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Acknowledgement
I want to thank Jason Hoult for reading my review essay and sharing with me his comments on it.
Notes
1. Ward writes in Modern Democracy that Spinoza offers “a rigorously naturalistic interpretation of scripture” (57), and later, he invokes what he calls “the naturalistic hermeneutics pioneered by Spinoza” (126). But thus, in conflating history with natural science, Ward erases the distinction that Spinoza properly maintains between hermeneutics (as based on a rigorously historical methodology) and natural science (which studies objects, not human subjects). So it is that Spinoza holds that the Bible contains absolute truth (the truth of caritas) as the universally ethical imperative that all human beings are obligated to fulfill. Although Ward at one point in his study does refer to the “rational imperative underlying all social existence,” he fails to note, however, that the laws (theories) of natural science are hypothetical, not imperative (categorical) (72).
2. Ibid., see also 47, 54, 70, 76, and 81.
3. Ibid., see, for example, 42 and 81.
4. Ward does not comment on the fact that, when Rousseau, in later sections of the Social Contract, locates the general will in ancient Rome, he cannot escape the contradictory impasse of holding that Christianity, while true in itself, has no proper concept of civil society and that ancient paganism, while false in itself, has a proper concept of civil society, with the result that he severely undermines his concept of the social contract. Ward also does not point out that, although Jefferson rightly distinguished the ethics of Jesus from the moral philosophy of the ancient Greeks, he falsely claimed that it was superior to (and fundamentally different from) the ethics, together with the theology, of his Jewish forbearers (as was characteristic of so many Christian thinkers over the centuries). This was the position that Spinoza, as we saw, explicitly showed to be false.