professor Jacobs started her research, the Library and Museum of the United Grand Lodge of England, the most important collection of masonic books in the world, was closed to non-masons and she was not permitted to use its collections. She was forced instead to use the (also remarkable) library of the Grand East of the Netherlands, but this means that her book does not take account of some relevant material in London, such as transcripts of minutes of the Old King’s Arms Lodge, No. 28, describing the Newtonian lectures and demonstrations held by the lodge. The situation has now of course changed, and the Library and Museum of Freemasonry is open to all scholars, with its catalogue available on the internet. But nevertheless it seems tragic that Professor Jacob was ever denied access to this collection, and English masons should resolve that such a situation will never occur again.