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Book Spinoza and Politics

    Book Details:
  • Author : Étienne Balibar
  • Publisher : Verso Books
  • Release : 2020-05-05
  • ISBN : 1789603692
  • Pages : 207 pages

Download or read book Spinoza and Politics written by Étienne Balibar and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Hobbes and Locke, Spinoza is arguably one of the most important political philosophers of the modern era, a premier theoretician of democracy and mass politics. In this revised and augmented English translation of his 1985 classic, Spinoza et la Politique, Etienne Balibar presents a synoptic account of Spinoza's major works, admirably demonstrating relevance to his contemporary political life. Balibar carefully situates Spinoza's major treatises in the period in which they were written. In successive chapters, he examines the political situation in the United Provinces during Spinoza's lifetime, Spinoza's own religious and ideological associations, the concept of democracy developed in the Theologico-Political Treatise, the theory of the state advanced in the Political Treatise and the anthropological basis for politics established in the Ethics.

Book Spinoza on Philosophy  Religion  and Politics

Download or read book Spinoza on Philosophy Religion and Politics written by Susan James and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan James explores the revolutionary political thought of one of the most radical and creative of modern philosophers, Baruch Spinoza. His Theologico-Political Treatise of 1670 defends religious pluralism, political republicanism, and intellectual freedom. James shows how this work played a crucial role in the development of modern society.

Book Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization

Download or read book Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization written by Hasana Sharp and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-02 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There have been many Spinozas over the centuries: atheist, romantic pantheist, great thinker of the multitude, advocate of the liberated individual, and rigorous rationalist. The common thread connecting all of these clashing perspectives is Spinoza’s naturalism, the idea that humanity is part of nature, not above it. In this sophisticated new interpretation of Spinoza’s iconoclastic philosophy, Hasana Sharp draws on his uncompromising naturalism to rethink human agency, ethics, and political practice. Sharp uses Spinoza to outline a practical wisdom of “renaturalization,” showing how ideas, actions, and institutions are never merely products of human intention or design, but outcomes of the complex relationships among natural forces beyond our control. This lack of a metaphysical or moral division between humanity and the rest of nature, Sharp contends, can provide the basis for an ethical and political practice free from the tendency to view ourselves as either gods or beasts. Sharp’s groundbreaking argument critically engages with important contemporary thinkers—including deep ecologists, feminists, and race and critical theorists—making Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization vital for a wide range of scholars.

Book Spinoza  Theological Political Treatise

Download or read book Spinoza Theological Political Treatise written by Jonathan Israel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-03 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise (1670) is one of the most important philosophical works of the early modern period. In it Spinoza discusses at length the historical circumstances of the composition and transmission of the Bible, demonstrating the fallibility of both its authors and its interpreters. He argues that free enquiry is not only consistent with the security and prosperity of a state but actually essential to them, and that such freedom flourishes best in a democratic and republican state in which individuals are left free while religious organizations are subordinated to the secular power. His Treatise has profoundly influenced the subsequent history of political thought, Enlightenment 'clandestine' or radical philosophy, Bible hermeneutics, and textual criticism more generally. It is presented here in a translation of great clarity and accuracy by Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel, with a substantial historical and philosophical introduction by Jonathan Israel.

Book Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Spinoza on Politics

Download or read book Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Spinoza on Politics written by Daniel Frank and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-16 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baruch Spinoza is one of the most influential and controversial political philosophers of the early modern period. Though best-known for his contributions to metaphysics, Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (1670) and his unfinished Political Treatise (1677) were widely debated and helped to shape the political writings of philosophers as diverse as Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and (although he publicly denied it) even Locke. In addition to its enormous historical importance, Spinoza’s political philosophy is also strikingly contemporary in its advocacy of toleration of unpopular religious and political views and his concern with stabilizing religiously diverse democratic societies. The first Guidebook to Spinoza’s political writings, The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza on Politics covers the following key points: Spinoza’s life and the background to his philosophy the key themes and arguments of the Theological-Political-Treatise and Political Treatise the continuing importance of Spinoza’s work to philosophy. This book is an ideal starting point for anyone new to Spinoza and essential reading for students of political philosophy and seventeenth-century philosophy.

Book Spinoza s Political Psychology

Download or read book Spinoza s Political Psychology written by Justin Steinberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and novel interpretation of Spinoza's political writings that reveals the significance of the affects for political life.

