The Excommunicant

Richard Popkin

  • The God of Spinoza: A Philosophical Study by Richard Mason
    Cambridge, 272 pp, £35.00, May 1997, ISBN 0 521 58162 1
  • Spinoza, Liberalism and the Question of Jewish Identity by Steven Smith
    Yale, 270 pp, £21.00, June 1997, ISBN 0 300 06680 5

Shortly after the end of World War Two, a young American professor submitted an article to a leading philosophical journal, explaining a difficult point in one of Spinoza’s arguments. In short order he received his manuscript back with the news, written on it by hand, that ‘we are not now and never will be interested in Spinoza.’ Spinoza had been dropped from the Anglo-American canon.

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