Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism

354 Pages·2017·14.575 MB·English

by  Lewis Samuel Feuer

SPINOZA AND THE
RISE OF LIBERALISM

SPINOZA
and the Rise of Liberalism
Lewis Samuel Feuer
Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 1987 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
New material this edition copyright © 1987 by Taylor & Francis.
Original edition copyright © 1958 by Lewis Samuel Feuer.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 87-7045
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Feuer, Lewis Samuel, 1912-
Spinoza and the rise of liberalism.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632-1677-Political and
social views. 2. Liberalism. I. Title.
B3998.F43 1987 320’.092*4 87-7045
ISBN 0-88738-701-2
ISBN 13: 978-0-88738-701-2 (pbk)
C O N T E N T S
Preface ix
Introduction to Transaction Edition xiii
Chapter 1 The Excommunication of Baruch Spinoza
The Decree of Anathema.................................................. 1
The Jewish Community of Amsterdam......................... 2
Why Spinoza Was Excommunicated...............................
4
The Economic and Political Structure of Amsterdam
Jew ry.................................................................................
5
The Use of Excommunication as a Socio-economic
Weapon: the Cases of Menasseh ben Israel and Uriel
Acosta.................................................................................
9
How Spinoza Became a Liberal Republican . . . . 17
Spinoza’s Rejection of Jewish Authority . . . . 22
Spinoza’s Judges: the Commercial Magnates and Rabbis
Aboab and Morteira........................................................ 24
The T r ia l.......................................................................... 33
Chapter 2 Revolutionist in Mystic Withdrawal
The Periods of Spinoza’s Thought............................... 38
The First Stage: Retreat Among the Religious Com-
munists .......................................................................... 40
Spinoza’s Mennonite Friends........................................... 43
Spinoza’s Meeting With an English Quaker Missionary 47
Spinoza's Pantheism and the Radical Thought of the
Seventeenth Century........................................................ 52
Chapter 3 Political Scientist in the Cause of Human
Liberation
The Political Philosopher as Political Participant . 58
The Political Setting........................................................ 61
The Birth of Liberalism.................................................. 65
The Calvinist Party in the Netherlands......................... 69
Spinoza and John de Witt: the Geometrical Method
in Politics.................................................................... 76
v
vi
Spinoza and the Mass of Mankind............................... 80
Determinism and Social Science: the Guide to Action
and the Apotheosis of Acquiescence......................... 82
Chapter 4 The Promise and Anguish of Democracy
The Limits of Democracy and the Futility of Revolu-
tion ................................................................................. 87
Demonstration of the Futility of Revolution .
90
What Is Democracy?........................................................ 101
Manifesto for Freedom........................................................ 108
To Preserve the Republic.................................................. 119
Chapter 5 Philosophic Liberal in a Reactionary Age
1672—Year of Catastrophe.................................................. 136
The Trauma of Democracy: the People as Mob . 138
Spinoza Withdraws A g a in ............................................ 139
Why Did the Liberal Republic Fall?............................... 150
Theory of a Commercial Aristocracy............................... 158
Constitution for the Dictatorship of the Commercial
Aristocracy.................................................................... 164
The Impasse of Authoritarian Liberalism . . . . 175
Academic Freedom and Public Education . . . . 179
A Republican Conceives the Theory of Limited Mon-
archy ................................................................................. 182
The Masses: Free Men or Slaves?..................................... 192
Chapter 6 A Free Man’s Philosophy
Mystic and Scientist: the Incompatible Components of
Spinoza’s Metaphysics.................................................. 198
The Ethics of the Free Man as a Critique of the Cal-
vinist E thics..................................................................... 200
The Mystic Rejection of Libertine Hedonism . 207
The Therapy of Self-understanding: Precursor to Freud 210
Intellectual Love of God and Intellectual Hatred . 215
The Eternity of the Human Mind: Spinoza’s Leap Be-
yond the Geometrical Method..................................... 221
Ultimate Uncertainty: the Failure of the Geometrical
M eth o d ........................................................................... 227
vii
Spinoza as a Left Cartesian............................................ 229
The Infinity of God: the Discovery of the Plurality
of Attributes.................................................................... 233
All Things Live in God: Spinoza’s Panpsychism . 235
Scientific Determinism and Enslavement to God: a
Masochist Projection........................................................ 239
The Mathematical Method: the Language of Artisans
and M erchants.............................................................. 242
The Final Disunity of Spinoza’s Thought: Linguistic
Nonsense or Linguistic Transfiguration? . . . . 247
Epilogue....................................................................................... 254
N o tes............................................................................................. 259
Index ............................................................................................. 309

P R E F A C E
A thinker can be understood only as we relive his experi-
ences. Spinoza’s philosophy was wrought in a time such as ours
—one of crisis. The seventeenth century was an age of war,
revolution, and social unrest. Cromwell, the Thirty Years’ War,
the Levellers, the Quakers, the Catholic Inquisition in Spain:
these were part of the world in which Spinoza lived. Liberalism
was being bom in the merchants’ republics of his native Nether-
lands.
Spinoza struggled to understand the crisis of his time. Like
political philosophers in the twentieth century, he found that
events did violence to his political theories. He was proud of
Amsterdam’s liberalism, and hopeful that the Dutch Republican
experiment would succeed. When political catastrophe came in
1672, Spinoza brooded upon the incapacity of the masses to
sustain a liberal government. His social feelings led him to
sympathy with the common man; as a social scientist, however,
he noted that common men were often irrational and hostile to
freedom. He was moved to withdraw to a secluded community
of like-minded friends, but he also longed to participate in
political action. This young excommunicate gave to the panthe-
ist mysticism of the revolutionary movements its noblest expres-
sion; he was also, however, stirred by the marvels which were
being opened by the new technology of science, the telescope
and microscope. He tried with immense power to identify the
God of his mystic vision with a Mathematical God of Science.
His system broke apart; scientist and mystic warred within him
unreconciled. He worked, a precursor of psychoanalysis, to make
men free by helping them to understand their passions; but he
also wondered if blessedness came only in unity with God. The
path toward freedom seemed often lost in an age of hatred.
I have tried to understand the various components of
Spinoza’s thought as the outcome of underlying emotional re-
sponses to the social conflicts of his time, and to portray his
ix