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Spinoza's not so quiet influence: the Theological-political treatise 350 years on


 In this review essay I reflect on the centrality of Spinoza's thought to political modernity on the combined occasion of the 350th anniversary of the original publication of his first political treatise, the Tractatus theologico–politicus, and of the publication this year of George Eliot's English translation of Spinoza's Ethics, which had been lying in a drawer for almost a century and a half. His influence is both substantial and methodological. It owes to the singular way in which he calibrated the relationship between reason, or the natural human need to understand, and faith, or the need to believe. But, over a century before the social sciences were invented, Spinoza also laid the foundations for the interpretative methods that would become central to these sciences and to the study of international politics. He remains essential reading for understanding our world.