A Trumpet of Sedition : Philosophy

Spinoza, Atheist Steven Nadler-Princeton University Press 2026-£25

Spinoza, Atheist: Materialism, Consciousness, and the Marxist Lineage

Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677) stands as one of the most radical and consequential thinkers in the history of philosophy. His work helped detonate the ideological foundations of the seventeenth‑century world and laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment, the democratic revolutions, and ultimately the materialist conception of history developed by Marx and Engels. Steven Nadler’s scholarship — especially his insistence that Spinoza was, in every meaningful sense, an atheist — has revived interest in this extraordinary figure. Yet Nadler’s work also reveals the limits of academic philosophy, which often isolates Spinoza from the historical and social forces that shaped him and from the revolutionary tradition that later drew upon his ideas.

Spinoza’s thought was dangerous in his own time, and it remains dangerous today. As the World Socialist Web Site has noted, his ideas are “dangerous to the financial aristocracy of the twenty‑first century” because they undermine every ideological justification for hierarchy, privilege, and religious authority.¹ To understand why, we must examine Spinoza’s life, his philosophical system, his political commitments, and his place in the lineage of materialist thought culminating in Marxism.

A Life of Intellectual Defiance

Spinoza was born into Amsterdam’s Portuguese‑Jewish community, a group of former conversos who had fled the Inquisition. Educated in Jewish tradition, he quickly distinguished himself as a formidable thinker. But at the age of twenty‑three, he was excommunicated with unprecedented severity. The cherem condemned him for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds,” though it did not specify them a sign of the community’s fear of his ideas.²

After his expulsion, Spinoza lived modestly, supporting himself by grinding optical lenses. He corresponded with leading scientists and philosophers across Europe, including Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society. His works circulated clandestinely, often in manuscript, because they were banned across Catholic and Protestant Europe. His Theological‑Political Treatise (1670) was published anonymously and immediately condemned as “a book forged in hell.”

Steven Nadler’s Spinoza: A Life reconstructs this world with remarkable archival detail.³ It shows Spinoza as a man of personal integrity, political sympathy for the republican cause of Jan de Witt, and unwavering commitment to intellectual freedom. When de Witt was murdered by an Orangist mob in 1672, Spinoza reportedly attempted to post a sign denouncing the killing as “barbaric,” only to be restrained by his landlord for fear of reprisals.

Spinoza died in 1677 at the age of forty‑four, likely from lung disease caused by inhaling glass dust. His friends published his Ethics posthumously, along with his correspondence and unfinished works. The Ethics would become one of the most influential — and feared — books in European intellectual history.

The Philosophical Break: Monism Against Dualism

Spinoza’s philosophical revolution begins with a decisive rejection of Cartesian dualism. Descartes had divided reality into two substances: res cogitans (thinking substance) and res extensa (extended substance). This dualism preserved the theological worldview of the seventeenth century: an immaterial soul, a transcendent God, and a universe governed by divine will.

Spinoza demolished this architecture. There is only one substance, infinite and self‑caused, which he calls God or Nature (Deus sive Natura). Thought and extension are not two substances but two attributes of the same underlying reality. As he writes in the Ethics, “the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.”⁴

This is the foundation of philosophical materialism. There is no supernatural realm, no divine providence, no miracles, no immortal soul. Human beings are modes of nature, governed by the same laws as everything else. Spinoza’s critics were correct to call him an atheist. Nadler argues persuasively that Spinoza’s “God” is not a being but a conceptual placeholder for the totality of nature.⁵

Spinoza’s monism dissolves the mind‑body problem centuries before it became the central obsession of analytic philosophy. If thought and extension are two aspects of one substance, there is no need to explain how an immaterial mind interacts with a material body. The problem is a product of dualist metaphysics, not a feature of reality.

Consciousness and the Body: Nadler’s Contribution

Nadler’s most significant philosophical contribution concerns Spinoza’s theory of consciousness. Many commentators have located consciousness in Spinoza’s doctrine of “ideas of ideas” — the notion that every idea has a second‑order idea that represents it. But Nadler argues that this cannot explain degrees of consciousness, since the doctrine applies uniformly to all ideas.

