This chapter considers the Russian Symbolist movement as an alternative to the utilitarian-populist literary edifice in addressing the socio-political problems that confronted Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. The chapter traces the growth of the Symbolist movement over its two phases, beginning with the searching attempts of the first generation of Symbolists – especially Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Zinaida Gippius, and Fedor Sologub – to turn a secular culture in the direction of spirituality and religion; and then the ambitious “theurgical” activist partnership of the second generation of Symbolists – Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi, and Viacheslav Ivanov – who rose to prominence during the politically tumultuous age of the fin de siècle (the decade surrounding the revolution of 1905), an era galvanised by a pervasive sense of disorientation, groundlessness, experimentation, and apocalyptic presentiment.

In seventeenth-century philosophy, the term “will” (voluntas) generally referred to the power or faculty of the mind that produces volitions. As such, the will was conceived as the executive power responsible for actions and for the sort of control that one exercises in choices and decisions. Philosophical accounts of the will were particularly interested in whether and in what sense the will qualifies as free.

The outward forms of different states, whether monarchies (monarchiae), aristocracies, democracies, or theocracies, are very elastic according to Spinoza. At the close of Chapter 7 of the TP, “On Monarchy,” Spinoza concludes that “a people can preserve quite a considerable degree of freedom under a king, provided that it ensures that the king’s power is determined only by the people’s power and depends on the people for its maintenance” (TP7.31). Spinoza evaluates the monarchies he analyzes – Aragon, Castile, England, and especially the ancient Israelite kingdom and that of ancient pre-republican Rome – less in terms of how efficient they may have been in their administration, upholding law and order, fighting wars, or defending their realms, than in terms of how effective their constitutional provisions were in restraining the power of the monarch. In his eyes the relevant measure was always how far the people remain the real sovereign power (potentia) behind the throne, and so how good the monarchies are at curbing tyranny and upholding the common good. He ends his chapter on monarchy by remarking “And this was the only Rule I followed in laying the foundations of a Monarchic state” (TP7.31).

The concept of temperament (ingenium) plays an underappreciated role in Spinoza’s practical philosophy. The Latin term ingenium signifies an innate disposition of mind or character. In the TTP, Spinoza refers to the ingenia of peoples and individuals, generally translated by Edwin Curley as their “mentality” (TTP3.44; TTP4.33; TTP5.7, 27–28; TTP16.62). In the Ethics, Spinoza grounds an individual’s affects and value judgments in their underlying ingenium, rendered by Curley as “temperament” (E3p31s, E4p37s1–2, E4p70d, E5p4s). Despite the difference in translation, there is reason to see the same notion of ingenium at work throughout Spinoza’s writings.

Literature about Russians abroad includes memoirs and other non-fiction narratives of exile and emigration, often by writers who wrote from first-hand experience. It also includes fiction by writers who may or may not have emigrated themselves. Emigration is at once a biographical fact and a literary phenomenon; this has led to conflicting approaches to its interpretation. This chapter centres on the protagonists found in works of émigré literature – universalising archetypal figures, minimally disguised authorial alter egos, and migrants who elicit an unexpected jolt of recognition – all created in their historical moment, yet open to new meanings beyond their time and émigré milieu. It concludes with an examination of the exodus of writers from Russia that began soon after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the concomitant need to re-evaluate the association between literary emigration and the émigré writer as a voice of moral authority.

This chapter turns again to David Potter, who argued compellingly that American exceptionalism emerged neither from a practical, nonideological political genius nor a prevailing faith in an inherited ideology, but rather from the influence of widespread and enduring economic abundance on the American character. Potter’s People of Plenty argued that the broad availability of abundance became the nation’s single most defining characteristic. Potter’s argument proved especially convincing during the broadly shared prosperity of the post-World War II years. Yet Potter’s explanation never quite accounted for the enduring postbellum poverty of the American South that lingered long enough for President Franklin Roosevelt to label the South the “nation’s no. 1 economic problem” in 1938. Additionally, as the nation’s economic growth slowed significantly and inequality worsened since 1980, there are new reasons to question whether Potter’s argument can remain influential if growing economic inequality and the related class anger persists or worsens.

In the Ethics, memory (memoria) is defined as a function of the association of ideas (E2p18). Almost every time I walk into my daughter’s room, I step onto a Lego piece. Thus, my idea of my daughter’s room and my idea of Lego pieces are tightly connected by association. Although there is no conceptual connection between the room and the Lego, one idea evokes the other. If a mind encounters two things, the recurrence of one will evoke the idea of the other.

