IN MEDIEVAL SCHOLASTICISM, ARISTOTLE’S reputation was such that he was usually referred to simply as “the Philosopher”. Among the moderns, this book makes the case for treating Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) similarly. And if there is no philosopher but Spinoza, Jonathan Israel is his prophet.
Spinoza: Life and Legacy is no ordinary biography. It builds on Steven Nadler’s classic Spinoza: A Life (1999) but its ambition is to assemble and interpret what we know of him on a much grander scale. Its 1,300 pages encompass not only the ancestry, adventures and afterlife of its subject, but provide a panoramic survey of his times, for which Israel’s first major book, The Dutch Republic, laid the groundwork quarter of a century ago.
In other ways, too, this monumental volume represents the culmination of a life’s work: the reconstruction and re-evaluation of the Enlightenment, to which Israel has already devoted a vast trilogy. Spinoza is, for him, the master thinker to whom we owe freedom, democracy and modernity itself.
The scholarly world is divided about
