The philosophy of Spinoza has replaced both Marxism and capitalist neo-liberalism. While affected timelessness is inherent in the Hardt-Negri rhetoric – hence their over-easy references to antiquity or the Middle Ages – the centre of gravity in this book is firmly in the later 17th century. Once regarded as an important precursor of the Enlightenment and of Marxist materialism, the thought of Spinoza (1632–77) is redeemed in these pages, as a wisdom awaiting its vindication in a globalised epoch yet to come. In vital ways, Spinoza told the whole story: his apparently abstract pantheistic philosophy explained history itself, future as well as past, and the globalisation process simply favours a return to such understanding, after the mounting sorrows and delusions of modernity.

We have gathered within the walls of the Communist Academy and are devoting this evening to Spinoza's memory not from the considerations which guided the organizers of the Hague celebration but from quite different considerations; for us Spinoza is essentially a great atheist and materialist. In this appraisal of Spinoza I am in complete agreement with Plekhanov. In all of Plekhanov's works, as I know, the fundamental thought is emphasized that Marxism, considered as a world‑view, is nothing other than a 'variety of Spinozism.' But I shall set this question aside for the moment, in order to cite a passage from Plekhanov's preface to my Introduction to Philosophy (the preface was written in 1914) in which he sharply criticizes the historians of philosophy who have numbered Spinoza among the idealists. 'With the present universal prevalence of idealism,' he says, 'it is quite natural that the history of philosophy should now be interpreted from the idealistic point of view. As a consequence, Spinoza his long since been numbered among the idealists. Hence, certain readers will probably be very much surprised to learn that I understand Spinoza in the materialistic sense; yet this is the only correct understanding of Spinozism. 'As early as 1843 Feuerbach asserted his fundamental conviction that the teaching of Spinoza was "an expression of the materialistic conceptions of the modern age." Of course, even Spinoza did not escape the influence of his time. His materialism, as Feuerbach remarked, was clothed in a theological costume, but the important thing was that, in any case, he eliminated the dualism of mind and nature. Nature in Spinoza is called God, but extension is one of the attributes of this God. And this constitutes the radical difference between Spinozism and idealism.'

Although Baruch Spinoza is one of the great thinkers of the European philosophical tradition, he was not a professional scholar – he earned his modest living as a lens grinder. So, unlike many thinkers of his time, he was unconstrained by allegiance to a church, university or royal court. He was free to be faithful to the pursuit of truth. This gives his philosophy a remarkable originality and intellectual purity – and it also led to controversy and charges of heresy. In the 19th century, and perhaps even more recently, "Spinozist" was still a term of abuse among intellectuals. In a sense, Spinoza was always an outsider – and this independence is precisely what enabled him to see through the confusions, prejudices and superstitions that prevailed in the 17th century, and to gain a fresh and radical perspective on various philosophical and religious issues.

Spinoza's thought is completely idealistic when it is presented as negative thought, when it develops the bourgeois utopia, living it in the extreme, abstract consequences of its spiritual idyll; it is, in contrast, completely materialistic as soon as it is reassembled in a constructive way, inverting the impossibility of an ideal world in the materialistic tension of its components and embracing these in a practical project, in a violent dynamism of worldly liberation. "Benedictus maledictus": never has a philosopher been more rightly hated by his times, a bourgeois and capitalist epoch.

...Spinoza hit the nail on the head with his paradoxical proposition: God is an extended, that is, material being. He found, at least for his time, the true philosophical expression for the materialistic tendency of the modern era; he legitimated and sanctioned it: God himself is a materialist. Spinoza's philosophy was religion; he himself was an amazing man. Unlike so many others, Spinoza's materialism did not stand in contradiction to the notion of a non-material and anti-materialistic God who also quite consistently imposes on man the duty to give himself up only to anti-materialistic, heavenly tendencies and concerns, for God is nothing other than the archetypal and ideal image of man; what God is and how he is, is what man ought to be or wants to be, or at least hopes to be in the future. But only where theory does not belie practice, and practice theory, is there character, truth, and religion. Spinoza is the Moses of modern free-thinkers and materialists.

Spinoza is the clear and luminous side of Modern philosophy. He is the negation of bourgeois mediation and of all the logical, metaphysical, and juridical fictions that organize its expansion. He is the attempt to determine the continuity of the revolutionary project of humanism. With Spinoza, philosophy succeeds for the first time in negating itself as a science of mediation. In Spinoza there is the sense of a great anticipation of the future centuries; there is the intuition of such a radical truth of future philosophy that it not only keeps him from being flattened onto seventeenth-century thought but also, it often seems, denies any confrontation, any comparison. Really, none of his contemporaries understands him or refutes him.

