Jonathan Israel
Practically all modern scholars who study the cercle spinoziste tie the group phenomenon, the emergence of the Radical Enlightenment framework in its earliest manifestation, to the fact that the United Provinces were republican and not monarchical, were religiously pluriform not uniform, lacked a strong state church, and were a society where censorship was comparatively weak. To this we might add that the ruling oligarchy lacked genuinely aristocratic credentials and were mostly an informal rentier oligarchy. Dutch Golden Age culture, moreover, was a milieu in which Cartesianism scored a precocious and unparalleled general breakthrough in intellectual life during the 1650s and 1660s.1 It would be fair to say that there is general agreement about all of this. Nevertheless, there is still a need to emphasize the point yet further, and especially explain more fully how and why, structurally, the Radical Enlightenment commenced in Holland in the mid-seventeenth century rather than elsewhere in the world, why we need to focus on later Dutch Golden Age when elucidating the origins of the Radical Enlightenment. Attention needs to be drawn especially to the systemic, persistent vulnerability of seventeenth-century Dutch oligarchic republicanism, the system of governance and framework of liberties forged and presided over by Oldenbarnevelt, De Witt and the Holland town regents.
Radical Enlightenment is defined here as an intellectual tendency combining two fundamental components: rejection of religious authority from law, politics, and education, on the one hand, together with democratizing republican social and political programs, on the other. Specifically, this combination of elements reflects the radical tendency’s consistent ideological core through the long eighteenth-century down to the revolutionary era (1775–1848). It was this combination of elements that provided the thread of philosophical continuity linking the successive stages, from the 1650s to the 1848 revolutions.2
Politically, down to the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century, the Dutch provinces and cities remained markedly less stable than the Swiss patrician republics of Berne, Zurich, and Geneva, or the Italian aristocratic republics of Venice and Genoa. It is especially important to consider the implications of the four great Dutch political crises of 1618–19 (Maurits versus Oldenbarnevelt), of 1650 (Willem II versus Amsterdam) and 1672 (Willem III versus the “True Freedom” oligarchs)—as well as, in a later context, of the Dutch political crisis of 1747–8—for creating a practical political as well as theoretical context in which “mixed government” headed by a semi-monarchical figure—already a particular object of Van den Enden’s scorn in 1665—was locked in deep, recurring, and irresolvable conflict with a republicanism too oligarchic and narrowly based easily to survive intact. The republicanism of the regents, De Witt’s “True Freedom,” was never anything other than a weak and insecure edifice of liberty and toleration because it was too narrowly based ever to receive wide support: it was and was seen to be—especially by Van den Enden, Koerbagh, the Brothers De la Court, and Spinoza—insufficiently broadly based and insufficiently “democratic” to use Spinoza’s term. In each of these four great political crises, the regent oligarchy was overwhelmed for longer or shorter intervals by a formidable opposing alliance. This was the combination of a powerful and ambitious prince working together with a public church rallying the lower orders behind them against the regent oligarchy striving to uphold toleration and individual liberty. Thus the “True Freedom” was trapped in conflict with a large body of theologians who joined with the Stadholder and common people during each successive bout of struggle chiefly by mobilizing an intolerant and authoritarian confessional orthodoxy. Theology, in other words, pressed together with the monarchical principle to squeeze the “True Freedom” championed by De Witt.
The cercle spinoziste needed a fundamentally new strategy for defending the Republic and this need was directly linked to their fascination with the power of theology and the challenge of trying to weaken that power. According to Spinoza, dread is the cause of “superstition,” which means that everybody is prone to it. But from this it also follows, he argues in the Preface to the Theological-Political Treatise, that by itself “superstition” is highly unstable and changeable and cannot easily be hitched to the needs of a sovereign ruler or a durable church without elaborate ceremonies and doctrines, the underpinning and façade, to give it institutional stability. “This is because such instability does not spring from reason but from passion alone, in fact from the most powerful of the passions. Therefore it is easy for people to be captivated by a superstition, but difficult to ensure that they remain loyal to it.”3 Samuel Shirley’s rendering here makes it difficult for the reader to grasp that by this Spinoza means it is difficult to get people to remain steadfastly within the same system of belief.4 The Latin original text, “Quam itaque facile est, ut homines quovis superstitionis genere capiantur, tam difficile contra est efficere, ut in uno, eodemque perstent” [G III 6], makes it perfectly clear, though, that Spinoza is speaking here of the difficulty of getting men to remain attached to the same system of belief, which to him is “superstition.” Left to themselves the common people would never adhere to a “superstition” for very long, but rather constantly be searching on all sides for new forms of credulity. Such instability is highly dangerous and continually causes revolts and upheavals. Hence, up to a point, a stabilized, institutionalized system of “superstition” achieved by the immense efforts everywhere made to adorn religion “whether true or false with pomp and ceremony so that everyone would find it more impressive than anything else and observe it zealously with the highest degree of fidelity”5 is decidedly better as regards political and social stability. Nevertheless, stability built on such institutionalized “superstition” involves, Spinoza shows, great disadvantages for society too.
