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Week of 29 January 1999 Vol. II, No. 21 Feature Article Talkin' about revolutions Benedict Lecturer has personal stake in Enlightenment's everyday radicals By Hope Green Margaret Jacob has identified with populist causes all her life. So it's no wonder the Enlightenment expert is fascinated by history's grassroots rebels. "I'm interested in people who went against the grain, who didn't belong to the Church of England or dissenters from it -- people who were outright heretical or even atheistic," says the internationally renowned scholar of the 18th century. "I'm interested in the spectrum of beliefs and values you'd find among those who are educated and those who are not." Margaret Jacob, professor of history at UCLA, will present a series of six lectures at BU on The Culture of Politics in Early Modern Europe. Photo by Barry Slobin Jacob, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles, has been selected to deliver this year's Robert P. Benedict Lectures in the History of Political Thought, sponsored by the political science department at CAS. Benedict was a Boston University professor of political science whose will, in 1965, established a fund for annual lectures by specialists in the history of political philosophy. The program was revived last year after a decade-long hiatus. Beginning February 4, in a six-part lecture series titled The Culture of Politics in Early Modern Europe, Jacob will explore the relationship between religious dissent and political radicalism in the 17th and 18th centuries. She is known for her unconventional approach to studying the Enlightenment, the era in Western Europe when superstition gave way to science and prominent intellectuals challenged the divine right of kings. "The traditional way to study the Enlightenment was to look at a few great thinkers," Jacob says. "I see the Enlightenment as a much more complex process of interactions among a variety of people. The publishers, booksellers, journalists, and anonymous writers of that time were in many ways just as important in creating momentum as were great philosophers such as Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau." A significant theme of her discussions at BU, she says, will be the paradigm in which the early modern Europeans viewed science, politics, and religion as interconnected. "They saw knowledge about nature generated through systematic inquiry as having a religious meaning," she says. "For them, nature gave signals; it had ways of showing human beings how to practice morality and conduct the state. That kind of interplay between the moral, the human, and the natural was very much in the minds of the Europeans. "In the course of the 18th century, these relationships remained," Jacob says, "but they became more abstract, so science became a model for the way in which all human inquiry should be conducted." Intriguing to Jacob is the cultural shift toward the secular in Western Europe during the 18th century, "when for large numbers of people, religion became a separate compartment and didn't permeate their lives as it once had." Much of her work looks at the relationship between radicalism and the American, French, and Dutch revolutions. Her 1991 book Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth Century Europe explores the role of Masonic lodges of the 17th and 18th centuries in spreading such democratic ideas as the right of free assembly and representative government. Benedict Lecture series schedule This year's Robert P. Benedict Lectures in the History of Political Thought will be held at Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, 635 Commonwealth Ave., Room 102. All lectures are free and open to the public. Margaret Jacob's schedule is as follows: Thinking About Early Modern Political Thought and Practice, Feb. 4, 7 p.m. The Populist Origins of the European Enlightenment: The Crisis of Absolutism, Feb. 5, 2 p.m. English Commonwealthmen and Dutch Republicans: 1688-1747, Feb. 18, 7 p.m. Revolutions and Constitutionalism: The Cultural Meaning of Freemasonry, March 18, 7 p.m. The Political Implications of the New Sociability: An International Republican Conversation, April 15, 7 p.m. English Radicalism from John Wilkes to the 1790s, April 16, 2 p.m. The academic study of ordinary citizens challenging the establishment resonates for Jacob in a personal way. Her Catholic working-class parents immigrated to the United States from Northern Ireland, where they had refused to identify themselves with the British crown. During the 1960s, while earning her B.A. at St. Joseph's College in Brooklyn, N.Y., she worked for an underground anticlerical newspaper called The Lutheran. "I was keenly aware of the force and power of religion in people's lives," she says, "and I revolted against it." Jacob earned her Ph.D. in history at Cornell University in 1968, at a time when few women were accepted to the doctoral program. Four years later, she participated in a floor fight at an American Historical Association convention, demanding that all academic positions be publicly advertised so as to open doors for female and minority candidates. Previously, she says, most of the hiring was conducted through an informal "old-boy system." Such battles waged back then by Jacob and others were, she says, "part of a populist democratizing tendency in academia, a more democratic vision of the way society and culture should be organized. So I'm sure this has influenced the kind of scholarship we do." Editor of The Enlightenment: A Reader (1998), Jacob is currently working with coauthor Lynn Hunt on a book about the British radicals of the 1790s. Also among her publication credits are Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (1997) and Telling the Truth About History (coauthored with Joyce Appleby and Lynn Hunt, 1994).