Spinoza's Critique of Religion and its Heirs

Idit Dobbs-Weinstein is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. She is the author of Maimonides and St Thomas on the Limits of Reason and coeditor of Maimonides and his Heritage (with Lenn E. Goodman and James A. Grady). Her work has appeared in such journals as Epoché and Idealistic Studies.

• Introduction: whose history, which politics?; 1. The theologico-political construction of the philosophical tradition; 2. The paradox of a perfect democracy: from Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise to Marx; 3. Judgment Day as repudiation: history and justice in Marx, Benjamin, and Adorno; 4. Destitute life and the overcoming of idolatry: dialectical image, archaic fetish in Benjamin's and Adorno's conversation; 5. Untimely timeliness: history, the possibility of experience, and critical praxis; Afterword: the possibility of political philosophy now.

'For Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Spinoza is neither the secular liberal he is for Jonathan Israel and Steven Nadler, nor the anatomist of power he is for Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. He is, rather, the first critical theorist. In support of this interpretation, she places Spinoza in a materialist tradition that privileges praxis over theoria. This tradition includes Aristotle, Averroes and Maimonides on the one hand, and Marx, Benjamin and Adorno on the other. At its centre is Spinoza's critique of religion, the political significance of which lies, for Dobbs-Weinstein, in the resistance to all forms of teleology rather than in the establishment of a public sphere.' Andrew Cutrofello, Loyola University, Chicago