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Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought [Graeme Hunter] on leondumoulin.nl *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Spinoza is praised as a father of atheism.
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The second trend was to situate the Enlightenment socially and politically within coteries, the political opposition, salons and Masonic lodges, and to locate republican tendencies among the enlightened.


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According to this school, the intellectual movement had its origins in the s, in the response to the invigorated absolutism of Louis XIV in France and James II in England. The French Protestants who fled persecution, and Locke, who hid in the Dutch republic from agents sent by James II to capture him, were credited with formulating new ideas about religious toleration, representative government, Newtonian science and alternatives to absolutism in church and state.

With the political and international dimension restored, the cultural warriors of the left, disenchanted with postmodernism, reclaimed the Enlightenment, and this was where things stood when Israel entered the picture. For him, the unity of enlightened ideals was founded in philosophical materialism, in an atheism which allowed nature and the works of man t0 be explained solely in terms of matter in motion. All his books see a philosophical and ethical debt to Spinoza who died in as guiding the Enlightenment project and giving momentum to its quest to establish republics based on a democratic egalitarianism.

Israel has been hailed by Dutch academics as a scholar of immense erudition. Which he is. The effect of his wide reading, however, has been to obscure the basic principles of the Western Enlightenment, and to turn its progenitors into members of warring factions. He has offered dichotomies, distinctions and differences that give the reader ever narrower glimpses of 18th-century thought, which becomes increasingly fractured and unrecognisable.

Most other historians would agree that the history of the Enlightenment must incorporate Spinoza and the Dutch republic, where clandestine books, translations of English republican works and new journals — largely in French — voiced enlightened opposition to religious persecution, French absolutism and the Aristotelian philosophy taught in schools.

Israel postulates a schism within enlightened circles: between moderates and radicals; between deists never mind theists and atheists; between Spinozists and everyone else; between anti-equality moderates and egalitarian radicals; between corrupted, mystical freemasons and the rationalist Illuminati in search of world reformation; between French materialists and Rousseau. Israel sees two Enlightenments, one radical and good, the other moderate and of mixed value at best. Born and educated in Britain, now teaching in the United States, he finds little of value in the British or American historical experience.

As the pre-Revolutionary Mirabeau noted, the Americans embraced the prejudices of the British. Those cunning moderates, seeking to bolster and make scientific their disregard for poverty and inequality, and led by Adam Smith and Turgot, invented the dismal science of economics.

They alone, he argues, gave us enlightened modernity. The first place in the Western world to abolish slavery, Pennsylvania, with its republican constitution, leaves Israel unimpressed. The Quakers who patrolled its borders in order to prevent owners from taking their slaves south do not merit a place in his radical pantheon; they are not secular enough. The gifts of freedom and democracy originated, he argues, in the minds of Hobbes, Bayle and especially Spinoza, who were followed by various French writers of the early 18th century.

The late 18th-century Continental revolutions owe their intellectual roots to that radical tradition. Any theorist with sincere religious beliefs had to be a moderate. Indeed, on occasion even the Jesuits are seen as allies of these two good English Protestants. That Newtonian science triumphed in the French colleges only after the expulsion of the Jesuits in is irrelevant to Israel.

Dominic Erdozain

Anglo-Americans can take heart, however: Israel harbours other dislikes. Some obsessions never die, however. There is a problem here: Priestley was religious.

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The historical record is otherwise. At the conclusion of the book, Israel sets his sights on the early phase of the French Revolution and the failure of historians to see its Spinozist roots. How can we be sure that everything good derives from Spinoza?


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Following the methods of Leo Strauss, Israel believes that texts hold hidden meanings, an exoteric one for the common reader and an esoteric one accessible only to the trained eye. Take Spinoza. Israel treats him as an atheist, as indeed did most of his contemporaries, and not a few 20th-century scholars. Israel cannot imagine the possibility that Spinoza meant what he said, that he believed God to be a unique, infinitely extended substance, encompassing of nature. Israel, however, treats Spinoza as offering a not terribly complicated version of atheism, to be distinguished from 18th-century deism.

One final example of his selective reading is his discussion of the doyen of 17th-century heresy-hunters, the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth. Yet a reader is hard pressed to find a single reference to him. Instead, Cudworth obsessed about ancient, pagan atheists and about Hobbes, his contemporary and countryman. Israel misses the transformations that took place within the 18th-century materialist reading of nature. Where we find 18th-century readers of Spinoza actually describing themselves as pantheists — as Toland and the Amsterdam leader of the radical phase of the Dutch Revolution of and leading Freemason , Jean Rousset de Missy did — we would profit from paying close attention to what they meant.

What happened to materialism after , when it gradually became vitalistic or pantheistic, transformed the course of Western metaphysics. Newtonian science made it possible, as they knew and acknowledged. Despite his deep religious convictions, Newton could be read by his contemporaries and subsequent generations as endorsing a world devoid of spiritual forces, composed solely of matter in motion, pulled by the force of attraction.

Radical Protestantism in Spinoza’s Thought

Unlike the postmodernists, Israel does not condemn the Enlightenment project per se; but it must be his Enlightenment. Only true radicals, and their admirers, can sit at high table, with Spinoza at its head, flanked by Hobbes and Bayle. This book explores the positive references to Christianity presented throughout Spinoza's works, focusing particularly on the Tractatus Theologico-politicus. Part II Christian Philosophy?

Reviews 'Graeme Hunter [ Hunter's book is engaging and his proposals and the scope of his study remarkably bold. His assertions challenge what is commonplace in current discussion Hunter's work deserves serious consideration in future research on Spinoza's philosophy and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. It is important that such a radical thesis be brought into the daylight His novel yet straightforward reading of Spinoza answers many puzzling questions, and it should help future readers of Spinoza better understand some of the consequences and issues at stake when comparing the Ethics with the TTP.

Very well written, philosophically rich, and vigorously argued, this book merits attention from both of its intended audiences. Request an e-inspection copy. Share this Title.

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