The Political Possibilities of Moral Realism: The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans, Margaret C. Jacob; Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, M. H. Abrams

Abstract:This essay explores a common theme in Margaret Jacob's The Radical Enlightenment and M. H. Abrams's Natural Supernaturalism, arguing they traverse the trajectory of a doctrine that may be called "realism about values" from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century and the political possibilities it offers for a form of radicalism that stands apart from the political commitments of the orthodox Enlightenment. Such radicalism stresses the ideal of overcoming alienation and reconfigures the great ideals of the Enlightenment—liberty and equality—to nest within this more fundamental ideal, addressing the chronic tension and trade-off between liberty and equality as standardly conceived.