Radical and Deist Writing

Justin Champion has recently recalled how Margaret Jacob pointedly suggested that ‘the militant atheism of the High Enlightenment was spawned by a radical English commonwealth tradition’. He added that earlier historians (such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Voltaire) had already ‘inverted the commonplace narrative of French radicalism and Engish narrative’. However, the argument needs to be made for a much broader European ‘portability and permeability’ of radical ideas (a ‘textually continuous relationship’) – just consider the unignorable and persistent links between sixteenth-century heretical radicalism, libertinage, and deism. This article has been co-authored by Giovanni Tarantino (first autohor) and Nicholas McDowell.