Spinoza: America’s Founding Grandfather. Een beschouwing op July 4th - Independence Day

Parker Lancaster op Wordsworths Editions over Vrijheid & Independence Day

 

 

Ik neem  daaruit één alinea over:

Spinoza was a peaceful radical, gentleman’s gentleman, freethinker, genius, and a reviled and notoriously unapologetic heretic. A man after my own heart. He was the first philosopher in the world to marry rigorous religious skepticism to a political theory of a democratic state. He invented the notion of secular democracy in his “Theological-Political Treatise”. If Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, et al, are America’s Founding Fathers, then surely Benedict Spinoza must be numbered chiefly among America’s Founding Grandfathers. History is decidedly on Spinoza’s side. It has been well-demonstrated, in Spinoza’s time and our own, that tolerant secular democracies (in the case of the United States, a democratic republic) or constitutional monarchies that essentially operate under the same democratic framework, are the only proven and sustainable model for a lasting, peaceful, just, and prosperous state. Or at least the most peaceful, just, and prosperous form of government yet devised. It would be a grave mistake to pretend that Spinoza was a perfect man free of his own prejudices, that his complete corpus is flawless, or that the political state he advocated for is, or could ever be, a utopia or panacea for the moral failings and ills of mankind. But all options considered, it’s certainly the least awful form of a society we’ve discovered to date.