When the Amsterdam synagogue excommunicated the young Baruch Spinoza in 1656 for his “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds” the writ insisted that “the Lord will not spare him, […] and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven.”  Roughly 150 years later, the German Romantic poet Novalis described Spinoza as a “man drunk on God” (Ein Gottbetrunkener Mensch). A further 200 years later, the historian Jonathan Israel named Spinoza as the more or less singular progenitor of a Radical Enlightenment that yielded a distinctly modern and secular, though as yet imperfectly realized, concept of democracy. Meanwhile, one critic has assailed the contemporary resurgence of Spinozism in domains ranging from political theory to the neurosciences as “a last ditch Salvationist movement, aimed at redeeming the status of –isms. It stands for ‘ismhood’, a necessarily total secular faith fusing conceptual satisfaction and moral political guidance.” 

The vagaries of context seem insufficient to account for the plurality of meanings “Spinozism” has sustained in the history of philosophy. This talk will consider this problem from several perspectives and, using its reception in twentieth-century France as a test case, will explore the philosophical challenges involved in seeking to understand Spinoza’s thought as a historical phenomenon.