...Now Spinoza, my master and model in respect to the first point [the natural basis of morality], does not satisfy me on the second [the humane possibilities, the "types of excellence towards which life may be directed"]; and I will take this opportunity, since I may not have any other, of clearing my conscience of ambiguity in that respect. The complete moralist must not only be sound in physics, but must be inwardly inspired by a normal human soul and an adequate human tradition; he must be a complete humanist in a complete naturalist. Spinoza was not only a complete naturalist but, by a rare combination, also a spiritual man, seeing and accepting the place of the human heart in the universe; accepting it not grudgingly or viciously or frivolously, as your worldling does, but humbly and joyously: humbly in that he asked to be nothing more than he was, and joyously because what he was allowed him, in spirit, to salute and to worship every form of the good. Nevertheless, Spinoza was not a complete humanist. He had no idea of human greatness and no sympathy with human sorrow. His notion of the soul was too plebeian and too quietistic. He was a Jew not of Exodus or Kings but of Amsterdam. He was too Dutch, too much the merchant and artisan, with nothing of the soldier, the poet, the prince, or the lover. [...] He was virtuous but not normal. [...] He was a genius; but as a guide in the spiritual life, he was narrow and inadequate.

An immense role in the development of logic, and in preparing the ground for modern views on its subject matter, a role far from fully appreciated, was played by Spinoza. Like Leibniz, Spinoza rose high above the mechanistic limitations of the natural science of his time. Any tendency directly to universalise partial forms and methods of thinking only useful within the bounds of mechanistic, mathematical natural science was also foreign to him. Insofar as logic was preserved alongside the doctrine of substance, Spinoza treated it as an applied discipline by analogy with medicine, since its concern proved not to be the invention of artificial rules but the co-ordination of human intellect with the laws of thought understood as an ‘attribute’ of the natural whole, only as ‘modes of expression’ of the universal order and connection of things. He also tried to work out logical problems on the basis of this conception. Spinoza understood thought much more profoundly and, in essence, dialectically, which is why his figure presents special interest in the history of dialectics; he was probably the only one of the great thinkers of the pre-Marxian era who knew how to unite brilliant models of acutely dialectical thought with a consistently held materialist principle (rigorously applied throughout his system) of understanding thought and its relations to the external world lying in the space outside the human head. The influence of Spinoza's ideas on the subsequent development of dialectical thought can hardly be exaggerated. ‘It is therefore worthy of note that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy.’ [Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel]

Writers, poets, musicians, filmmakers – painters too, even chance reader – may find that they are Spinozists; indeed, such a thing is more likely for them than for professional philosophers. It is a matter of one's practical conception of the “plan”. It is not that one may be a Spinozist without knowing it. Rather, there is a strange privilege that Spinoza enjoys something that seems to have been accomplished by him and no one else. He is a philosopher who commands an extraordinary conceptual apparatus, one that is highly developed, systematic, and scholarly; and yet he is the quintessential object of an immediate, unprepared encounter, such that a nonphilosopher, or even someone without any formal education, can receive a sudden illumination from him, a “flash”. Then it is as if one discovers that one is a Spinozist; one arrives in the middle of Spinoza, one is sucked up, drawn into the system or the composition. (…) What is unique about Spinoza is that he, the most philosophic of philosophers (…) teaches the philosopher how to become a non-philosopher.

Spinoza was a republican democrat and a supporter of the politician Johan De Witt (1625–72), an opponent of the House of Orange. After De Witt's death, the aristocratic Orange faction took power and restored a more conventional social order (which was subsequently imposed on Britain when one of them acquired the English throne in 1689). By that time ‘Spinozism’ was already a thriving underground cult with ardent supporters in many countries: ‘The battle was on to fix the image of the dying Spinoza in the perceptions and imagination of posterity,’ Israel writes, since ‘the final hours of a thinker who seeks to transform the spiritual foundations of the society around him become heavily charged with symbolic significance in the eyes of both disciples and adversaries.’ Plainly, this battle still continues. It is not to disregard or minimise such a striking lineage to observe that Spinozism had limitations associated with the society it came from, in which countries were struggling to emerge from absolutism and theocratic tyranny. Today, Spinoza's greatness has to be defended against the delusions of a belated progeny, rather as Marx had to be in the later 19th and 20th centuries.

