Steven Nadler

On his book A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Modern Age

Cover Interview of October 20, 2011

A close-up

The way I have conceived this book, I would hope the browsing reader will open up to page one and immediately be taken by the story.

The opening pages put the reader in seventeenth-century Amsterdam and in the middle of proceedings by religious authorities to ban this “book forged in hell.” I intentionally start in a very intimate way with the controversy and uproar occasioned by the book, focusing on a couple of individuals who were involved in trying to put an end to the “pestilential publication”; I figured this personal approach was a good way to “hook” attention. From this initial episode, the story then moves back to the origins of the Treatise, the basic ideas of the work, the circumstances of its publication, and finally to scandal it caused.

philosophy / polemics / religion / europe / christianity / modernity / netherlands / spinoza baruch /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009