The Turks, Spinoza, suggests, have been particularly successful in stabilizing “superstition,” to such an extent indeed that they believe “that it is wicked even to argue about religion” and fill everyone’s mind with “so many prejudices that they leave no room for sound reason, let alone doubt.” One cannot do better by way of stabilizing society than the Ottoman Empire and there is certainly no more effective way to entrench the power of a sovereign ruler than by closely associating him with such institutionalized “superstition.” To Spinoza, this is a determining fact of politics.
It may indeed be the highest secret of monarchical government and utterly essential to it, to keep men deceived, and to disguise the fear that sways them with the specious name of religion, so that they will fight for their servitude as if they were fighting for their own deliverance, and will not think it humiliating but supremely glorious to spill their blood and sacrifice their lives for the glorification of a single man.6
By “slavery” or “servitude” Spinoza here means a condition where citizens are obliged to submit to a sovereign’s commands but where these do not promote the “common good” but rather the ruler’s own advantage.7 Furthermore, escaping from political bondage in Spinoza is closely related to the individual’s struggle to escape from moral bondage, through developing one’s reasoning powers and resisting the passions, and both forms of escape are far harder for the prejudiced, superstitious, and credulous to achieve than for the rational minded; indeed, for the superstitious, true citizenship is effectively impossible.8 Spinoza’s concept of citizenship is thus simultaneously pivotal to his political theory and his general philosophy. Democracy is the only form of state where philosophy as well as freedom to philosophize can flourish.9 Consequently, in a free republic defined as one where the free judgment of the individual is not in fact shackled “with prejudices or constraints of any kind,” nothing could be more detrimental than the flourishing of the well-adorned and more stable variety of credulity and “superstition.” So while institutionalizing and stabilizing “superstition” is the key to establishing a stable monarchy, in a free republic nothing matters more than preventing laws, constraints, and penalties attached to belief and doctrines which by definition are always “prejudices,” deflecting coercive dogma of whatever kind, from gaining the force of law.10
If one seeks to change a despotic, authoritarian regime into a better one, contends Spinoza, the first priority, and an absolute sine qua non, is to defeat credulity and “superstition.” So essential is defeating credulity and “superstition” in Spinoza’s philosophy that if one cannot weaken “superstition” and ecclesiastical authority, then there is no point in even attempting to overthrow tyranny.11 One sees then, given this Spinozist framework, that there is nothing at all forced or artificial about postulating as a fundamental and defining feature of the Radical Enlightenment its tying its assault on ecclesiastical power to a wider propensity to social and political subversion. Moreover, monarchy in this political theory is inherently tyrannical unless heavily circumscribed with constitutional limitations. Spinoza admires the Aragonese Revolt against Philip II and detests Philip’s monarchy in its Castilian format. Rather than speak of his “distrust,” it is better to say that Spinoza harbored a deep dislike of and antagonism toward monarchy.12
It is also in the Theological-Political Treatise’s preface that Spinoza launches into his famous eulogy of the Dutch Republic. Spinoza here is contrasting free republics specifically with “monarchy” and not “tyranny” and this stands out as a fundamental principle of his thought. Consequently, it is unfortunate that Shirley’s version mistranslates the key lines, rendering “the highest secret of monarchical government” as “the supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay.” (The Silverthorne-Israel rendering here also needs, and has been given, some adjustment.) This is a serious double mistranslation since there is no reference to “mystery” or “tyranny” here: what Spinoza is referring to is the ecclesiastical technique or means of controlling the monarch’s subjects. “Verum enimvero si regiminis Monarchici summum sit arcanum, ejusque omnino intersit, homines deceptos habere, et metum, quo retineri debent, specioso religionis nomine adumbrare, ut pro servitio, tanquam pro salute pungent” [G III 7]13 should be translated: “If, indeed it is the highest secret of the monarchical form of government, and utterly basic to it, to keep men deceived and represent the fear by which they should be held back under the specious name of religion so that they fight for their servitude as if for their salvation.” Pina Totaro correctly translates the main phrase into Italian as “il più grande segreto del regime monarchico.”14 We must here avoid employing such misleading terms as “mystery” and “tyranny” because such wording altogether obscures what Spinoza is saying, namely, that monarchy is always inherently defective but that it is consistently and efficiently despotic only and exclusively when in firm alliance with organized religion.
