In his book A Revolution of the Mind, Jonathan Israel, one of the leading historians of the Enlightenment on a global scale, identifies the philosophical roots of modern ideals of equality, freedom, tolerance, and self-determination of peoples in the less "respected" layers of Enlightenment thought – in the stream of ideas that he himself calls Radical Enlightenment.

During the revolutionary decades of the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s, the emergence of Radical Enlightenment on the historical stage triggered intense reactions. This opposition was due to the tendency of traditional society to defend the principles of monarchy, aristocracy, imperial power, and racial hierarchy, which were associated with the maintenance of ecclesiastical authority, social inequality, religious discrimination, and the extensive privileges of dominant groups.

In recent decades, Jonathan Israel's work has overturned prevailing notions of the Enlightenment, transforming, among other things, the spatiotemporal coordinates of the phenomenon. The transnational movement of the Enlightenment began in 1650 in the Netherlands, spread throughout Europe and America, and took on universal dimensions during the 1770s. The author reveals the contradictions and illuminates the intellectual strategies and alliances that shaped the Enlightenment venture.