Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

CHAPTER 9
The moral and political philosophy of Spinoza
Hans W.Blom
Spinoza as a moral and political philosopher was the proponent of a radical and
extremely consistent version of seventeenth-century Dutch naturalism. As a
consequence of the burgeoning bourgeois self-confidence during the heyday of
their Golden Age, Dutch philosophers, attracted by Ciceronian republican moral
ideas prepared the way for a philosophy of man and society in which natural
processes and mechanisms had an important role to perform. Although they
understood themselves as partisans of widely divergent philosophers like
Aristotle or Descartes, they shared the conviction that man’s moral predicament
should be analysed from a naturalistic point of view, by advocating an almost
autonomous position for philosophy separate from religion. They were sure that
sufficient attention paid to the natural capabilities of mankind would show the
way to overcome human weakness. This philosophical programme, propagated
by otherwise conventional Calvinists, was constructed on the basis of a
theological notion of means-end relations, but its proponents were unaware that
in the end it would turn out to secularize human teleology completely. The most
outstanding outcome was to be Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand, in
which individual and societal teleology are interrelated by means of the laws of
human nature. In this perspective, Spinoza’s philosophy of man and society
presents itself as an early and thorough attempt to realize the seventeenth-century
Dutch naturalistic programme of secularizing the human condition. We shall
follow Spinoza in this attempt and develop his moral and political philosophy
against its Dutch background, eventually indicating why the response he met
with was so critical and hostile.
So after the introduction there will follow an overview of political philosophy
in the Dutch Republic, next the presentation of Spinoza’s reaction to the key
issues involved therein, especially as far as his moral philosophy is concerned,
and then his political philosophy proper. After the conclusion there follows a
select bibliography.