A crucial component of this fundamental alliance between monarchy and organized religion, the key to understanding the functioning of monarchy, were the revenues and authority of the Church and the careers these provided. Whatever the merits of Christianity per se, because its offices were lucrative and its pastors regarded by the common people as great dignitaries, “those who came forward to fill the sacred offices were consequently the worst kind of people and the impulse to spread God’s religion degenerated into sordid greed and ambition.”15 Spinoza, who has considerable respect for the pure pre-Apostolic Christianity offered by Christ, has none at all for the Christianity of the Apostles and those who came after the Apostles. “Unsurprisingly, then, nothing remains of the religion of the early Church except its external ritual (by which the common people seem to adulate rather than venerate God) and faith amounts to nothing more than credulity and prejudices [quam credulitas et praejudicia].”16 This amounted to a sustained and vehement attack on Protestantism, Catholicism, and the Orthodox Church all at once, a program for which Spinoza could expect sympathy and support from his several Collegiant and Socinian as well as his freethinking friends. His harshness here, emotionally powered no doubt by the horrific religious persecution to which many members of his own family had been subjected in southern Portugal, extends to his saying: “And what prejudices they are! [At quae praejudicia!] They turn rational men into brutes since they completely prevent each person from using his own free judgment and distinguishing truth from falsehood. They seem purposely designed altogether to extinguish the light of the intellect.”17 Again Shirley’s rendering notably weakens and obscures the meaning by translating “credulitas et praejudicia” as “credulity and biased dogma” and, worse, “At quae praejudicia” as “But what dogma!”18 Spinoza’s target is not just “dogma” but all religious authority. When Spinoza speaks of “scripturam sine praejudicio interpretari,” he does not mean the interpretation of Scripture in a manner free of dogma, but, rather, free of all theological notions.19
The alliance between monarchy and religious authority is the chief basis of despotism, as Spinoza analyzes it. At the same time, an important component in the edifice of religious authority, he argues, and one fundamental to the “mysteries” he decries, are “the speculations of the Aristotelians and Platonists” [Aristotelicorum et Platonicorum speculationes] [G III 9].20 He accuses the theologians of having built their theology in considerable part on the constructs of Greek dualist philosophy and rendered the prophetic writings of the Old Testament entirely nonsensical by interpreting them in light of Aristotelian and Platonist concepts.21 It is far from surprising that the theologians have failed to add anything novel “on any philosophical question,” other than what had long been commonplace in ancient philosophy. “For if you ask what mysteries they discover hidden in Scripture, you will find nothing but the fabrications of Aristotle or Plato or some like philosopher which mostly could be more readily dreamt up by some layman than derived from Scripture by even the most consummate scholar.”22 This sustained polemic against Plato and Aristotle runs right through Spinoza’s oeuvre.23
In the concluding chapter of the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza reminds us that the subjugation of individual judgment by higher authority can never be complete but it can stretch very far and become systematically “violent” and oppressive. Insofar as such subjugation of judgment is to be “considered possible, it would be most likely under a monarchical government and least probable under a democratic one where all the people, or a large part of them, hold power collectively.” Shortly after this follows Spinoza’s famous line: “Finis ergo Reipublicae revera libertas est” [G III 241].24 It is hardly open to question that Spinoza is arguing strongly in favor of the democratizing republic against monarchical government and that this is the core of his republican creed especially in the period before the Anglo-French assault on the Dutch Republic and the consequent Orangist coup of 1672. It is true that his perspective is somewhat modified in the later Tractatus Politicus. But in both works he sets out a conception of republican citizenship that represents a political philosophy dramatically and fundamentally different from that of Hobbes and Locke.25
Spinoza has two connected main aims in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, he explains in his preface: to emancipate philosophy from being shackled and “enslaved” to theology and to priesthoods, and to help free men from lay despotism and tyrannical potentates, in other words from all political authorities using divine sanction, priestly sanction, and revelation to buttress the laws and compel men to bow down before their appointed religious spokesmen and institutions, the social and educational values priesthoods proclaim. Accordingly, in Spinoza’s philosophy, linking democratic republicanism to rejecting religious authority philosophically is the basic strategy from the outset. This feature of Spinoza’s thought that so decisively sets his political thought apart from that of Hobbes, Locke, and all other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political writers likewise typified the outlook of the cercle spinoziste as a whole. When seeking an historical-philosophical explanation for this unique group phenomenon we should, therefore, undoubtedly take into account the peculiarity and uniqueness of the political and religious circumstances of the prosperous and successful but politically precarious Dutch Republic during the First Stadholderless period (1650–72). Its specific circumstances provided the specific setting in which this complex new phenomenon could germinate and take shape.
