Recent Work on Spinoza

More than any other thinker of his time, Spinoza continues to interest philosophers. This may be related to his variety of guises. There is Spinoza the atheist and Spinoza the “God intoxicated” philosopher so much loved by German Romantics; Spinoza the renegade Jew who preferred Jesus to Moses and Spinoza the precursor to political Zionism; Spinoza the defender of liberal democracy and Spinoza the proponent of “might makes right.” Each of these guises appears in the books under review, and each makes its claim on our attention.

I begin with the late Richard H. Popkin’s Spinoza. Popkin writes about the Jewish influences on Spinoza and the religious milieu in which he grew up. His conclusion is that, when all is said and done, is that we are still not sure what caused Amsterdam’s Jewish community to expel a young thinker of genius. Excommunications were not uncommon in Amsterdam and were undertaken for a variety of reasons, practical and theoretical. A person could be excommunicated for failing to pay a debt, insulting a leader of the community, or making allegedly heretical statements. As Popkin indicates, all the community had to do was get a list of the standard curses, fill in the proper name, and proceed with the expulsion. On the other hand, the tone of Spinoza’s ḥerem was unusually harsh.¹ Because other Jews associated or collaborated with Protestant thinkers without causing upheaval, it is hard to believe that Spinoza’s ties would have shocked anyone. Much the same is true of his interest in Cartesianism. Although these ideas did threaten traditional ways of thinking, the community’s leaders did not express outrage.

Popkin engages Steven Nadler’s claim that the root cause for Spinoza’s excommunication was his view on immortality but counters by saying that we do not know what his view was at the time of the excommunication and that Sephardic communities in northern Europe were less interested in doctrine and ritual than in preserving Jewish life in the midst of a wider Christian society.² Unlike Uriel Da Costa, Spinoza did not attempt to get himself reinstated. Nor did he cite his excommunication as a reason for leaving Amsterdam. According to Popkin (p. 38): “Spinoza went off, not as a victim or a pariah but as an independent Portuguese person living in Amsterdam” and thus he “became one of the first people to live outside of any religious affiliation.” In short, he became secularized.

It is in this context that we should approach Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (hence TTP). Based on its long subtitle (by means of which it is shown not only that Freedom of Philosophizing can be allowed in Preserving Piety and the Peace of the Republic: but also that it is not possible for such Freedom to be upheld except when accompanied by the Peace of the Republic and Piety Themselves), the TTP was written to show not only that freedom of thought does not threaten social harmony but that freedom cannot be maintained unless accompanied by it. Popkin considers reactions to the TTP, including the many calls that it be banned or refuted, and the claim that Spinoza was a Cartesian who pushed the master’s doctrine to its ultimate conclusion—pantheism, which for many was tantamount to atheism. Popkin himself twice says (pp. 80, 83) that according to Spinoza everything “is God and is in God.” This, I fear, is misleading. It is true that for Spinoza God is the only substance so that whatever else exists must exist in God or be conceived through God. But this does not mean that things exist in God in the way that...