Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Preface
Introduction to Transaction Edition
Chapter 1: The Excommunication of Baruch Spinoza
The Jewish Community of Amsterdam
Why Spinoza Was Excommunicated
The Economic and Political Structure of Amsterdam Jewry
The Use of Excommunication as a Socio-economic Weapon: the Cases of Menasseh ben Israel and Uriel Acosta
How Spinoza Became a Liberal Republican
Spinoza's Rejection of Jewish Authority
Spinoza's Judges: the Commercial Magnates and Rabbis Aboab and Morteira
The Trial
Chapter 2: Revolutionist in Mystic Withdrawal
The First Stage: Retreat Among the Religious Communists
Spinoza's Mennonite Friends
Spinoza's Meeting With an English Quaker Missionary
Spinoza's Pantheism and the Radical Thought of the Seventeenth Century
Chapter 3: Political Scientist in the Cause of Human Liberation
The Political Setting
The Birth of Liberalism
The Calvinist Party in the Netherlands
Spinoza and John de Witt: the Geometrical Method in Po litics
Spinoza and the Mass of Mankind
Determinism and Social Science: the Guide to Action and the Apotheosis of Acquiescence
Chapter 4: The Promise and Anguish of Democracy
Demonstration of the Futility of Revolution
What Is Democracy?
Manifesto for Freedom
To Preserve the Republic
Chapter 5: Philosophic Liberal in a Reactionary Age
The Trauma of Democracy: the People as Mob
Spinoza Withdraws Again
Why Did the Liberal Republic Fall
Theory of a Commercial Aristocracy
Constitution for the Dictatorship of the Commercial Aristocracy
The Impasse of Authoritarian Liberalism
Academic Freedom and Public Education
A Republican Conceives the Theory of Limited Monarchy
The Masses: Free Men or Slaves
Chapter 6: A Free Man's Philosophy.
Mystic and Scientist: the Incompatible Components of Spinoza's Meta physics
The Ethics of the Free Man as a Critique of the Calvinist Ethics
The Mystic Rejection of Libertine Hedonism
The Therapy of Self-understanding: Precursor to Freud
Intellectual Love of God and Intellectual Hatred
The Eternity of the Human Mind: Spinoza's Leap Beyond the Geometrical Method
Ultimate Uncertainty: the Failure of the Geometrical Method
Spinoza as a Left Cartesian The Infinity of God: a Masochist Projection
The Infinity of God: the Discovery of the Plurality of Attributes
The Final Disunity of Spinoza's Thought: Linguistic Nonsense or Linguistic Transfiguration?
Epilogue
Notes
Index.