BENEDICT DE SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise

Note on the text and translation
The present translation was ¢rst made by Michael Silverthorne and
scrutinized by Desmond Clarke, then extensively revised by Jonathan
Israel in close collaboration with the translator.
Spinoza wrote hisTractatusTheologico-Politicus in Latin, and although some
scholars regard it as quite likely that he also had some hand in the
subsequent French (1678) translation, it is not certain that he did. Hence
the Latin version, anonymously and clandestinely published and
distributed in Amsterdam by Jan Rieuwertsz, ostensibly in 1670 (but in fact
in 1669), is the original and only de¢nitely authentic version of the text.
Despite its clandestine nature and the fact that it was widely banned,
copies of the book surviving in libraries today are surprisingly numerous.
This seems to have been mainly due to the brisk demand for copies all over
Europe during the late seventeenth century and Rieuwertsz’s ruse of
issuing several unnoticed new editions through the 1670s, retaining what
looked like the original title-page bearing the original false date and place
of publication ‘Hamburg, 1670’.
Until quite recently the best modern critical edition of the original text
was that prepared by Carl Gebhardt and published at Heidelberg in 1925,
in the third volume of his complete edition of Spinoza’s works. 1 An
improved critical edition prepared by the expert Dutch Latinist, Fokke
Akkerman, was published in a bilingual Latin^French version by the
Presses Universitaires de France, in Paris, in 1999. It was this excellent and
very scholarly edition of the Latin, correcting Gebhardt’s version (albeit
1 Benedict de Spinoza, Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt (4 vols., Heidelberg, 1925).
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