Although there is a considerable measure of agreement among those working on Spinoza’s circle from the 1650s to the 1670s about the general character, aims, and philosophical concerns of the group, not much of this has so far rubbed off on the more general discussion about the European and trans-Atlantic Enlightenment as such. Recent writers on the Enlightenment proceed, just as before, without attributing any importance to the circle and mostly without mentioning them. This is true not only of British and American scholars like Anthony Pagden and Matthew Stewart but even of Dutch writers such as Rienk Vermij, who in his recent work De Geest uit de fles: De Verlichting en het verval van de confessionele samenleving26 makes no mention of Franciscus van den Enden, the Koerbaghs, Lodewijk Meyer, Abraham Cuffeler, and the others, even in his index. In British and American work on Spinoza since the start of the new millennium there has been an increased willingness to accept, or at least consider, the idea of Spinoza as a central figure in the Western Enlightenment and a revolutionary force, and there has even been an occasional reference to his connection with—and this kind of Enlightenment’s rootedness in—“certain dissident factions in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic,” as one scholar put it, but, again, we usually encounter no mention of Van den Enden, the Koerbaghs, Meyer, Cuffeler, and the others, whether individually or as an active long-standing network.27
The cercle spinoziste was a network forged by political and social crisis from which a common pool of ideas emerged. They were not a study circle simply imbibing the ideas of Spinoza, but a questioning, reforming, subversive creative network active in many spheres of study and the arts. Michiel Wielema has pointed out that Adriaan Koerbagh developed “some Spinozistic notions before they had been published by Spinoza himself” and that at no stage was he simply replicating Spinoza’s ideas; rather, Koerbagh showed considerable originality, and when attacking religious authority he expressed views “certainly far more outspokenly anti-Christian than anything Spinoza ever dared to write.”28 Much the same is true of Van den Enden, who was actually the first to couple the attack on religious authority with an uncompromising democratic republicanism irrespective of whether or not he did foreshadow Spinoza’s one-substance philosophical monism. Van den Enden was undoubtedly the precursor of the whole group when it came to openly calling for democracy and in propagating in print the crucial principle that enlightenment and educating the people against “superstition” is the only way to combat political and religious tyranny functioning together, the central principle Spinoza enunciates in the Preface to his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.29
Van den Enden was likewise the first to insist that any society aiming to encourage everyone to improve their attitude and outlook and conquer ignorance, fanaticism, and “superstition” has to be politically reorganized and can only arise on the basis of democracy allied to republicanism. Democracy, eulogized by Van den Enden as that form of government which is hardest and least likely to be captured by private interest in conflict with the “common good,”30 is here heavily suffused with an uncompromising anti-Orangist politics and an even greater hostility to ecclesiastical supervision of morality, society, and education. Toleration that is full and comprehensive, and respects the views of everyone equally, must be fostered and taught, while the religious authority that perennially opposes it must be unbendingly fought and overcome. Real toleration is not a principle that can simply be declared and safeguarded on the basis of existing institutions; rather, it is a precious social benefit that runs directly against the interests of the entire ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and monarchical establishment, and it must be doggedly fought for.
