The Crisis of the European Mind: 1680-1715 (New York Review Books Classics)

Jonathan Israel, probably our current leading expert on the history of the Enlightenment, praises this book, so I bought it and read it through in a weekend. It's as good as Israel says it is: a panoramic view of the Enlightenment's major minds, written with verve, Enlightenment-like irony, and thorough command of its material. It begins in 1680 but has plenty to say about Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza.

Though published more than eighty years ago, this essay is still a best-seller, still relevant and still fascinating.Paul Hazard describes himself as “a historian of mentalities”. To him, the last 20 years of the 17th century and the first 20 years of the 18th century are crucial in shaping the way we think, view the world, and gauge religions. That period in History is like the adolescence of the modern world.Like all crucial periods of our past, it wasn’t born, armed to the teeth, from the thigh of Jupiter. Paul Hazard gives precursors their dues : Rabelais, Montaigne and Bacon, to name but three. There are others.Talking about adolescence, if you mention The Crisis around you, you’ll find that those who are enthusiastic about it, have generally read it (several times) during their high school and university years. It has provided them with an excellent lie detector, and that’s priceless. Never mind the date of publication : like diamonds, this book is forever.

A book on the evolution of western thought is either a lesson from a pedant or an interesting journey and this is one all interesting. Well written, not in the least pedantic, and interesting. I study history, with a particular interest in social change-- what sparks it, and is the direction predictable? (I am not sure they are to this reader, but I am hoping someone smarter than I am will find a pattern). One spark is war and another is the choices of individuals (leaders as a rule) for good or ill. Leaders are influenced by the ideas abroad in the land. What starts as radical revision becomes the standard text and approach, waiting for the next wave of insight. Hazard's book traces in some detail the shift from a basis in religiously inspired thought towards the rational. I recently read elsewhere the the modern society is moving away from rational / logical thought as its standard (an idea I don't wholly embrace), but it is an interesting idea. The Hazard treatise may give us an idea of how that might happen.

Paul Hazard knew more history than nearly everyone else. I came to this book hopeful of his sharing real knowledge about the people and ideas involved in this “Crisis”. Some of it was there… enough for me to persist through the book. Mostly, it was florid, opinionated, rhetorical, light-as-feathers speechifying. Not worth the time.

Changes in human societies come only through the ideas from geniuses who see much farther than us.This book is about those geniuses who shaped Europe by defending their ideas by a powerful weapon called reason.If your interested in the history of ideas, this is a must read.

