To browse Academia. Highly important source of Spinoza's political treatises, which are, in facte, paraphrases of the theories of the master..
Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was published anonymously in 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 Critical Guide to the Treatise 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.
The goal of this essay is to offer an alternative account to the view that political freedom and philosophical freedom are consistent, harmonious, and mutually reinforcing.
Certainly, freedom is central to Spinoza's political thought, but to understand it properly, we need to explain how it alleviates, rather than encourages, superstition among the nonrational multitude.