Instead, Nadler highlights Spinoza’s remarks linking consciousness to bodily complexity. In the scholium to Ethics IIp13, Spinoza writes:

“In proportion as a body is more capable than others of doing many things at once… so its mind is more capable than others of perceiving many things at once.”⁶

This is the basis of what Nadler calls “explanatory materialism”: consciousness is not caused by the body but is the mental expression of the body’s organisation. Degrees of consciousness correspond to degrees of bodily complexity. This anticipates modern embodied cognition and dissolves the Cartesian “hard problem” centuries before Chalmers formulated it.

From a Marxist standpoint, this is crucial. Spinoza provides the monistic foundation; Marx adds the historical and social dimension. Human consciousness is not only the correlate of a complex body — it is the correlate of a body transformed by labour, tool‑use, and social practice. Marx’s dictum in The German Ideology — “consciousness can never be anything else than conscious being” — completes what Spinoza began.⁷

Politics: Equality, Democracy, and the Attack on Ideology

Spinoza’s philosophical radicalism was inseparable from his political radicalism. Jonathan Israel has shown that Spinoza was the first major modern thinker to embrace democratic republicanism as the most rational form of political organisation.⁸ If all humans are modes of the same substance, governed by the same natural laws, then no divine hierarchy can justify monarchy, aristocracy, or clerical authority.

Freedom, for Spinoza, is not free will but the understanding of necessity — the rational comprehension of the causes that determine us. This is why superstition, religious authority, and political tyranny are intertwined: they depend on ignorance of causes. Spinoza’s Theological‑Political Treatise is one of the earliest and most powerful arguments for secularism, freedom of thought, and the separation of philosophy from theology.

It is no accident that Spinoza’s revival in the 1780s preceded the French Revolution. As Ann Talbot notes, Spinoza was “as responsible as any one person could be for the revolution in consciousness” that made the Enlightenment possible.⁹

Spinoza and Marxism: A Line of Descent

The connection between Spinoza and Marx is not a retrospective imposition. It runs through the French materialists — La Mettrie, Diderot, d’Holbach — and into the dialectical transformation of materialism achieved by Marx and Engels.

Plekhanov put it plainly: “present‑day materialism is a Spinozism that has become more or less aware of itself.”¹⁰ When he asked Engels in 1889 whether Spinoza was right that thought and extension are attributes of one substance, Engels replied: “Of course. Old Spinoza was quite right.”¹¹

Spinoza provided the monistic ontology; Marx provided the historical, social, and dialectical method. Spinoza dissolved dualism; Marx dissolved idealism. Spinoza grounded human equality in nature; Marx grounded it in social relations and class struggle.

Spinoza vs. Roger Scruton: Materialism Against Conservative Idealism

The contrast between Spinoza and Roger Scruton reveals the political stakes of philosophy. Scruton admired Spinoza’s logical rigour but sought to neutralise him — to turn Spinoza into a source of aesthetic consolation rather than a revolutionary materialist. Scruton’s conservatism, rooted in tradition, hierarchy, and the “sacred,” is the ideological antithesis of Spinoza’s rationalism.¹²

Where Spinoza insists that social reality can be understood and transformed, Scruton insists it must be accepted. Where Spinoza undermines religious authority, Scruton defends it as a source of social cohesion. Where Spinoza’s monism points toward equality, Scruton’s idealism defends hierarchy. This is not a difference of temperament; it is a difference of class position.

Why Spinoza Matters Now

The renewed interest in Spinoza — from Nadler’s scholarship to the embodied‑mind movement to the revival of radical Enlightenment studies — reflects a deeper crisis. Postmodernism, with its rejection of reason and truth, has exhausted itself. Bourgeois philosophy, trapped between scientistic reductionism and irrationalist relativism, finds itself returning to the materialist tradition it once abandoned.

Spinoza offers a way out: a rational, naturalistic, egalitarian worldview that rejects superstition and hierarchy. But only Marxism can complete what Spinoza began — by grounding consciousness, politics, and freedom in the material conditions of social life. Spinoza was a revolutionary in the age of the Dutch Republic. His ideas remain revolutionary in the age of global capitalism.

Notes

Ann Talbot, “Spinoza Reconsidered,” World Socialist Web Site, 2001.
Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 73–75.
Ibid.
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, IIp7.
Steven Nadler, “Was Spinoza an Atheist?”, Journal of the History of Philosophy 45, no. 2 (2007).
Spinoza, Ethics, IIp13s.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1846).
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Ann Talbot, “Spinoza Revisited,” World Socialist Web Site.
G. V. Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (1908).
Ibid., correspondence with Engels.
Roger Scruton, Spinoza (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).