In the mid-1660s Spinoza began to compose the TTP, an ambitious work combining scriptural interpretation and political theory that would ignite a firestorm of criticism in Spinoza’s lifetime. In a 1665 letter to Henry Oldenburg, Spinoza presents the three primary reasons for writing the work: to oppose the prejudices of theologians; to rebut the charge of atheism; and, to defend the freedom of philosophizing (Ep30). The TTP was ultimately published anonymously and with a false imprint in 1670, perhaps occasioned in part by the imprisonment on charges of blasphemy and subsequent death (presumed to be due partially to the conditions of his captivity) of Spinoza’s friend Adriaan Koerbagh. Among the central claims of this multifaceted text are: Scripture is fundamentally a collection of simple moral teachings for ordinary people, rather than a source of insight into God’s nature and operations; philosophy and faith aim at different things, namely truth and obedience respectively; the sovereign maintains complete right over the external practice of religion; and that the peace and piety of a state can be preserved only if the freedom to philosophize is granted.

In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel offers the following verdict on Spinoza’s ontology: “According to Spinoza what is, is God, and God alone. Therefore, the allegations of those who accuse Spinoza of atheism are the direct opposite of the truth; with him there is too much God” (Hegel 1995, 3.281–82). It is not easy to dismiss Hegel’s grand pronouncement, since Spinoza indeed clearly affirms: “whatever is, is in God [Deo]” (E1p15). Crocodiles, porcupines (and your thoughts about crocodiles and porcupines) are all in God. There is nothing that is not in Spinoza’s God.

The polymath Goethe was such an important literary and cultural figure in Germany that his era is sometimes referred to as the Goethezeit. However, it is notoriously difficult to assess Goethe’s achievements as a scientist and philosopher, given his syncretic, and sometimes mystical approach. Spinoza, the philosopher Goethe esteemed above all others, was among his key influences.

In E3def3, Spinoza defines the term “affect” (affectus), claiming, “By affect I understand affections of the body in which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections.” Affects are affections of the body by which or in which (the Latin, quibus, is ambiguous) the body’s power changes. The first notable feature of the affects is an event in the body that alters its power of acting, increasing or decreasing it. This state of the body, and the idea of this state, is an affect.

Spinoza does not talk about “the Absolute” in the nominative sense that the German Idealists will use later, but he consistently uses the adjective (absoluta/e) and adverb throughout his works. For Spinoza, something is “absolute” in a metaphysical sense when it is considered without relation to anything else.

Piety (pietas) is an important concept in Spinoza’s ethics, where it describes aspects of virtuous individuals, and in his political writing, where he uses it to develop his theological views. Since Spinoza’s understanding of the term is informed by its received meaning, it is important first to mention how the term was understood in his immediate context, the seventeenth-century Dutch intellectual scene. The term would have been known foremost from the humanistic tradition, which focused on ancient Roman writers like Cicero and Tacitus, rather than from the scholastic tradition. In the classical Latin used by Roman writers, pietas refers to upright conduct, particularly dutiful conduct, but also kindness and loyalty. The term is ambiguous between upright conduct that is religious or moral in nature. In the Christian era, pietas came to refer more exclusively to the religious virtue of dutiful reverence for God. Pietas was also an important concept in Calvinist theology, the orthodox theology of the Dutch Republic.

This chapter traces the development of Russian poetry from the earliest known texts to the late nineteenth century. The emphasis is on versification (syllabic, syllabo-tonic, and tonic [also called accentual] systems, all of which appear at times in Russia), genre, and style. Examples come primarily from the work of canonic poets. A distinction is drawn between folkloric and literary verse, which intersected only infrequently. Some attention is devoted to the ways that Russian poetry was indebted to Polish, German, and French models. The focus is on two periods: the eighteenth century, when secular Russian literature first began to flourish, and the ‘Golden Age’ of Aleksandr Pushkin.

Spinoza inherits the notion of substance (substantia) from Descartes and the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition. To appreciate what Spinoza is doing with the category of substance, and how his monism – that is, his thesis that there is no substance besides God – works, it is useful to begin with a basic understanding of the Aristotelian distinction between a substance and an accident.

Spinoza presents the remedies for the affects (affectuum remedia) in the final part of the Ethics (E5pref–E5p20s) as part of an analysis of the power of the intellect and the way to freedom (libertas). While Spinoza prefers the general concept “affect” in these passages, the remedies clearly target passions – that is, emotions that involve inadequate knowledge (E3GDA). Because passions are major obstacles for achieving happiness, the discussion of the remedies can be seen as a central stage in achieving the overall aim of the Ethics, blessedness (beatitudo) (E2pref), and as completing the consideration of the remedies for the excessive desires for wealth, honor, and sensual pleasure that had started already in the early pages of the TIE (sections 1–11). Passions produce both tormenting vacillations of the mind and desires contrary to reason’s dictates which aim at our true well-being. In this regard, passions betray our lack of power and cause “sickness of the mind [animi aegritudines]” (E5p20s). The general aim of the remedies is to cure such sickness by guiding the mind to adequate understanding and replacing passions with active affects, such as “love toward God [Deum amore]” and “satisfaction of mind [animi acquiescentia].”

Thought is an attribute of God (E2p1) endowed, like every attribute, with infinite and finite modes that are conceived through it (E1def5, E1p16, E2a2). Thought and the related concept of knowledge were important categories in the philosophical theories that Spinoza set out to supplant. Spinoza’s treatment of thought poses some of the most difficult problems for interpreters of his philosophy. These problems are of especially great importance because Thought, as an essence of infinite substance, is arguably the single most fundamental category in his metaphysics and epistemology.

