Spinoza's True Ideas: Suggestive Convergences

It’s a recurrence bordering on cliché to begin accounts of the history of Spinozism with a remark on the plurality of philosophical roles that Spinoza has taken on, from the godless heretic who scandalized seventeenth-century Dutch Jewry to the Gottbetrunkener Mensch who inspired nineteenth-century German Romanticism. Politically, things aren’t much clearer when one notes that the same thinker beloved of Marxists is also dear to a tradition that runs from Bismarck to Kissinger. A lot of this disparity has to do with the different intellectual, cultural, and political contexts that Spinoza has occupied. If your concern is liberalism, you think of him alongside Hobbes; if it’s religion, he’s placed somewhere between Maimonides and radical Protestantism; the metaphysicians regard him as either post-Cartesian or pre-Kantian, or both. The point is that Spinoza serves a variety of theoretical purposes. This is a historical fact. But there’s another historical fact that...