Was Spinoza’s Enlightenment so radical after all?
SPINOZA Life and legacy
JONATHAN I. ISRAEL 1,344pp. Oxford University Press. £39.99 (US $49.99).
PHILOSOPHERS, according to Marx’s famous grumble, interpret the world, but fail to change it. But as Jonathan I. Israel insists, when it comes to Baruch Spinoza, nothing could be further from the truth. For Israel, Spinoza was the mastermind of modernity, pivotal in ushering in equality, freedom, tolerance, democracy, secular government and a world-view based on science after toppling monarchy, aristocracy, the church and traditional religion. It’s a neat thesis that Israel hammered out in page after page over three monumental volumes, Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006) and Democratic Enlightenment (2011). Spinoza, argued Israel, decisively shaped the “Radical Enlightenment”, which provided the intellectual fuel for the French Revolution, which in turn translated Spinoza’s moral-political vision into the social order of the modern world.
And by a hair’s breadth it all could have been thwarted. Conscious of his notoriety as an atheist, Spinoza chose not to publish most of his writings during his lifetime, including his philosophical masterwork, the Ethics. His death in 1677 sparked a clandestine effort by dedicated friends to get the manuscripts into print. As they laboured agents of the Calvinist Church and the Inquisition were in hot pursuit. Israel documents how Johannes van Neercassel, the Inquisition’s envoy, put together a “detective team” to seize Spinoza’s literary estate, leading him to the doorstep of the Amsterdam publisher Jan Rieuwertsz, where Spinoza’s works were secretly being typeset. Fortunately, Rieuwertsz successfully deceived Neercassel and he backed off.
Given the extraordinary importance Spinoza holds for Israel, it is not surprising that he has added a prequel to his Radical Enlightenment trilogy, offering an exhaustive account of Spinoza’s life and legacy. His critics are unlikely to be swayed. It’s hard to shake the feeling that the evidence is marshalled to support a preconceived thesis: that Spinoza was the modern world’s uniquely revolutionary prophet.
Central to Israel’s portrait is a conversion story that Spinoza himself recounts: leaving behind traditional religion and the lures of wealth and prestige, he wholeheartedly embraces the life of the mind. Violence in the name of the God of the Bible cast a long shadow over Spinoza’s life. He was born in 1632, in the midst of the religious wars that devastated Europe, and his family, Marrano Jews from Portugal, had been forced to masquerade as Christians. Only after moving to the more tolerant Dutch Republic were they able to reclaim their Jewish faith. In Amsterdam Spin
