Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction by Roger Scruton

Started this a year ago while in Mexico, was reading it alongside Spinoza's Ethics; finished neither back then, but picked this back up to tackle Ethics.

Great introduction to Spinoza. It contextualizes his philosophy through the historical context, Spinoza's personal biography, and the intellectual context (Spinoza's intellectual influences, intellectual trends of the day, etc.). Does a great job of explaining Spinoza's abstruse terminology (substance, attribute) and how Spinoza usage of these terms diverge from his predecessors (Aristotle). Spinoza used language in a particular way; he wanted to write in a pure, philosophical language divorced from the language of man, and without Scruton, I would miscomprehend Spinoza.

Roger Scruton is a British conservative: I saw a Youtube video of him in a debate with Terry Eagleton. I think that Scruton's study of the classics, of Spinoza and some of the other medieval philosophers, lends to his conservative ideology.

In Spinoza's philosophy, human beings move from a passive state to an active state of freedom by way of reason (adequate ideas of the world). State institutions and laws exist to allow human beings to exercise reason, which is their freedom. Liberal constitution provides a framework for rational thought and discussion, and by "obeying the laws of a liberal constitution, we obey the dictates of reason, and to be compelled by reason is to be free." This means that "civil disobedience, which threatens the condition upon which his freedom depends, involves only a partial understanding... Such disobedience is an expression, not of freedom, but of inner bondage."

No wonder conservatives are enamored with the discourse of reason, freedom of speech, freedom, although I think that their own positionality prevents them from seeing the uneven distribution of access to rational discussion within a polity.

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