Although a more generous view of "philosophy" could have extended the title to say, Leveller Richard Overton, Leveller apostate John Wildman, or some lesser known Dutch writer, Leo Strauss and Tom Pangle have agreed that Spinoza was the first philo sopher to defend liberal democracy. In part he favored liberal democracy because, like Kant much later, he expressly believed that while monarchies tended to war, democracies tended to peace (liberal democracies do not in fact make wars on each other , as elaborated and explained in R. Rummel, Power Kills, 1997). But before we address Spinoza's arguments for freedom of political discourse, we may put him in context.

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam (the house is still there) to a Jewish family descended from refugees from Portugal. Only during his earliest childhood was the family status comfortable, becoming more parlous after his mother's death in 1638. But f rom age 13 to 24, Spinoza worked within a relative's trading house. It left time to become well-schooled in the Rabbinic tradition, with work not only on theology but also in languages, sciences and philosophy. He acknowledged little respect for the anc ient Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, even if he did admire the Greek atomists.

But the Hebrew faith had a notorious tension with philosophy, and by 1656 Spinoza's studies were to lead him to openly doubt the Hebrew faith, for reasons elaborated later. This led to his excommunication, which the Amsterdam synagogue refused to revoke over three hundred years later, notwithstanding his fame. After excommunication, Spinoza found it more comfortable to relocate to The Hague.

Always a bachelor, Spinoza for a time associated with the Mennonites, who taught a communitarian, apolitical pacifism. This naturally led to his similar admiration for the Quakers, as reviewed in the prior essay.

Spinoza in 1663 had published his Principles of Cartesian Geometry, which connects him to scholarly circles. Spinoza's 1665 Tractatus Theologico Politicus (published 1670) was a sharp critique of the existing interpretations of the T orah (what Christians call the Old Testament), putting authorship of some books in doubt and challenging the idea that the Jews were a chosen people. He would have been skeptical of Protestant Christian biblical fundamentalisms as well, especially of the Calvinists who made so much use of the Old Testament, and who also could think themselves Elect of God. Spinoza thought that the Calvinists of Amsterdam were very like the Pharisees of ancient Jerusalem.

Spinoza naturally grew into a philosophy of secular, rationalistic liberalism, as espoused by John De Witt (1625-72) and a brother, who had been students of Cartesian mathematics. John De Witt was a pioneer in calculation of actuarial tables, used in the insurance industry to price annuities. The De Witt brothers' ideal was political leadership by enlightened, middle class elements involved in Holland's increasingly prosperous international trade. Holland had enjoyed de facto autonomy from Spain since 1609, which only became formalized in 1648.

A moderate wing of the Calvinist Dutch Reformed had similar peaceable trading aims as did De Witt, hoping to acquiesce in continuing Catholic control of the southern Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium) and make permanent peace with Catholic states. Indeed, possibly nearly half the population of the provinces which become the modern Netherlands were Roman Catholic, which made mutual Calvinist-Catholic toleration seem the only sensible idea. However, the more zealous Calvinists, apparently more lower class and including many refugees from the southern region, kept urging more war with Spain, winning the rest of the Spanish Netherlands. They favored not secular republicanism but a monarch of the House of Orange. In 1672, five years before Spinoza's death, the English and French declared war on the Dutch, and the French actually invaded. In such a climate of fear which often suspends reason, the Calvinist fanatics gathered in a mob which went after John De Witt as well as his brother, murdering them and further mutilating and dismembering their bodies.

Horrified, Spinoza commented, "Lowest barbarians!" In disillusionment, he completed his withdrawal from organized religion by withdrawing from any political involvement. He now held that anyone who thinks citizenries can be led by reason alone ar e dreaming of "the poetic golden-age, or of a stage play." After that, Spinoza could at most prefer a semi-aristocratic democracy, where more enlightened leaders guide non-leaders in such a way that they think they lead themselves (Political Treatise, x, 7). In 1673 the University of Heidelberg offered him a professorship, but Spinoza turned it down because it would leave him less time for philosophy. Continuing to grind lenses for a living, he became a recluse before finally dying of tuberculos is in 1677.

During the years 1663-74 he had been at work on his Ethics, and by 1676 he was also at work on his Tractatus Politicus, and both works appear only posthumously, with the latter leaving its discussion of democracy unfinished.

Spinoza's philosophy as elaborated in the Ethics imitates classical geometry, with axioms, propositions, corollaries, etc., and what Nietzsche scornfully criticized as "the hocus-pocus of mathematical form" is not easy reading. Suffice it t o say that Spinoza is broadly pantheistic, rejecting any concept of God separate from nature, and hence divine (as well as diabolical) interventions are not in question. Rather, he assumes that human behavior is quite predictable according to laws, becau se it is largely deterministic and hedonistic.

Determinism means that he denies any strong sense of freedom of the will, quipping that if a thrown stone were given thought, it would imagine that it chose its direction of its own free will. In an almost Stoic way, he thinks that there is an ind efinite chain of causality behind most choices, and to the extent that minds are passive, dominated by the activity of the body, these causes really make those choices. Yet Spinoza anticipates Sigmund Freud's view two centuries later in noting that a sma ll minority of the philosophic, by avoiding mental perturbation by force of passions, can attain high activity of mind. Through knowledge of the causes of their behavior, they acquire in virtue of the identity of intellect and will a freedom of mind from those causes: "A passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it." For such truly wise minorities, recognized determinism in majorities means that they are "to hate no one, despise no one, to mock no one; to be angry w ith no one, and to envy no one. It teaches everyone...to be content with his own and to be helpful to his neighbor."