The concept of sovereignty (imperium, summa potestas) has come under attack since the mid-1970s when Foucault put it in one line with slavery or oppression (Foucault 2004, 37). With this in mind, Antonio Negri and Spinoza scholars in his vein criticized Hobbes for justifying sovereignty as absolute monarchy, while celebrating Spinoza as a democrat whose political theory aims for freedom (e.g., Negri 1991, 109–14, 140; Balibar 1998, 55–56). Spinoza, however, widely agreed with Hobbes’s political theory (Ep50; Prokhovnik 2004, 221–22). In particular, he agreed with the latter’s concept of sovereignty (in Spinoza’s Latin, summum imperium / summa potestas; in English translation, “sovereignty” or “supreme power,” TTP16.26; but see Prokhovnik 2004, 225) while, arguably, significantly improving it. He did so in two principal ways. First, Spinoza aimed to make the democratic generation of the commonwealth and the sovereign as suggested by Hobbes (L17.13) somehow permanent; and second, he extended Hobbes’s argument for freedom of thinking (L42.11; L46.37, 42) toward freedom of speech – though without undermining absolute sovereignty.

The evolution of Russian drama from the early twentieth century to the present day has been shaped by an alternation between censorship and relaxation, and has included exciting periods of formal innovation. The psychological realism of Konstantin Stanislavskii’s stagings of Anton Chekhov’s plays was challenged by the post−1917 radicalism of Vsevolod Meierkhold, exemplified in his production of Vladimir Maiakovskii’s Mystery-Bouffe. Experimentation gave way to rigidity under Socialist Realism, but the post-Stalin era saw cautious innovation in playwriting succeeded by a flourishing culture of ‘director’s theatre’, led by figures such as Iurii Liubimov. Innovations gathered pace under glasnost, opening out to the bold variety of ‘New Drama’ in the twenty-first century. This has now given way to the rigid constraints imposed by the Putin regime.

This chapter explores a hardy perennial – the meaning of the American Civil War – from the standpoints of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It evaluates historian David Potter’s 1968 assertion that, from an international perspective, the defeat of the American South’s bid for independent nationhood and the emancipation of enslaved Blacks, the American Civil War resulted in an unprecedented marriage of liberalism and nationalism, a union unique in the formation of nineteenth-century nation-states. This marriage not only gave liberalism a strength it might otherwise have lacked but also lent nationalism a democratic legitimacy that it may not otherwise have deserved. It also explores how the end of the Cold War and the emergence of multiple decentralizing technologies (cell phones, social media, the internet, etc.) and other polarizing forces which have raised serious questions about whether a more than 150-year-old marriage can survive the centrifugal temptations of the new century.

This chapter traces the rise of secular, non-governmental publishing in Russia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and argues that a succession of risk-taking entrepreneurs eventually made it possible for authors to become remunerated professionals and to become the entertainers, tribunes, and conscience of the nation. Despite the obstacles of government interference, undercapitalisation, and mass illiteracy, publishers underwent a series of transformations, from printer-artisans to merchant-booksellers to, by the 1840s, intellectuals, becoming a force for shaping imaginative literature, primarily through the medium of the thick journal. Only by the end of this period did they become major print capitalists, but even then, the publisher often remained a creaky mechanism for producing literature, with poorly fitting parts and thin financial lubrication. The influence of these publishers and their enterprises, however, is demonstrated by the fact that the new Soviet regime made closing them down one of its first tasks.

This chapter outlines the role of empire in shaping Russian literature from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. It traces the persistent literary impact of empire using the concept of imperiality, developed by analogy with coloniality, which decolonial theory describes as a sociopolitical and cognitive framework that endures beyond the times of colonialism. The chapter highlights the impact of empire on eighteenth-century Neoclassical poetry and on literature of the Romantic era. It then explores the enduring presence of empire in later periods, including Realist and early Modernist writing, as Russia’s colonial practices combined with a self-image as a magnificent and much-put-upon nation state. Finally, it presents the Soviet-era cultural system of the ‘friendship of the peoples’ as a reimagined imperiality and concludes with an in-depth discussion of critical reflections on imperial legacies by post-Soviet authors such as Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, and Liudmila Ulitskaia.

For many years, the reality about the role of women in American and southern history remained the absence of scholarship about women and the absence of women in the profession. The journey of women into the world of professional historians involved overcoming many stereotypes and prejudices. A few women emerged as professional historians who made major contributions into new areas of scholarship as early as the post-World War II years, but the ratio of women to men only began to increase in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Economist Claudia Goldin identified a “quiet revolution” of women entering the history profession between 1950 and 1970, which then exploded as women rushed into the profession in force during the 1970s. The influx of talented women opened new fields of study (women, family, social history topics, etc.). This chapter examines the influence of women who shaped new areas of study while also offering new perspectives on longstanding questions of broad scholarly interest.

Spinoza’s remarks about education are somewhat scattered and indirect, yet education is an important theme in his philosophy. Spinoza’s reflections on education fall into three broad categories: reflections on the education of children, reflections on the cultivation of philosophers, and reflections on civic education. In view of E2p7 and its scholium, which instructs us that Thought and Extension are two attributes of the same substance, E3p2s, which instructs us that the order of actions and passions in our body is the same as the order of actions and passions in our mind, and related texts that elaborate these core commitments, we can understand Spinoza’s notion of education as concerning the power of the body, the power of the mind, and the organization of the emotions or “affects.”