If Spinoza had in fact tried to construct his philosophical system by the method that our contemporary positivism would have recommended to him, it is not difficult to imagine what he would have produced as a ‘system’. He would only have brought together the purely mechanical and religious, mystical ‘general ideas’ that were guiding all (or almost all) naturalists in his day. Spinoza understood very clearly that religious, theological mysticism was the inevitable complement of a purely mechanistic (geometrical, mathematical) world outlook, i.e. the point of view that considers the sole ‘objective’ properties of the real world to be only the spatial, geometrical forms and relations of bodies. His greatness was that he did not plod along behind contemporaneous natural science, i.e. behind the one-sided, mechanistic thinking of the coryphaei of the science of the day, but subjected this way of thinking to well substantiated criticism from the angle of the specific concepts of philosophy as a special science. This feature of Spinoza’s thinking was brought out clearly and explicitly by Friedrich Engels: ‘It is to the highest credit of the philosophy of the time that it did not let itself be led astray by the restricted state of contemporary natural knowledge, and that from Spinoza right to the great French materialists it insisted on explaining the world from the world itself and left the justification in detail to the natural science of the future.’ [Dialectics of Nature] That is why Spinoza has come down in the history of science as an equal contributor to its progress with Galileo and Newton, and not as their epigone, repeating after them the general ideas that could be drawn from their work. He investigated reality himself from the special, philosophical angle, and did not generalise the results and ready-made findings of other people’s investigation, did not bring together the general ideas of the science of his day and the methods of investigation characteristic of it, or the methodology and logic of his contemporary science. He understood that that way led philosophy up a blind alley, and condemned it to the role of the wagon train bringing up in the rear of the attacking army the latter’s own ‘general ideas and methods’, including all the illusions and prejudices incorporated in them. That is why he also developed ‘general ideas and methods of thought’ to which the natural science of the day had not yet risen, and armed future science with them, which recognised his greatness three centuries later through the pen of Albert Einstein, who wrote that he would have liked ‘old Spinoza’ as the umpire in his dispute with Niels Bohr on the fundamental problems of quantum mechanics rather than Carnap or Bertrand Russell, who were contending for the role of the ‘philosopher of modern science’ and spoke disdainfully of Spinoza’s philosophy as an ‘outmoded’ point of view ‘which neither science nor philosophy can nowadays accept’. Spinoza's understanding of thinking as the activity of that same nature to which extension also belonged is an axiom of the true modern philosophy of our century, to which true science is turning more and more confidently and consciously in our day (despite all the attempts to discredit it) as the point of view of true materialism.

Spinoza founds Modern materialism in its highest form, determining the horizons of both Modern and contemporary philosophical speculation within an immanent and given philosophy of being and an atheism defined as the negation of every presupposed ordering of either the constitution of being or human behavior. However, even in its productive and living form, Spinozian metaphysics does not succeed in superseding the limits of a purely "spatial" (or Galilean-physical) conception of the world. It certainly pushes on this conception and tries to destroy its limits, but it does not reach a solution. Rather, it leaves unresolved the problem of the relationship between the spatial dimensions and the temporal, creative, and dynamic dimensions of being. The imagination, that spiritual faculty running throughout the Spinozian system, constitutes being in an order that is only allusively temporal. As such, the problem remains intact, in terms that are unresolved but pure and forceful: Being (before the invention of the dialectic) evades the tangle of dialectical materialism. In fact, the readings of Spinoza by socialist and Soviet authors have not enriched dialectical materialism but have, rather, only diminished the potentialities that Spinozian metaphysics offers for superseding the purely spatial and objectivistic dimension of materialism.

[Spinoza] — the deepest, most original thinker to emerge from our people from the end of the Bible to the birth of Einstein.

There may be no philosopher in history (with the possible exceptions of Socrates and Nietzsche) who has received greater attention in artistic, literary and popular culture than Bento (Benedictus) de Spinoza (1632–1677). His life, ideas and influence have been the subject of numerous novels, plays, poems, paintings, sculptures, even musical pieces and opera. His name and his visage have been used in the marketing of various items in the worlds of entertainment, leisure and consumption, from cafés to rock bands to bagels. [...] A relatively simple explanation for Spinoza's unusually high profile outside the walls of academia is at hand. Spinoza was the most radical and iconoclastic thinker of his time. His ideas on religion, politics, ethics, human psychology and metaphysics, presented in difficult and sometimes mystifying treatises, lay the groundwork for much of what we now regard as “modern.” Perhaps most enticing of all, he was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community as a young man for reasons that remain obscure (although not hard to fathom). Everyone loves a rebel—especially one whose values they likely share and whom, they feel, was unjustly punished by those in power.