How many philosophers and historians of philosophy have gone along with the academies, burning with the desire to be able to sit there! The Dutch tho… - Benedictus de Spinoza

None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.

[The] right of the individual is co-extensive with its determinate power. ...
Nature's bounds are not set by the laws of human reason which aim only at man's true interest and his preservation ... man is but a particle.

Although proclaiming Spinoza the chief and most prominent ‘representative’ of the underground atheistic tradition supposedly striving to undermine the main structures of authority underpinning Christendom has an astoundingly long history, from 1673 when we first encounter this notion that Spinozism was a forbidden philosophy being promoted, first in Holland, by an underground sect of disciples, called ‘spinozistes’, continuing down to the 1820s, roughly lasting a century and a half, modern historians took very little interest in this striking phenomenon until the question became tied to the (since 2001) highly divisive issue of ‘Radical Enlightenment’. The remarkable historiographical and philosophical controversy over the role of Spinoza and Spinozism in the Western Enlightenment generally sparked by the debate over ‘Radical Enlightenment’ since 2001, instead of receding after some years, as one might expect from the normal course of historiographical controversies, has been escalating for more than a decade now especially since 2009, in a dramatic fashion.