ABSTRACT
In the last two generations Spinoza's social and political thought has given rise to a number of strong, divergent interpretations. Leo Strauss's jeremiad in Persecution and the Art of Writing stresses Spinoza's absolutist state, his elitism, his conception of religion as a sop to the masses, and his use of equivocal language. Materialist readings, by contrast, stress Spinoza's deconstruction of an exceptional human mind, together with the conceptions of transcendence and teleology that undergird it. In the nineteenth century, materialism comes to attach to the name Karl Marx. The materialist reading of Spinoza coheres in many respects with the Spinoza retrieved by historians of the Radical Enlightenment, each emphasizing social, religious, and philosophical reform in the service of populism and a mobile pantheism, to use a term specific to Enlightenment literature. There have been several ways of understanding the relationship between the various accounts Spinoza gives of the origin of social and political life.
