The enlightenment needs rescuing, or so thinks Jonathan Israel, the pre-eminent historian of 17th-century Holland. In 2001 he pu

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问题     The enlightenment needs rescuing, or so thinks Jonathan Israel, the pre-eminent historian of 17th-century Holland. In 2001 he published Radical Enlightenment. He now offers a second Volume with a third to come. (46)The three volumes will be the first comprehensive history of the Enlightenment for decades—and Mr. Israel’s groundbreaking interpretation looks set to establish itself as the one to beat.
    The period was once thought of as a glorious chapter in the history of mankind, a time when the forces of light (science, progress and tolerance) triumphed over the forces of darkness (superstition and prejudice). Today, the Enlightenment tends to be dismissed. (47)Post-modernists attack it for being biased, self-deceived and ultimately responsible for the worst in Western civilization. Post-colonialists accuse it of being Eurocentric, an apology for imperialism. Nationalist historians reject the idea of a coherent universal movement, preferring to talk about the English, French, even Icelandic Enlightenments.
    Mr. Israel has set himself the task oil repelling these critics and re-establishing the period as the defining episode in the liberation of man. His arguments are convincing. He contends that there were two Enlightenments, one Radical, and the other Moderate. The Radicals, inspired by Spinoza, were materialists, atheists and equalities. (48)The Moderates, who followed Locke and Newton, were conservative and more at home than the Radicals in the hierarchical and deeply religious world of 18th-century Europe. They advocated only a partial Enlightenment.
    In Mr. Israel’s opinion, the Radicals offered the only true Enlightenment, giving us democracy, equality, individual liberty and secular morality. The Moderates, on the other hand, have left an ambiguous and, in the end, harmful legacy. While promoting tolerance, they remained uncomfortable with the idea of universal equality. While advancing reason, they failed to divorce morality from religion and tried to rationalize faith. (49)Mr. Israel argues that for as long as historians treat the two wings of the Enlightenment as a single movement, they have misunderstood the phenomenon. Worst still, they supply today’s critics with the evidence they need to blacken the movement.
    This re-evaluation makes for an unfamiliar picture of the Enlightenment and its torchbearers. According to Mr. Israel, "enlightened values" were born not in England but in Holland, and he re-casts men such as Locke, Voltaire and even Hume, once thought of as champions of the party of light, as apologists for colonialism and enemies of equality. In addition, Mr. Israel would like his book to be studied beyond academia. In an ideal world everyone would be reading it. (50)His stupendous research and grasp of the sources are such that few will contest his core argument that the Enlightenment was a coherent, Europe-wide phenomenon, intellectual in origin, which represented a profound shift in the way that men thought about themselves and the world around them.


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答案Israel声称,只要历史学家还把这两支启蒙运动力量混为一谈,他们仍然会在理解这一历史事件上陷入误区。

解析 as long as的正确理解;wing、phenomenon的意译;整句话的意译。Mr. Israel argues that后接了一句宾语从句,此句主干为Mr. Israel argues that sth.。宾语从句按照正常语序翻译;as long as意思是"provided that,since",此处译成"只要";wing原意为"翅膀,机翼,侧面",由上文得知,激进派和温和派都领导了启蒙运动,所以wing译成"支";phenomenon原意为"现象,事物",这里译成"事件",启蒙运动是发生在过去的,所以为历史事件。
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