I was looking for material on Spinoza to place him in the `correct' position in the history of philosophy, because he is not read in the US, and I was slowly making my way through his Theological-Political Threatise---with the intention of getting some insight into Leo Strauss's Critique of Religion. I found a great essay by J.I Israel on an interesting distinction between Locke's tolerance of religious practice and Spinoza's tolerance of philosophical thought.
Here is an excerpt from a book review of Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, Oxford Uni Press:
What are the key points that Israel makes about Spinoza?
Firstly, Israel emphasises that Spinoza was part of an international ideological movement. It has become customary to view the Enlightenment from various national perspectives, so that we have the French Enlightenment, the German Enlightenment or the Scottish Enlightenment. In rejecting this approach Israel is standing out against the prevailing academic attitude to the Enlightenment in which each national tradition has its own source material, its own secondary sources and its own body of professional specialists. And in doing so he finds a coherence that the period often lacks in other more national oriented treatments.
This was an age when natural philosophers travelled and corresponded internationally and regarded themselves as part of a global Republic of Letters. It does not lend itself to a national perspective and to study it in that way inevitably distorts its character and gives a false impression of the nature of the ideological influences of the period. Yet even as their own world becomes ever more integrated that is what most historians do.
Secondly, Israel makes it clear that Spinoza was a materialist philosopher, who rejected Descartes dualism between body and soul and instead regarded the whole of nature, including mankind, as consisting of a single substance. For Spinoza, man's thinking, just as much as his bodily nature, is a property of substance and is not the activity of an immaterial soul that animates the body as it was for many of his contemporaries. Israel's account of Spinoza's ideas is one of the clearest available and he makes a philosophical system that is often opaque, because it is presented in the form of a geometrical proof and is expressed in a theological manner, much more accessible to the modern reader.
Thirdly, what is important about Israel's book is that he draws out the connection between revolutionary ideas in science and philosophy and revolutionary ideas in politics. It has been argued, for example by the historian Robert Darnton, that the ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers were not connected with opposition to the ancien regime and that the state was more concerned to ban illicit erotica than the writings of serious philosophers like Spinoza. Israel corrects this impression, identifying Spinoza as the "first major European thinker in modern times to embrace democratic republicanism as the highest and most rational form of political organisation," in which all men were equal...''
The importance of Spinoza's stand lays in the fact that the US adopted Locke's position of freedom of worship, and not freedom of thought, which I think had a lot to do with the generally provincial attitude most of US history has had towards radical speech, writing and advocacy. The rightwing and parrticularly the Christians seem to main a purposeful confusion of the two poles, so as to maintain their own abborant religious practices as `free speech' while denigrating the left as against `freedom' to worship---as if worship were equivalent to thought and speech.
Anyway, has anybody read Israel's book on Spinoza?
CG