Spinoza, Metaphysics and Political Economy

Spinoza is generally recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the early modern period; less well known are his observations regarding private ethical conduct, social control including state intervention in the market, and public policy including welfare.

This book explores these political economy dimensions of Spinoza’s though setting them in the context of his own wider work and the broader intellectual history landscape. The discussion in the book takes account of Spinoza’s relation with his contemporary Thomas Hobbes regarding constitutional matters as well as public policy; compares his stance respecting ethical conduct with that of Immanuel Kant, who came a century later, and with utilitarianism; and examines the objections to Spinozan doctrine by the seventeenth-century philosopher Pierre Bayle and thereafter by David Hume, and the nineteenth-century critics G.W.F. Hegel and J.S. Mill. More specifically, this book points to a hitherto unnoticed adjustment by Spinoza himself to his contrast between ‘substance’ and ‘mode’ thereby weakening the foundations of his philosophical-theological position. It also demonstrates the on-going relevance in civil society of the State of Nature for both Hobbes and Spinoza and underscores a divergence from Kant regarding private ethical conduct. The book also explores Spinoza’s position on public policy, with emphasis on working-class welfare, a matter displaying a typically ‘mercantilist’ stance.

The book will be of great interest to readers of the histories of political economy, philosophy, and political science in particular, and intellectual history more broadly.

Samuel Hollander is University Professor in Economics at the University of Toronto where he taught from 1963 to 1998. He is the author of studies of the economics of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Robert Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. Also, of A History of utilitarian Ethics (Routledge 2020), Immanuel Kant and Utilitarian Ethics (Routledge 2022), and Hegel on Ethics, the State and Public Policy (Routledge 2025). He is a Guggenheim Fellow, an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.