``It's not really a book about Spinoza, but more about the diffusion of Spinozist ideas across Europe in the decades after his death.''
Chris Brooke
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I ordered it last night, just based on Israel's essay, which I forgot to list: http://www.knaw.nl/publicaties/pdf/981137.pdf It's short and to the point which mainly contrasts Spinoza and Locke.
I also need to know about that diffusion, because Strauss takes on Hobbes as his next project and Rousseau after that. Strauss's PhD thesis on Jacobi centers around the Spinoza controversey Jacobi generated about Lessing and Mendleshonn. It is followed up indirectly in Hegel's Philosophy of the Right, which has Jacobi and d'Holback in a couple of footnotes.
``The book is based on a vast amount of erudition...''(CB)
That's always wonderful to hear. It makes me feel like I can relax and just learn---without worrying about inaccuracies, manufactured and hidden agendas and all the other academic paranoia I have while reading Strauss. I don't trust a single thing he says---absolute none of it.
``General overestimation of the importance of the Netherlands, a characteristic bias of somebody who has been a Netherlands specialist for many years.'' (CB)
I have to say, the reading I've done hasn't paid enough attention to the Netherlands in this period. For example, Spinoza's family lived on the same block in Amsterdam as Rembrandt and the synagogue that excommunicated him was in the center of the block across the street. Descartes before Spinoza and Locke after him, both lived in Netherlands in exile. D to write Meditations, Discourse on Method and L to write Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Essay on Tolerance. There was Spinoza of course who ran something like a floating salon in letters and visitors. Let's see. Leeuwenhock (father of microbiology), Vermeer. Vermeer may have used Leeuwenhock as a model in his painting The Geographer. The Netherlands was a very happening place in the Seventeenth Century.
``Like a lot of people with a single big thesis, Israel seems to have a tendency to assimilate rather too much to his overall argument. Lots of small, radical movements around Europe get assimilated to "Spinozism", when they might just have been small, radical, local movements that didn't have a great deal to do with it.''
There is a plausible explanation for this proliferation. Spinoza kept up a large volumn of correspondence where he developed and promulgated his ideas. In fact it was his main method of spreading his ideas. He only published the Theological-Political Treatise and a book on Descartes during his lifetime. His Ethics and other works were circulated as manuscript copies, drafts, outlines, and sections. The T-P Treatise was also circulated in this fashion. So it is a distinct possibility that these writings spawned their own cottage industry of mini-movements. According to Nadler, Salomon van Til a professor of theology at Utrecht was Pierre Bayle's source for works by Spinoza. Also Leibniz initiated correspondence with Spinoza (1671) and had already read the T-PT---so some of it got to Germany.
I am looking forward to reading Israel's Radical Enlightenment, because I get the feeling he will cover a lot of what I need to know about. I can obviously find the original philosophy texts, and follow some of the political history, but what is hard to do is piece together the flow of people and events that collectively creates the `history of ideas'----that Strauss will later analyze---in his own search to understand Weimar. The problem is that I don't know enough about this history---rather the general concensus view of it. It is a necessary point of view through which to `see' Strauss. In an interesting sense the ideas that Strauss attacks actually reflect back on Strauss's sensibility---precisely because he wants to force an argument or idea into making his point. It is a strange game of reflections. Nietzsche's comment about philosophers as unrelieable and crafty advocates of prejudice goes double for Strauss.
As you say about Israel's trumpeting the Netherlands, every country has its advocates. The English invented everything---according to the English. No, the French did. Bullshit, the Italians were there first. Oh, no the Germans did it better... There was a pan-Euro competition going on as if philosophy were a sport, like soccer. This competition and foment exploded into the geopolitical and internal political battles that were taking place simultaneously as the English, Dutch, French and to a lesser degree the Spanish compete with each other to gang rape the `New World'---while they all collapse, reform, restore, revolt, or go to war with each other often all at the same time.
Here we go again. Michael Pollak writes:
``.. best lines of his [Israel] argument were all discovered and laid out by Margaret Jacob in her 1981 book, _The Radical Enlightenment_, and that Israel is only differing with her on the margin. (As I understand it, he thinks the movement started wholly in the Netherlands, where she thinks much of the original impetus came from English revolution and was transplanted to the Netherlands by refugees...''
Judging from reading Nadler's bio of Spinoza, the English turmoil was simultaneous with the Dutch and intertwined with it. (Nadler cites Israel, but not Jacob in his biblio).
This is extraordinarily confusing history mixed with the on going wars between the Protestants and the Catholics in England, Netherlands, France and Spain. The northern provinces revolted under Phillip II form a union and gain support from William I of Orange, officially deposing Philip (1581). After several different arrangements with the English including a protectorate, the United Provinces declare themselves a Republic, officially recognized (de facto for thirty or forty years) in the Peace of Westphalia (1648). The Republic was ruled under an elected Stadholder (elected by aristocrats) which was supposed be several stadholders elected by each province in the union. But several the provinces elected the same stadholder. When William II was Stadholder he tried to take over Amsterdam by force and lost. He died of smallpox right afterward (You can see his portrait as a boy in Van Dyke's William Prince of Orange and Mary, his future wife---they look about ten or twelve). After Wm II died, the Republic in 1650 did not elect a Stadholder and the most powerful of Holland's political figures Johann de Witt became Regent. It is this period 1650-72 under de Witt that coincided with most Spinoza's philosophical production. The English meanwhile were going nuts and fought two or three wars with the Dutch Republic. In the English domestic hiatis Locke moved to Amsterdam(?) just after Spinoza died.
Breathless,
C