No philosopher was ever more worthy, but neither was any philosopher more maligned and hated. To grasp the reason for this it is not enough to recall… - Benedictus de Spinoza

Machiavelli is not in the least utopian; he simply thinks the conjunctural case of the thing, and goes dietro alla verità effettuale della cosa. He asserts it in concepts which are philosophical and no doubt make him, in his temerity, solitude and scorn for the philosophers of the tradition, the greatest materialist philosopher in history – the equal of Spinoza, who declared him "acutissimus', most acute. Spinoza considered him acutissimus in politics. He would appear not to have suspected that Machiavelli was also most incisive in materialist philosophy.

...But I was indeed on Spinoza's "line" by insisting with Marx and Hegel on the distinction between the "real concrete," therefore, the universal singular (all the "cases" that constitute the world from the beginning of knowledge of the first kind), and the concrete-in-thought that constitutes knowledge of the third kind.

Spinoza has long intrigued me, and for years I've wanted to write about this valiant seventeenth-century thinker, so alone in the world—without a family, without a community—who authored books that truly changed the world. He anticipated secularization, the liberal democratic political state, and the rise of natural science, and he paved the way for the Enlightenment. The fact that he was excommunicated by the Jews at the age of twenty-four and censored for the rest of his life by the Christians had always fascinated me, perhaps because of my own iconoclastic proclivities. And this strange sense of kinship with Spinoza was strengthened by the knowledge that Einstein, one of my first heroes, was a Spinozist. When Einstein spoke of God, he spoke of Spinoza's God—a God entirely equivalent to nature, a God that includes all substance, and a God “that doesn't play dice with the universe”—by which he means that everything that happens, without exception, follows the orderly laws of nature.