Book Becoming Political

    Book Details:
  • Author : Christopher Skeaff
  • Publisher : University of Chicago Press
  • Release : 2018-06-25
  • ISBN : 022655550X
  • Pages : 189 pages

Download or read book Becoming Political written by Christopher Skeaff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-06-25 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pathbreaking work, Christopher Skeaff argues that a profoundly democratic conception of judgment is at the heart of Spinoza’s thought. Bridging Continental and Anglo-American scholarship, critical theory, and Spinoza studies, Becoming Political offers a historically sensitive, meticulous, and creative interpretation of Spinoza’s texts that reveals judgment as the communal element by which people generate power to resist domination and reconfigure the terms of their political association. If, for Spinoza, judging is the activity which makes a people powerful, it is because it enables them to contest the project of ruling and demonstrate the political possibility of being equally free to articulate the terms of their association. This proposition differs from a predominant contemporary line of argument that treats the people’s judgment as a vehicle of sovereignty—a means of defining and refining the common will. By recuperating in Spinoza’s thought a “vital republicanism,” Skeaff illuminates a line of political thinking that decouples democracy from the majoritarian aspiration to rule and aligns it instead with the project of becoming free and equal judges of common affairs. As such, this decoupling raises questions that ordinarily go unasked: what calls for political judgment, and who is to judge? In Spinoza’s vital republicanism, the political potential of life and law finds an affirmative relationship that signals the way toward a new constitutionalism and jurisprudence of the common.

Book Spinoza s Political Treatise

Download or read book Spinoza s Political Treatise written by Yitzhak Y. Melamed and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-02 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spinoza's Political Treatise constitutes the very last stage in the development of his thought, as he left the manuscript incomplete at the time of his death in 1677. On several crucial issues - for example, the new conception of the 'free multitude' - the work goes well beyond his Theological Political Treatise (1670), and arguably presents ideas that were not fully developed even in his Ethics. This volume of newly commissioned essays on the Political Treatise is the first collection in English to be dedicated specifically to the work, ranging over topics including political explanation, national religion, the civil state, vengeance, aristocratic government, and political luck. It will be a major resource for scholars who are interested in this important but still neglected work, and in Spinoza's political philosophy more generally.

Book Spinoza and the Stoics

Download or read book Spinoza and the Stoics written by Firmin DeBrabander and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2007-03-15 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines Spinoza's moral and political philosophy and his engagement with Stoicism.

Book Potentia

    Book Details:
  • Author : Sandra Leonie Field
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
  • Release : 2020
  • ISBN : 0197528244
  • Pages : 337 pages

Download or read book Potentia written by Sandra Leonie Field and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book offers a detailed study of the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza, focussing on their concept of power as potentia, concrete power, rather than power as potestas, authorised power. The focus on power as potentia generates a new conception of popular power. Radical democrats-whether drawing on Hobbes's 'sleeping sovereign' or on Spinoza's 'multitude'-understand popular power as something that transcends ordinary institutional politics, as for instance popular plebsites or mass movements. However, the book argues that these understandings reflect a residual scholasticism which Hobbes and Spinoza ultimately repudiate. Instead, on the book's revisionist conception, a political phenomenon should be said to express popular power when it is both popular (it eliminates oligarchy and encompasses the whole polity), and also powerful (it robustly determines political and social outcomes). Two possible institutional forms that this popular power might take are distinguished: Hobbesian repressive egalitarianism, or Spinozist civic strengthening. But despite divergent institutional proposals, the book argues that both Hobbes and Spinoza share the conviction that there is nothing spontaneously egalitarian or good about human collective existence. From this point of view, the book accuses radical democrats of pernicious romanticism; the slow, meticulous work of organizational design and maintenance is the true centre of popular power"--

Book Spinoza s  Theological Political Treatise

Download or read book Spinoza s Theological Political Treatise written by Yitzhak Y. Melamed and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was published anonymously in 1670 and immediately provoked huge debate. Its main goal was to claim that the freedom of philosophizing can be allowed in a free republic and that it cannot be abolished without also destroying the peace and piety of that republic. Spinoza criticizes the traditional claims of revelation and offers a social contract theory in which he praises democracy as the most natural form of government. This new Critical Guide presents new essays by well-known scholars in the field and covers a broad range of topics, including the political theory and the metaphysics of the work, religious toleration, the reception of the text by other early modern philosophers, and the relation of the text to Jewish thought. It offers valuable new perspectives on this important and influential work.

Book Spinoza s Book of Life

    Book Details:
  • Author : Steven B. Smith
  • Publisher : Yale University Press
  • Release : 2003-01-01
  • ISBN : 0300128495
  • Pages : 256 pages

Download or read book Spinoza s Book of Life written by Steven B. Smith and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a new reading of Spinoza's masterpiece, Smith asserts that the 'Ethics' is a celebration of human freedom and its attendant joys and responsibilities and should be placed among the great founding documents of the Enlightenment.

