Journal of the History of Philosophy

418 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 24:3 JULY i986 those seeking only limited certainty needs to be recognized, and Professor Shapiro has done so. The book brings a wealth of material together under this banner. But the actual struggle of ideas that went on needs to be kept in mind also if we are to comprehend what happened and if we are to realize the mixed legacy and unresolved conflicts we have acquired from the seventeenth-century developments in the theory of knowledge and its applications. I should add a few further complaints. There is no bibliography. The footnotes are all in the back of the book, and the publisher has not seen fit to provide clues as to what pages they relate to. And, finally, for no apparent reason, the name of the Cambridge Platonist Cudworth is listed and printed as "Ralph Cudsworth." RICHARD H. POPKIN Washington University Jack Fruchtman, Jr. The ApocalypticPolitics of Richard Price andJoseph Priestley:A Study in Late Eighteenth-Century English Millennialism. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 73, part 4. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society , 1983. Pp. l~5. $to.oo. Beginning perhaps in x949 with E. L. Tuveson's Millennium and Utop/a, a now rapidly growing body of scholarship has shown that the Judaeo-Christian apocalyptic played an altogether crucial role in shaping European thought between 15oo and 18oo. A sizable portion of this scholarship has argued persuasively that in some contexts the apocalyptic proved an essential catalyst in the development and triumph of liberal democratic values---and, more broadly, in the creation of secular modes of discourse. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the anglophone cultures, and Professor Fruchtman's new study of the radical English Unitarians, Joseph Priestly and Richard Price, illustrates just how dosely the sacred drama could become interwoven into the aspirations of the age of the democratic revolutions. Price and Priestley posited a "rational Christianity" in which God's spirit so permeated the world's structure and processes that the traditional distinction between active mind and inert matter--and even between Creator and creation--tended to break down. This perception underwrote both their theology and their science. For them the saint and the citizen, the godly company and the democratic republic, also became indistinguishable, and the triumph of political liberty was nothing less than the historical redemption. Indeed, this culmination of human development, conceived of at once as transforming institutions and raising consciousness, would usher in the messianic age prophesied in scripture. Any obstruction to free speech, any impediment to the free exchange of ideas therefore frustrated human destiny and was inherently sinful: the Baconian motto, the eschatological slogan of seventeenth-century English science--"many shall run to and fro [in the latter days], and knowledge shall increase" (Dan. l~.4)---still spoke cogently. Religious discrimination, the Test Act, the Corporation Act, and all the repressive legislation of Hanoverian England would be swept away. Implacably hos- BOOK REVIEWS 419 tile to slavery, they in fact opposed any fiscal or political arrangement which appeared to compromise moral autonomy and civic capacity. Lords, bishops, kings, popes were all antichristian in that they obstructed the divine programmatic---and, notably the papacy, had been specifically anticipated and so described by the prophets and the apostles. So too the French and American Revolutions possessed the greatest eschatological significance, and these events convinced them that the millennial era was imminent. The run-up to the final resolution of human experience involved such long-established Protestant expectations about the latter days as the restoration of the Jews to Israel, the destruction of the Turkish Empire, and the decline of the Papacy. Priesdey, who lived till 18o4, appears to have seen Napoleon fulfilling that ancient tradition of a last world emperor before the return of Christ. In the millennium Christ would literally rule on earth and at some point a resurrection would take place. Within this framework Price and Priestley found many areas of disagreement, which Fruchtman reviews in considerable detail. And yet all of these disagreements proved surprisingly secondary, constituting different ways of articulating their overwhelming commitment to the republic and the millennium. Fruchtman's study becomes less satisfactory when...