The heavy stress on equality of status, the equal right of everyone to pursue happiness in their own way, and on individual freedom of expression as a precondition for a flourishing democratic republic in Van den Enden, Koerbagh, the De la Courts, and Spinoza, along with the idea that the successful democratic republic is impossible without a degree of mass enlightenment that overthrows the ubiquitous hegemony of praejudicia and that enables men to correctly cultivate body and soul together, leads directly to the question of equal and universal human “rights.” Neither Spinoza, nor Van den Enden, nor the others speak of “rights”; what they do instead is continually insist on advancing what Van den Enden calls the “common” [alghemeene] “best” or “interest” [welstant], which is presented as the only secure way to advance the individual’s “particular” [byzondere] “best” or “interest” [welstant].31 Like Spinoza, Van den Enden is strongly infused with the idea of the particular or individual welstand consisting in each pursuing their happiness in their own way, as seems best to them, and that the pursuit of individual happiness is the inevitable goal of everyone, and something chiefly protected and furthered by government when the latter is genuinely committed to the common or general interest. It is this deeply un-Hobbesian and un-Lockean specifically Spinozistic emphasis on the equal necessity and right of everyone to pursue their individual happiness in the best way available, I would argue, and not the older, more deeply rooted theories of “rights” prevailing in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century and infusing Natural Law doctrines, which constitutes the true origin of the equal and universal “rights” that first explicitly appear on the scene in the early 1770s with the Histoire philosophique (1770), the political books of Baron d’Holbach and Claude Adrien Helvétius, and later, by 1776, with the texts of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, George Mason, Thomas Young, Ethan Allen, and other democratic republicans in the American colonies.
In his resolute critique of the Radical Enlightenment thesis, Theo Verbeek focuses on the relation between “naturalism” (“atheism”) or, even further back, “scientific” or “critical” thinking, on the one hand, and “natural rights” on the other. But he definitely appears to confuse “universal and equal human rights” based on the individual pursuit of “happiness” with the ideas of the Natural Law school and the philosophy of John Locke. It is a basic category mistake to confuse modern human rights with Natural Law theories and Locke’s system. The idea that once we decide to “think for ourselves,” as Verbeek argues, we also affirm natural rights or, inversely, that to affirm natural rights we should have a monist or naturalist philosophy is philosophically and historically naive. Natural rights are not innate ideas but must be constructed. They were first constructed (on the model of the notion of property) in late medieval theology and philosophy, the theory being further developed by Spanish Scholastics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—a context which is anything but atheist or naturalist. They were reform-related, partly on theological foundations, by Grotius (1583–1645), and developed into a full and comprehensive theory by Locke, whose theory in turn inspired the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (1789).32
Verbeek appreciates that Spinoza “consciously rejects contemporary foundations or theories of natural right,”33 but, making exactly the same mistake as Beth Lord, he fails to see that it is precisely natural inequality in the state of nature, and the resulting great inequality in human well-being, that renders it essential to construct a political framework of equality in the free republic.34 It is precisely the Spinozist denial that God is a lawgiver, that there is no natural right in nature, that makes it imperative to construct both our ethics and “the individual interest” on the basis of a socially constructed system of “good” and “evil” that has no basis in either nature or theology. It is because Spinoza reduces “natural rights” outside the state, in the state of nature, to a brutal chaos where ruthless and powerfully built men have more rights than women, children, and old men, that under “the state” the collective power of individuals can create a “right” which must now be as nearly as possible equalized (something conceivable only in his democratic republic). It is because there are no natural rights prior to society that that form of state that most effectively equalizes the individual pursuit of freedom and happiness, namely, democracy, is the sole means available to construct a social and ethical system of law and “natural right” based on equality.
Exactly this “rights” logic was adopted later by d’Holbach in the 1770s when he argued in his series of four books of political theory that the fundamental inequality of man in the state of nature is what renders equal “natural” rights necessary in a society that seeks to protect the rights of its citizens. For this reason, historians need to reject more emphatically than they have the view that Spinoza was not a forefather of “modern liberalism” because he failed to accord an “absolute worth” to the individual.35 The correct formulation is that it was Spinoza’s appreciation of man’s natural inequality that led directly to the pressing need to impose a system of individual equality lending the laws authority and enabling men to derive maximum benefit from society and which is, paradoxically, a “natural” remedy to natural inequality.
