De Witt was the “Pensionary of Holland,” that is, the secretary and chairman of the legislature of the most important of the Seven Provinces constituting the Dutch Republic (or United Provinces) during most of Spinoza’s adult life. De Witt held this powerful position from 1653 until the summer of 1672 when, during the French invasion of the Republic, he and his ruling faction were overthrown by the Orangist opposition. The Orangists supported the claims of the princely house to hereditary right to the stadholderate, the presiding office in each of the Seven Provinces of the United Provinces combining military command with key roles in the seven legislatures and their highest committees, giving the young William III (stadholder 1672–1702) presiding political power as well as full military and naval command. Since the late 1660s especially, De Witt, his followers, and their anti-Orangist ideology known as the “True Freedom” rejecting the hereditary stadholderate, had faced deepening opposition.

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).

In Chapter 8 of the TP Spinoza states it is the “secret policy” of a monarchy that its subjects should “sink beneath their burden,” because the standing of kings “counts for more in war than in peace, and because those who wish to reign alone must do their best to keep their subjects in a state of poverty” (TP8.31). He then notes that there are also other considerations that militate against monarchy and in favor of democratic republics, but that here he is omitting these points which were “noted some time ago by that most wise Dutchman. V.H. [prudentissimus Belga V.H.],” V.H. standing for “Van der Hove”; he is here referring to the two brothers Johan and Pieter de la Court, figures of pivotal importance in the development of Dutch democratic republican political theory during the 1650s and 1660s.

After spending five years as a young man studying philosophy and theology at the Paris Sorbonne (1730–35), Denis Diderot earned his living in Paris as a tutor, immersed in the French clandestine philosophical literature, soon becoming a subversive philosophe himself. First, he adopted a deist stance in his Pensées philosophiques (1746), but soon rejected deism. Knowing his second foray, the Promenade du sceptique, written in 1747, would be totally unacceptable to the authorities, he left it unpublished. Though printed only long after his death (1830), it remains a key to his early intellectual development, relating an idealized debate between a group of philosophers all disagreeing but all also rejecting revealed religion – a deist, sceptic, spinoziste, and representative of a crudely mechanistic, Epicurean atheism reminiscent of La Mettrie. Finally, it is the spinoziste who triumphs by presenting the most cogent, compelling, and morally most uplifting stance, an important indication of Diderot’s own lasting commitment to a creed he calls that of the “Spinosistes modernes.”

Antonio Pérez was an Aragonese who, having been Philip II of Spain’s secretary of state, in succession to his father, for some twelve years (1566–78), and then disgraced and imprisoned for another twelve years, finally escaped from Spain and became one of the foremost international publicists denouncing Philip II’s oppressive absolutism. His writings played a significant role in shaping Spinoza’s view of Iberian history and political history generally. His trenchant, bitter style – the favor of princes is “false, feeble, deadly, the shadow of death itself” – seems to have greatly appealed to Spinoza: “For as Antonio Pérez notes quite rightly,” remarks Spinoza in his TP, “to exercise absolute rule is very dangerous for a Prince, very hateful to his subjects, and contrary to the laws instituted by both God and man. Countless examples show this” (TP7.14). Spinoza here only slightly alters Pérez’s wording.

Chapter 16 considers the moderate lumière in his Enlightenment context with a focus on his relationship to the “radical Enlightenment.”