Israel 2005, 352
“Around 1720, British ʻDeismʼ looked a dynamic cultural and intellectual force;
but it tended to recede, from the 1720s, both in local vitality and from continental
philosophical debates. If, from Blount onwards, British ʻDeismʼ bore Spinozaʼs, as
well as Hobbesʼs, imprint even in the case of Shaftesbury who expressly repudiated
their thought, in the longer run, non-providentialist Deism in Britain notably failed
to integrate a comprehensive toleration, freedom of thought, individual liberty,
rejection of religious authority, republican virtue, democratic republicanism, and
equality into a coherent radical intellectual system by means of the monist philosophical
apparatus at hand. British Deism, despite its republicanism, perhaps
revealed itself to be au fond more Hobbesian and Humean in orientation than
Spinozist.40 If some British, as well as most continental, observers clearly saw that
ʻthe most applauded Doctor of modern atheism, Spinosaʼ had, as Leland put it, also
ʻtaken the most pains to form it into a systemʼ,4¹ in Britain, it was precisely that
broad radical intellectual system with its attendant democratic and egalitarian consequences
which was avoided.
In any case, by the mid eighteenth century the so-called ʻDeist controversyʼ had
largely spent itself and ceased to be central to British culture.4² At the same time,
republican radicalism, as we have seen, did not so much disappear as adjust to the
changing British political reality in compliant and compromising ways.4³ In his
later years, Toland became the tireless apologist of a faction which tried to merge
republicanism with monarchism, rendering it not merely compatible, but closely
integrated with, a monarchical, aristocratic, and imperial world system.44 He had all
along helped publicize the suitability and dynastic claims of the House of Hanover
but little by little this became more central to his endeavours, gradually softening
his republican edge.45 With his spate of tracts of the years 1711†“14, claiming that
the Hanoverian Succession by permanently excluding Stuart divine right monarchy,
entrenching toleration and civil liberty, and curbing the High Church reaction of
Queen Anneʼs reign (1702†“14) would best secure what he and his allies judged the
main gains of the Glorious Revolution, the ideological fusion of republicanism
with a new version of British mixed monarchy was already largely complete.
If, as a critique of revelation and miracles, British ʻDeismʼ retained much of its
vigour into the mid eighteenth century and beyond, maturing in particular into the
sceptical philosophy of Hume and anticlerical historiography of Gibbon, Humeʼs

Champion, Republican Learning, 116†“18, 120, 123†“4, 129†“30, 132†“5.
politics and social and moral thought were even more conservative than those of
Shaftesbury,Toland,Molesworth, and Collins and, by his time, rejection of the radical
approach to social and moral issues had become predominant within, and typical
of, British Deism generally. At the same time, it seems this broad retreat from
the wider-ranging republican legacy of the recent past, and decreasing participation
in the continental intellectual debates, resulted not from any specifically intellectual
factors but was due rather to social, cultural, and political conditions in
Britain, Ireland, and America.

40 Ellenzweig,ʻFaith of Unbelief ʼ, 44. 4¹ Leland, A View, iii. 21.
4² Brown,ʻIntroductionʼ, 10; Porter, Enlightenment, 97†“8.
4³ Pocock,ʻSignificance of 1688ʼ, 278, 291; Champion, Republican Learning, 116†“17.
44 Champion, Republican Learning, 133†“6; Zurbuchen,ʻRepublicanismʼ, 50.
45 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 449, 476†“7, 483; Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, 171†“3,

Leave a Reply