Book Spinoza for Our Time

    Book Details:
  • Author : Antonio Negri
  • Publisher : Columbia University Press
  • Release : 2013-10-01
  • ISBN : 0231160461
  • Pages : 154 pages

Download or read book Spinoza for Our Time written by Antonio Negri and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antonio Negri, a leading scholar on Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) and his contemporary legacy, offers a straightforward explanation of the philosopher’s elaborate arguments and a persuasive case for his ongoing utility. Responding to a resurgent interest in Spinoza’s thought and its potential application to contemporary global issues, Negri demonstrates the thinker’s special value to politics, philosophy, and a number of related disciplines. Negri’s work is both a return to and advancement of his initial affirmation of Spinozian thought in The Savage Anomaly. He further defends his understanding of the philosopher as a proto-postmodernist, or a thinker who is just now, with the advent of the postmodern, becoming contemporary. Negri also deeply connects Spinoza’s theories to recent trends in political philosophy, particularly the reengagement with Carl Schmitt’s “political theology,” and the history of philosophy, including the argument that Spinoza belongs to a “radical enlightenment.” By positioning Spinoza as a contemporary, revolutionary intellectual, Negri addresses and effectively defeats critiques by Derrida, Badiou, and Agamben.

Book A Book Forged in Hell

    Book Details:
  • Author : Steven Nadler
  • Publisher : Princeton University Press
  • Release : 2011-10-09
  • ISBN : 069113989X
  • Pages : 299 pages

Download or read book A Book Forged in Hell written by Steven Nadler and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-09 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it appeared in 1670, Baruch Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was denounced as the most dangerous book ever published. Religious and secular authorities saw it as a threat to faith, social and political harmony, and everyday morality, and its author was almost universally regarded as a religious subversive and political radical who sought to spread atheism throughout Europe. Steven Nadler tells the story of this book: its radical claims and their background in the philosophical, religious, and political tensions of the Dutch Golden Age, as well as the vitriolic reaction these ideas inspired. A vivid story of incendiary ideas and vicious backlash, A Book Forged in Hell will interest anyone who is curious about the origin of some of our most cherished modern beliefs--Jacket p. [2].

Book The Savage Anomaly

    Book Details:
  • Author : Antonio Negri
  • Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
  • Release : 2000
  • ISBN : 9780816636709
  • Pages : 308 pages

Download or read book The Savage Anomaly written by Antonio Negri and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this essential rereading of Spinoza's (1632-1677) philosophical and political writings, Negri positions this thinker within the historical context of the development of the modern state and its attendant political economy. Through a close examination of Spinoza, Negri reveals turn as unique among his contemporaries for his nondialectical approach to social organization in a bourgeois age.

Book Spinoza s Theologico Political Treatise

Download or read book Spinoza s Theologico Political Treatise written by Theo Verbeek and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the first accessible analysis of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-politicus, situating the work in the context of Spinoza’s general philosophy and its 17th-century historical background. According to Spinoza it is impossible for a being to be infinitely perfect and to have a legislative will. This idea, demonstrated in the Ethics, is presupposed and further elaborated in the Tractatus Theologico-politicus. It implies not only that on the level of truth all revealed religion is false, but also that all authority is of human origin and that all obedience is rooted in a political structure. The consequences for authority as it is used in a religious context are explored: the authority of Scripture, the authority of particular interpretations of Scripture, and the authority of the Church. Verbeek also explores the work of two other philosophers of the period - Hobbes and Descartes - to highlight certain peculiarities of Spinoza's position, and to show the contrasts between their theories.

Book The Democratic Soul

    Book Details:
  • Author : Aaron L. Herold
  • Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
  • Release : 2021-08-06
  • ISBN : 0812299892
  • Pages : 253 pages

Download or read book The Democratic Soul written by Aaron L. Herold and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-08-06 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Democratic Soul, Aaron L. Herold argues that liberal democracy's current crisis—of extreme polarization, rising populism, and disillusionment with political institutions—must be understood as the culmination of a deeper dissatisfaction with the liberal Enlightenment. Major elements of both the Left and the Right now reject the Enlightenment's emphasis on rights as theoretically unfounded and morally undesirable and have sought to recover a contrasting politics of obligation. But this has re-opened questions about the relationship between politics and religion long thought settled. To address our situation, Herold examines the political thought of Spinoza and Tocqueville, two authors united in support of liberal democracy but with differing assessments of the Enlightenment. Through an original reading of Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise, Herold uncovers the theological foundation of liberal democracy: a comprehensive moral teaching rehabilitating human self-interest, denigrating "devotion" as a relic of "superstition," and cultivating a pride in living, acting, and thinking for oneself. In his political vision, Spinoza articulates our highest hopes for liberalism, for he is confident such an outlook will produce both intellectual flourishing and a paradoxical recovery of community. But Spinoza's project contains tensions which continue to trouble democracy today. As Herold shows via a new interpretation of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, the dissatisfactions now destabilizing democracy can be traced to the Enlightenment's failure to find a place for religious longings whose existence it largely denied. In particular, Tocqueville described a natural human desire for a kind of happiness found, at least partly, in self-sacrifice. Because modernity weakens religion precisely as it makes democracy stronger than liberalism, it permits this desire to find new and dangerous outlets. Tocqueville thus sought to design a "new political science" which could rectify this problem and which therefore remains indispensable today in recovering the moderation lacking in contemporary politics.