The Dutch Republic is the essential context for understanding the Radical Enlightenment’s beginnings, but it ceased to be central to the story after the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). Linking the broadest possible attack on religious authority to democratic republican political theory nevertheless remained the Radical Enlightenment’s most essential defining feature, most notably during the French Revolution. Tying the attack on religious authority closely to democratic republicanism is characteristic of the Marquis de Condorcet, Joseph-Antoine Cérutti, Camille Desmoulins, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and all the theorists and publicists of the democratic republican wing of the French Revolution, as well as of the Paineite tradition infusing the radical (democratic) wing of the American Revolution—represented in the United States by Thomas Young, Ethan Allen, Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, Joseph Palmer, and Thomas Jefferson himself. While the centrality of this linkage has indeed been denied by several notable critics of the Radical Enlightenment thesis such as Siep Stuurman, Ann Thomson, and Helena Rosenblatt, who all contend that there is no “necessary” connection between the push for equality and denial of religious authority, such rejectionism hardly seems a tenable or logical position. Rather, the opposite of their view is obviously far more convincing. Contrary to what they maintain, it should be more or less obvious that only through denying divine governance of human affairs, and ruling out revelation and miracles, could the moral and legal order, and hence the social system, be conceived as being not God-given and legitimately sanctioned and ordained by any ecclesiastical authority.
Equally, only by ruling out a conscious divine providence could one block philosophies embracing Locke’s “supra rationem.” Far from being a connection hard to sustain as these critics contend, in reality there is no other way to construct a full equality of interest and opinions in society. Only by systematically excluding revelation and theological doctrines, in every dimension of legal, educational, and political life, leaving reason and social utility to be the sole criteria of legitimacy in the social sphere, can a divinely sanctioned world order buttressing value systems and according priority of interest and opinions to the royal, aristocratic, ecclesiastical, and oligarchic, based on priestly sanction and support, be set wholly aside. Awareness of just how momentous and great a break this represented infused the Radical Enlightenment itself from its first stirrings in the 1650s down to its final defeat during and after the 1848 revolutions. Eliminating Aristotelianism, Platonism, and the “supra rationem,” indeed every conceivable ground for reconciliation between theology and philosophy and doing so uncompromisingly, a step later vigorously followed up by John Toland in the wake of Spinoza, specifically to counter Locke,36 was the sole and exclusive strategy capable of establishing anything resembling a comprehensive equality of interests, participation, expression, and representation in society and politics.
The Radical Enlightenment’s linkage of democratic republicanism with eliminating religious authority, then, is simultaneously an undeniable historical fact, in that the democratic republicans of the American and French Revolutions, with Condorcet and Paine at their head, like their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors, were mostly atheists, if not radical deists (or, otherwise, radical Unitarians, in the tradition of Jarig Jelles, Jan Rieuwertsz, John Jebb, Richard Price, and Joseph Priestley), and a crucial, indispensable, well-defined philosophical procedure. The uncompromising rejection of theology and priesthood was indeed, as Spinoza argued, the requisite and absolute sine qua non for a secular and naturalistic politics and social theory. What has aptly been called the “radicalization of the freedom to philosophize” by Spinoza was doubtless in one sense an outcome of the Cartesian philosophy; but it was ultimately a consequence of an uncompromising separation of philosophy and theology that enabled Spinoza and his circle to integrate the social and political dimensions of their thought to their naturalistic metaphysics in a revolutionary new manner.
In Spinoza, as Vicente Serrano recently expressed it, “knowledge is not a mere operation isolated from the rest of the life of individuals, but it is rather the life of individuals and their very will.”37 Radical Enlightenment is about revolutionizing all philosophy, politics, society, morality, and education by decisively and irrevocably changing the relationship between the individual and authority, between learning and “ignorance,” and between theologians and social reality.
Notes
1 Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 581–587, 889–931.
2 Jonathan Israel, “‘Radical Enlightenment’: A game-changing concept,” in Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment, ed. Steffen Ducheyne (New York: Routledge, 2017).
3 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 5 [TTP, pref., §§7–8]. [References to Spinoza’s TTP are given here by page number following Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise. References are also given to Curley’s edition in brackets.]
4 “So men’s readiness to fall victim to any kind of superstition makes it correspondingly difficult to persuade them to adhere to one and the same kind.” See Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Gebhardt edition, 1925), trans. Samuel Shirley (Brill: Leiden, 1989), 50.
5 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 5 [TTP, pref., §9].
6 Ibid., 6 [TTP, pref., §10].
7 See Susan James, Spinoza on Philosophy, Politics and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 255.
8 See Michael LeBuffe, From Bondage to Freedom: Spinoza on Human Excellence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 182–189.