Where Chapter 2 assessed the origin and content of Morin and Cappel’s works, Chapter 3 shifts to consider aspects of their reception, tracing both the debates prompted by Morin’s publications and the difficulties Cappel faced in publishing the Critica sacra. These, it shows, were interlinked, as many of the problems Cappel encountered stemmed from the way in which his Protestant contemporaries learned about Morin’s claims and followed the disputes he provoked. It draws particular attention to how scholars in Switzerland came to oppose Cappel’s work, showing how this was shaped by a conjunction of differing views about the practice of biblical scholarship and how Protestant scholars ought to conduct themselves in the Republic of Letters.

Chapter 6 shows how the later 1650s and 1660s defy ready categorisation, with the practices and tools of biblical scholarship being drawn on in a range of different ways in a range of different contexts. Its three parts proceed concurrently, rather than chronologically, and successively analyse: the way in which debate concerning the Old Testament became increasingly polemical, framed in terms of a choice between the Masoretic Hebrew text or the Septuagint; how biblical scholarship differed according to different local settings (in this case Italy (and especially Rome) and the Dutch Republic); and how Benedict de Spinoza, comparatively disconnected from the confessionalised world of Old Testament scholarship, targeted a precise set of the views concerning the Bible held by others in his local Reformed and Jewish communities.

Chapter 2 explores the early history of colonial rule in the New Kingdom of Granada, and of the priests and officials first tasked with introducing Christianity to its Indigenous peoples. This involves unravelling a series of powerful assumptions entrenched in the historiography that insist on the efficacy of colonial power. Instead, the chapter shows that the ability of colonial officials, missionaries, and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic to effect change on the ground remained fleeting, contingent, and inconstant. To do so, it explores the participatory nature of the royal administration and judiciary, both at an imperial and a local level, and its reliance on petitioners, supplicants and rescript; reassesses the role of the legislative projects of local officials, whose efficacy is so often taken for granted; and tests the real impact of these institutions and their claims on the lives of Indigenous people through a careful re-reading of all surviving records of early visitations, showing that for decades colonial control remained an illusion and that in practice power remained far from the hands of colonial officials in the New Kingdom.

Theories of religion, prophecy, and the interpretation of Scripture in the TTP incorporate Spinoza’s account of miracles (miraculi). “On Miracles,” Chapter 6 of the TTP, includes two different senses of the term. The chapter opens with an acknowledgment of an ordinary understanding of the term, on which a miracle is a divine action in which God violates the universal laws of nature (TTP6.3–4). Spinoza strongly denies that there are any such actions. He does, however, offer a different sense of “miracle,” which he accepts:

Ever since Spinoza was alive, commentators have been struck by the prevalence of Stoic themes in his writings. Leibniz named him a leader of “a sect of new Stoics” which maintained that “things act because of [the universe’s] power and not due to a rational choice” (Leibniz 1989b, 281). In the nineteenth century Hegel placed both Stoics and Spinoza in the same philosophical school, which tried to advance an idealistic metaphysics and dogmatically avowed what he called the metaphysics of the “understanding.” In more recent times, major scholars such as Susan James and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty have published important articles asserting that at bottom Spinoza was a Stoic. Some have even linked Spinoza to the Stoics because of his temperament. In the earliest known biography of Spinoza, Johannes Colerus tells his readers that even as he suffered greatly from illness at the very end of his life, Spinoza “always exprest … a truly Stoical constancy” (Colerus 1706, 87).

After the Civil War, the American South seemed to be the exception to American exceptionalism. As the late British historian Eric Hobsbawm asserted, after the end of Reconstruction, the South remained “agrarian, poor, backward, and resentful; whites resenting the never-forgotten defeat and blacks the disfranchisement and ruthless subordination imposed by whites when reconstruction ended.” Confederate defeat and the emancipation of slaves left the American South faced with the challenge of embarking upon the “Age of Capital” while largely bereft of capital. This chapter focuses on how the southern capital shortage turned much of the rural South into a “vast pawn shop” with financing for planting crops coming from a mortgage on a crop not yet produced. As beggars for capital, the American South became the ragged stepchild of the industrializing American economy, an economic backwater controlled by outside capital. Active economic legacies of the capital-starved South still haunt the region’s economic landscape in the form of underdeveloped human capital.

The author describes his parents’ upbringing and move to New York around the time of the Great Depression. The young Weinberg is encouraged to read widely and later takes inspiration from Norse myths from the Poetic Edda.