But to say that most people will be hedonistic is to say not only that they are self-interested but that they are rather mechanically determined in their behavior by the pleasures and pains they experience, anticipate or otherwise associate with th ings.

Sometimes such associations are beyond easy control, as when ethnic or other prejudices arise, in Spinoza's view, because foolish people generalize adverse experience of one or a few of a group to the whole of the group. In this, nothing has chang ed.

In other cases our psychology is more hopeful. Thus by public arrangements of pains, which we now would call negative reinforcements, we can steer behavior toward the public good.

This applies in punishments, for as he puts it in a 1674 letter, the assumption of determinism need not preclude holding people legally responsible for their wrongdoing, since deterrence motives remain: "Wicked men are not less to be feared, and a re not less harmful, when they are wicked from necessity."

It also applies to some aspects of public policy, whereby a bad passion can be neutralized by an offsetting good one, such as dissuading public officials in an aristocracy from the bad passion of making wars by according them a share of 1-2% of rev enues from both export and import duties, which would hence go down with the trade volume during wars.

It is less easy to see any nexus of his psychological theory to our focal concern with freedom of speech. He does favor what we now call "sunshine laws" of maximal public disclosure of all public information, since citizens always tend to associat e the secretive with some evil intentions of their leaders.

His most original argument for freedom of speech uses the familiar concept of a state of nature, wherein the powers of individuals are coextensive with their rights. He holds that even in constituting a government, the powers of public officials w ill not practically permit the shaping of beliefs, concluding that therefore they have no right to do that. Translating his idea into a modern cliche, he seems to be saying, "A man coerced against his will, remains of the same opinion still."

Unfortunately, some evidence suggests that this may not be so. Viewed from one side, most of us who are not philosophers literally can't help believing as we do, for it is beyond any freely willed choice. But viewed from the other side, even if one conceded that authorities cannot directly coerce belief, they often can control a great deal of at least the public expression of belief, and such control can indirectly lead to change in beliefs. By no means always but often coerced co mmunication climates measurably lead to change of opinion in the desired direction. When Germany was split after World War II, the West German government required the teaching of religion in public schools, while the East German government required teach ing of atheism. The 1989 fall of Communism surely shows that not all beliefs can be coerced, if only because non-public communication flows were likely critical, but in that year self-reported disbelief in God was only 33% in West Germany compared to 75% in East Germany (Central Archive for Empirical Research, University of Cologne). Even government control over certain non-verbal actions can ultimately reshape certain beliefs: Legally mandated desegregation of schools, housing, etc. seems to have resu lted in less prejudicial belief systems in the United States.

If one may thus challenge one Spinozan defense of freedom of speech, he seems to be on stronger ground when he emphasizes its value as part of the means to human self-preservation, or as part of the climate which promotes development of the arts an d sciences. Like others before him, he also claims that religious freedom led to commercial prosperity in Holland. But Lewis Feuer suggests that perhaps he has the causal arrow reversed, that really an openly commercial society tends to lead into openne ss to diversity of thought.

For Spinoza, not an uncritical acceptance of revelation from an overly anthropomorphic god but rather reason is most likely to conduce to human peace rather than religious warring. He was especially wary of those claiming direct divine prophecy, w hich especially arises when a state is most in peril.

Actually Spinozan rational analysis would put most religious views in doubt. Indeed, the pantheist's merger of God and nature, or what William James called the Creator and the Created, also erases any distinction of sacred and secular, as Christop her Hill has observed. I would put it this way: Once god is everywhere, is it not almost as much as saying nowhere?

Spinoza clearly wanted to protect philosophy from both politics and religion by freeing politics from religion, and at least substantially freeing religion from politics.

While broadly for freedom of speech, Spinoza yet would not preclude a minimal kind of civil profession of faith: God exists, He wants us to love one another, and He judges us by our deeds more than by creeds. To have permitted such a "thin" publi c establishment of religion at all expresses his admitted fear that excess in religious liberty could lead into an excess of diverse sects (rather than unity through persuasion), and that this could lead to disunity and destabilization of a society.

Also, while hoping that philosophers would out of responsibility censor themselves, he seems willing to censor in vulgar forms of expression certain beliefs which he thinks are inherently subversive whether or not religious. These are beliefs whi ch he says tend to undermine social compacts: "For instance a man who holds that the supreme power has no rights over him, or that promises ought not to be kept, or that everyone should live as he pleases" (Theologico-Political Treatise, XX). Whil e these Spinoza-opposed teachings seem close to anarchism, even anarchists of later years taught that some promises should be kept and some acts should not be done to make mutuality of uncoerced cooperation possible. Since Spinoza vigorously opposed abso lute government as well as anarchism, it is puzzling that he would only mention restrictions on ideas linked to the latter. By inference, he perhaps assumes that freedom to say anything else fully accords with the prevention of absolute government.

Another limitation of his freedom is that while he would apparently grant them the same measure of free speech, he would not accord full voting rights to women and immigrant aliens, such as included the great French philosopher Descartes, who had c hosen to live much of his life in Amsterdam.

But yes, Spinoza seems to be the first thoroughly philosophic person to endorse liberal democracy and its freedom of speech, whatever his reservations and qualifications.

McShea, Robert J. 1968. The Political Philosophy of Spinoza.

New York: Columbia University Press.

Strauss, Leo. 1965. Spinoza's Critique of Religion. N.Y.: Schocken Books.