Spinoza

The life and thought of Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) can prove instructive for “our own censorious time of dangerous political polarization,” according to this admiring biography from bestseller Buruma (The Collaborators). Born into a Portuguese Jewish merchant family in Amsterdam, Spinoza developed a sense of “personal caution”; he was “cagey” about sharing ideas with those he didn’t trust and halted translations of some of his potentially inflammatory works from Latin into Dutch. His provocative notions, including his belief that god and nature were inseparable and his dismissal of “religious superstitions that worked on people’s hopes and fears,” threatened the religious and secular authorities of his time, and contributed to his formal expulsion from the city’s Spanish-Portuguese Jewish community in 1656. Though Spinoza “was no revolutionary,” Buruma contends that he was committed to a revolutionary mode of “reason and freedom of thought” to which all, regardless of religion or culture, were entitled. Overviewing the political and religious landscape of Spinoza’s lifetime, Buruma convincingly frames the philosopher’s dedication to reason as an exemplar for an America constricted by a “disregard for... discernible reality” and by “secular ideologies which insist... on ideological conformity” in the same way as the church did in Spinoza’s. It’s an inspiring reassessment of the enduring relevance of a trailblazing thinker. (Feb.)