Spinoza: Liberty

In this review, I outline Lærke's interpretation of Spinoza's freedom of philosophizing as a rich, positive freedom, encompassing but extending far beyond mere legal permission for free expression. Lærke's book takes on the challenge to explain how such freedom is to be brought about. I suggest that Lærke's reconstruction overlooks a central plank of Spinoza's approach: the role of good institutional design in supporting freedom. The longer version is the original author submission; the shorter version was trimmed on the journal's (...) request. (shrink)

It is often put forward that the entire political project of epicureanism consists in the overcoming of fear, whereby its scope is deemed to be very narrow. I argue that the overcoming of the fear of death should actually be linked to a conception of freedom in epicureanism. This idea is further developed by Spinoza, who defines the free man as one who thinks of death least of all in the Ethics, and who develops this idea more in the Theological (...) Political Treatise. (shrink)

The chapter introduces the function of authority in Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise and Political Treatise.

We sometimes imagine that diversity of religion, culture and ethnicity is a problem of the present, one that sets our time apart. However in the 17th century at the end of the Reformation and the wars of religion that divided Europe, overthrowing medieval institutions, social, political and religious hierarchies that had dominated for centuries, the question of how to govern a diverse multitude of individuals was a pressing practical and theoretical question. By taking human diversity as primary, Baruch Spinoza proposed (...) a theory of the state that does not require pre-existing unity among individuals and so provides a theory of justice, which can be scaled to the global. Further, Spinoza’s theory of political and individual power offers positive reasons why we may want to build global democratic institutions to solve the problems of global justice. (shrink)

Spinoza's contributions to a theory of global justice.