Philosophers conceive of the passions which harass us as vices into which men fall by their own fault, and, therefore, generally deride, bewail, or b… - Benedictus de Spinoza

The formation of society serves not only for defensive purposes, but is also very useful, and, indeed, absolutely necessary, as rendering possible the division of labor. If men did not render mutual assistance to each other, no one would have either the skill or the time to provide for his own sustenance and preservation: for all men are not equally apt for all work, and no one would be capable of preparing all that he individually stood in need of. Strength and time, I repeat, would fail, if every one had in person to plow, to sow, to reap, to grind corn, to cook, to weave, to stitch and perform the other numerous functions required to keep life going; to say nothing of the arts and sciences which are also entirely necessary to the perfection and blessedness of human nature.

As early as the 1670s, and continually, right through the eighteenth century, one finds numerous references in the contemporary controversial literature, theological, philosophical and historical, in all the Western European countries, to ‘Spinoza’ as supposedly the foremost and most dangerous of the ‘atheists’ threatening Christianity, society and the moral order generally, and the ‘sect of Spinozists’ specifically as the veritable hard-core of the libertine underground challenging all the structures of authority then in place.

As the French philosopher Louis Althusser wrote in his 1976 Essays in Self-Criticism, much late 20th century Spinozism has proceeded by ‘attributing to the author of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Ethics a number of theses which he would surely never have acknowledged, though they did not actually contradict him. But to be a heretical Spinozist is almost orthodox Spinozism, if Spinozism can be said to be one of the greatest lessons in heresy that the world has seen!’. Though Spinozists have existed ever since the radical circles that rippled through Europe in the wake of Spinoza's death, I think it is fair to say that only in the past 50 years or so has there been a Spinozism to match in hermeneutic rigour and creative interventions the history of Kantianism or Hegelianism, that only now has the hereticism that Althusser referred to been complemented by the labour of the concept. Arguably, it is only now then that the scope of his thought and its relevance to our social and political existence can be truly appreciated, at a historical juncture when the communicative power of the multitude and of what Marx called the general intellect is so intensified that the physics, ethics, ontology and politics of Spinoza (what are ultimately indissociable facets of his philosophizing) can be thought simultaneously. Today more than ever, one might argue, is Spinoza, as Pierre Macherey puts it, ‘an irreplaceable reactor and developer’.