belly of the beast—an authoritarian “commonwealth.”12 A ruler should “be their representative,” with absolute power to keep order and protect the subjects from both external enemies and their own animal instincts.13 If individuals had the latitude to determine their rights, mayhem would ensue, and neither state nor the individual would be safe. Therefore, in exchange for order and protection, a subject would have to swear an oath: I give up the right to govern myself.
This compulsory variant of the social contract put Hobbes at odds with the optimistic aspect of the zeitgeist. A prescription for dictatorship, albeit meant to be a benevolent and competent one, did not suit many of the era’s intellectuals and reformist politicians. While Hobbes was preparing Leviathan for publication, he expected vehement criticism if not outrage from colleagues and successors, and he was not mistaken.14 It is little wonder that he is often characterized as the Enlightenment’s prince of darkness, and his name has come up in academic debates in the early twenty-first century with the rise of “illiberal” democracies, first in central Europe and then in the current American presidency of Donald Trump.
Thomas Hobbes was also controversial, in his own time and beyond, because he doubted that there was a God. In contrast, Baruch Spinoza’s concept of God was so radical that even his venturesome and open-minded contemporaries often shied away from him. So did the revolutionaries who would lay the ground for an independent America in the next century.
Spinoza was born in 1632 to a Sephardic family in Amsterdam. His parents had fled the Portuguese Inquisition and settled in the Netherlands during its golden age of culture, global trade, prosperity, and military prowess. Thanks to the Peace of Westphalia, the United Provinces of the Netherlands became an independent republic in the vanguard of religious diversity and free speech. The governors of the provinces—Calvinists in ruffled starched collars—welcomed temporary refugees as well as permanent immigrants, like the Spinozas, who were escaping political heat in their own countries.
When he was twenty-three, Spinoza’s synagogue excommunicated him for his audacious insistence that biblical law was not true and God “only existed in the ‘philosophical’ sense.”
So he created his own philosophy for a new definition of God in a ninety-thousand-word treatise titled Ethics and circulated it through the Republic of Letters.15
Spinoza hewed to a rigorous, deductive, a priori path, moving from definitions and axioms through demonstrated propositions to arrive at the stunning conclusion that God is everything and everywhere, literally and, he was convinced, indisputably. God, he asserted, is not just in every atom, cell, star, thought, event, act of charity or barbarism, pain or joy, truth or lie, human disaster, whether manmade or a new deadly virus. Rather, everything that exists, material or abstract, is in God and, therefore, is God. A bleak thought to many, but not to Spinoza. His signature phrase, “God, or Nature,” was not a dichotomy but synonyms to convey one thought—a very big one. God was as impersonal as Nature. “He, who loves God, cannot endeavor that God should love him in return.”16
There was no heavenly shepherd looking out for mortals and caring for them in the eternal life to come. It was this kind of blunt, unsparing assertion that led the British scholar Jonathan Israel to call Spinoza “the supreme philosophical bogeyman of Early Enlightenment Europe.”17 Steven Nadler takes a more expansive view: “Spinoza has a rightful place among the great philosophers in history. He was certainly the most original, radical, and controversial thinker of his time, and his philosophical, political, and religious ideas laid the foundation for much of what we now regard as ‘modern.’ ”18
Spinoza lived during the emergence of deism, a movement that attempted to integrate theology and science, belief and reason. Instead of worshiping the Lord of Heaven and the scriptures, deists accepted a creator of the universe who does not interact with humanity. Although the movement was roundly condemned in the seventeenth century, it appealed to many figures of the European Enlightenment and to many leaders of the American Revolution in the eighteenth.
As Catherine Drinker Bowen wrote in The Miracle at Philadelphia, her widely read account of the Constitutional Convention in 1787: “Deism was in the air. Two generations ago it had made the westward crossing, to the immense perturbation of the faithful. Here was a religion free of creed: the Newtonian universe, the classical revival, the discovery of new seas and new lands had enlarged the world but crowded the old dogma rudely.”19
Spinoza, who crowded it more rudely than anyone, remained a name that was rarely whispered except by the bravest freethinkers (Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson). It took the German Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and its Jewish spin-off to appreciate where Spinoza’s relentless logic had taken him. On both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century, some Jewish congregations treated Spinoza with the same interest and respect as they did Maimonides.20
Modern deists often claim Albert Einstein as one of their own. He demurred, being drawn instead to the outcast Jew who posited divinity not as a supreme being but as the essence of all creation existing in nature, animate or otherwise. This would encourage Einstein to pursue the unified field theory even though it remained elusive—or perhaps because it was elusive. Spinoza’s God could coexist with Einstein’s universe.21
In contrast with Spinoza’s mind-bending metaphysics, his views on liberal government were down-to-earth. They were also ahead of his time. More than most Enlightenment philosophers, he studied the masses, combining empathy for the downtrodden and awareness of the danger to society if they were ignored. In Ethics, he urged the political powers and the intelligentsia to pay attention to the populace’s emotions, especially their fear and frustration.
He elaborated in the Theologico-Political Treatise, one of his works published in his lifetime: “In a Free Republic everyone is permitted to think what he wishes and to say what he thinks.”22 In this work, published anonymously, Spinoza also defended freedom of speech as a corollary to sovereignty of the individual: “If, then, no one can surrender his freedom of judging and thinking what he wishes, but everyone, by the greatest natural right, is master of his own thoughts, it follows that if the supreme powers in a republic try to make men say nothing but what they prescribe, no matter how different and contrary their opinions, they will get only the most unfortunate result.”23 Moreover, if the authorities of the state tried to muzzle free expression, it would backfire, possibly in rebellion: “It simply couldn’t happen that everyone spoke within prescribed limits. On the contrary, the more the authorities try to take away this freedom of speech, the more stubbornly men will resist.”24
Elsewhere, he reiterated the key component of a social contract: “The end of the Republic … is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or automata, but to enable their minds and bodies to perform their functions safely, to enable them to use their reason freely, and not to clash with one another in hatred, anger, or deception, or deal inequitably with one another.”25
Ever the realist, he urged that a sturdy government must have enough processes and institutions to survive periods of malfeasance: “For a [state] to be able to last, its affairs must be so ordered that, whether the people who administer them are led by reason or by an affect, they can’t be induced to be disloyal or to act badly.”26
By “administration,” Spinoza meant sturdy institutions of government that would restrain incompetent, harmful, or overbearing rulers. This principle would find its way into the heart of the American Constitution in the form of federalism and separation of powers.
Spinoza was a liberal with no romantic illusions of rebellion or populist rule. If the populace