This book may be my favorite of all time. It is a history of the mental state of European culture, a crisis that followed the elimination of divine authority and divine providence and all that had guided the European’s lives - their traditions and history, politics and authority, beliefs and morals. How those mindsets were changed and shaped. I believe this is essential reading at a time when Western culture seems to be relying on science to provide answers to the biggest questions, which it cannot.Yes, the author’s writing is florid. It reads like a classic novel. And that is what I so enjoy about it. It brings European history to life, and more important I think is it brings human affairs back into the humanities where it belongs. How we think is of ultimate importance to what we do, and don’t do. And whether we do at all. Opinions are throughout the book - a very human quality. Very little are by the author. Most are by the period players. The author does try to describe some mindsets and they can be quite humorous. One of my favorites is the author probing the mindset of Leibniz, a major player of the rationalists, those that infused doubt into everything that had ever been written, and thought. The author tells the story of how Leibniz tried to reunite the Catholics and Protestants. He felt it should be able to be done, based on his understanding of mathematics. I found it quite amusing. Here is the excerpt:“His great mathematical discovery, the infinitesimal calculus, is the transition from the non-continuous to the continuous; his great psychological law is the law of continuity: a clear perception is linked to obscure perceptions by a series of insensible degrees which lead us ever closer and closer to the initial vibration of the vital principle. Harmony is ever the supreme metaphysical verity. Diversities which seemed irreconcilable end by merging together at last in one harmonious whole, where each component has the place designed for it by a divinely constituted order. The universe is one vast choir. Each individual has the illusion that he is singing independently of all the others, whereas, in reality, he is singing the part allotted to him in one mighty score, wherein every note is so placed that all the voices have their answering counterparts, the whole creating a concord more perfect than that music of the spheres dreamed of by Plato.”I thought I’d also include the next section also. It tells of the difficulty Leibniz will have in seeking unity. It summarizes the crisis of the era (and perhaps a factor of Western society’s current difficulties):.“Let us here read over again that noble passage in which Émiel Boutroux put on record the difficulties which such a thinker would have had to encounter at the time of his entry into the world: “The problem does not present itself to him under the same conditions as it did to the Ancients. He finds confronting him, developed by Christianity and the influence of modern thought, sharply opposed ideas and contrarieties, if not downright contradictions, such as the Ancients never knew. The general and the particular, the possible and the real, the logical and the metaphysical, the mathematical and the physical, mechanism and finality, mind and matter, experience and instinct, universal coordination and individual spontaneity, concatenation of causes and human liberty, providence and evil, philosophy and religion—all these contraries more and more divested of their common elements by the process of analysis, have now reached such a degree of divergence that their reconciliation seems no longer possible, so that to choose one to the complete exclusion of the other seems the only course open to a mind that has any regard at all for clarity and consistency. To resume, in such conditions, the task of Aristotle, to try to arrive at that underlying unity and harmony in things which man seems to despair of ever finding, which, perhaps, he even regards as non-existent, such was the task that Leibniz set himself.””

A charming meander through the highways and byways of European thought without a hint of ennui!The Kindle version allows for easy highlighting and notes, but I noticed parts of sentences were duplicated at the "page" breaks many times in the book.

Interesting view of this transition period from French dominance to English leadership in Western Europe. Very little on developments in the Hapsburg led Eastern Europe and philosophical developments in what would become Germany q50 years later,.

This is an outstanding book. The scope of Hazard's evaluation of the changing components of European thinking is accurately reflected in the title, with its careful delineation of dates. The full text runs to 447 pages, so this a thorough treatment of the subject, and one of the beauties of it lies in Hazard's biographical sketches of movers and shakers such as Pierre Bayle, Richard Simon, Bossuet, Locke and others. As one reviews their contributions to the ferment of intellectual novelty which characterises this period, you can see all the seeds of Enlightenment thinking which is looming on the horizon, and indeed precursors of the 19th Century liberal thinking which sought to reinvent faith in the mould of Enlightenment subjectivism.Offhand, I cannot think of a more useful introduction to such a range of thinkers and authors. My own studies have benefited enormously from the springboard kindly provided by Paul Hazard - and one wonders what more useful work he would have delivered to us, had he survived past 1944. ([...]). Hazard's use of language is very much of the period, but it does not take long to fall into the cadences of his writing, which is far from unengaged with the ironies, subjectivism and variable rationalities of the various modes of thinking that he describes. At times, I would wish that he might let us know (clearly) what he thinks of a given thinker or ideology, but it is difficult to penetrate his urbanity.If one was to be harsh, the weak point of the book lies in its 'Conclusion' - yet a moment's thought brings some leniency. How would one draw conclusions from such a period of change? Indeed, the valuable lesson that Hazard draws is the one we find in Ecclesiastes: there is nothing new under the sun. The new ideas which ferment together to give rise to Enlightenment thinking, are in fact reiterations of older Renaissance thinking, which in turn is a recapitulation of still more ancient ideas. In this sense, Hazard demonstrates very clearly to the reader why a Classical education is absolutely vital, and why its absence in modern, secular educational systems is to be lamented.

Only read the beginning. Its prose is so rhetoric it makes for very uncomfortable reading.

Although at times difficult to read, unless you know a vast amount of that era's names, it is very rewarding in the end. Amazing book.