Spinoza and Us

Political Theory

Volumn 29, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 583-594

  Connolly, William E ^a  

^a JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84998103877     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591701029004006     Document Type: Review

References (15)

1. Folio 408 of Livra dos Acordos da Nacam, as quoted in Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 3.
2. Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza (London: Faber and Faber, 1960).
3. Stuart Hampshire, Freedom of the Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). 203–4.
4. The two Deleuze books are Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. by R. Hurley (San Francisco: Zone, 1988)
5. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. by M. Joughin (New York: Zone, 1992).
6. Antonio Negri's is The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics, trans. by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Negri charts a crisis during a break in the writing of the Ethics, one in which the formalism of Part I eventually gives ground to the immanent materialism of Parts II–IV.
7. I explore these issues with respect to Augustine in The Augustinian Imperative: Reflections on the Politics of Morality (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. 1993)
8. and with respect to Kant in Why I Am Not A Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1999), chaps. 5 and 7.
9. The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge. UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
10. In a later essay titled “Two Motivations for Rationalism: Descartes and Spinoza,” in his Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge. UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Frankfurt concludes that Descartes and Spinoza develop divergent strategies to achieve harmony with the world: the strategy of the rebel and of the mystic. “The rebel and the mystic share a desire to overcome the discrepancy between themselves and what is other than themselves, one by changing the world to suit himself and the other by merging himself into the external order” (p. 53). I imagine that Gatens and Lloyd. Negri. Deleuze. and Montag would find both the rebel and the mystic circulating through Spinoza.
11. Letter XXX, in Spinoza: The Letters, ed. by Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995), 185.
12. But a new Hobbes is also emerging today to join the new Spinoza. Richard Flathman's Thomas Hobbes: Skepticism, Individuality and Chastened Politics (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993) presents a Hobbes who could enter into productive dialogue with Spinoza on the topics of diversity, ethics, and generosity.
13. Richard Tuck's Hobbes (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1989) moves in a similar direction. A generous reading of each thinker in relation to the other could be very productive.
14. John Docker, 1492: The Poetics of Diaspora (London: Continuum, 2001).
15. I examine how Tocqueville's engagement with Amerindians already inhabiting the land of America compromises his model of democratic pluralism in Chapter 6 of The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).