9 James, Spinoza on Philosophy, 235, 253.
10 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 6 [TTP, pref., §10].
11 Ibid., 3–12 [TTP, pref.].
12 Cf. R. J. McShea, The Political Philosophy of Spinoza (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 116.
13 TTP, pref., §10.
14 Spinoza, Trattato teologico-politico, ed. Pina Totaro (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2007), 9.
15 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 7 [TTP, pref., §15].
16 Ibid., 7 [TTP, pref., §16].
17 Ibid., 7–8 [TTP, pref., §16].
18 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus [Shirley], 52–53. See also Emilia Giancotti Boscherini, Lexicon Spinozanum, 2 vols (The Hague: Springer, 1970), vol. 2, 858–860.
19 See, in particular, Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ch. 7.
20 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 8 [TTP, pref., §18].
21 Cf. Ibid., 8, 173 [TTP, pref., §18 and TTP, ch. xiii, §5].
22 Ibid., 173 [TTP, ch. xiii, §5].
23 See Wim Klever, Spinoza Classicus: Antieke bronnen van een modern denker (Budel: Damon, 2005), 79–92.
24 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 252 [TTP, ch. xx, §12].
25 Christophe Miqueu adopts a similar perspective with respect to Hobbes but aligns Locke and Spinoza more closely than is implied here. See Christophe Miqueu, Spinoza, Locke, et l’idée de citoyenneté: Une génération républicaine à l’aube des Lumières (Paris: Garnier Classique, 2012), 54.
26 Rienk Vermij, De Geest uit de fles: De Verlichting en het verval van de confessionele samenleving (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Nieuwezidjs, 2014).
27 See Christopher Norris, “Spinoza and the Conflict of Interpretations,” in Spinoza Now, ed. Dimitris Vardoulakis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 27 and in the same volume, Michael Mack, “Toward an Inclusive Universalism: Spinoza’s Ethics of Sustainability,” Spinoza Now, 103 and Warren Montag, “Interjecting Empty Spaces: Imagination and Interpretation in Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,” Spinoza Now, 161–164.
28 Michiel Wielema, The March of the Libertines. Spinozists and the Dutch Reformed Church (1660–1750) (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2004), 15, 85; see also Miqueu, Spinoza, Locke, et l’idée, 53–72.
29 Franciscus van Den Enden, Free Political Propositions and Considerations of State [1665], edited and translated by Wim Klever (Vrijstad, 2007), 191, 194.
30 Ibid., 156–160; Miqueu, Spinoza, Locke, et l’idée, 60–62.
31 See Franciscus van Den Enden, Vrije Politijke stellingen en Consideratien van staat [1665], ed. Wim Klever (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1992), 169–173; Wim Klever, “A New Source of Spinozism: Franciscus van den Enden,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 29, no. 4 (1991): 613–631, here 627.
32 Cf. Theo Verbeek, “Spinoza on Natural Rights,” Intellectual History Review 17, no. 3 (2007): 257–275, here 289.
33 Verbeek, “Spinoza on Natural Rights,” 264–265; Theo Verbeek, “Liberté, vertu, démocratie,” in Qu’est-ce que les Lumières “Radicales”: Libertinage, athéisme et spinozisme dans le tournant philosophique de l’âge classique, ed. Laurent Bove, Tristan Dagron, and Catherine Secrétan (Paris: Éditions d’Amsterdam, 2007), 366, 368.
34 Beth Lord, “Spinoza on Natural Inequality and the Fiction of Moral Equality,” in Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment, here esp. 127–129, 138–139.
35 Henri Krop, Spinoza: Een paradoxale icoon van Nederland (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Prometheus, 2014), 744; see also Wiep van Bunge, “The Modernity of the Radical Enlightenment,” De Achttiende Eeuw 41 (2009): 137–143, here 140–141.
36 Ian Leask, “The Undivulged Event in Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious,” in Atheism and Deism Revalued: Heterodox Religious Identities in Britain, 1650–1800, ed. Wayne Hudson, Diego Lucci, and J. R. Wigelsworth (Farham: Ashgate, 2014), 63–80.
37 Vicente Serrano, “Freedom of Thought as Radical Freedom in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” Reformation and Renaissance Review 14, no. 1 (2012): 23–39, here 27.