Tradition and Modernity 29between the individual and society, religion and the state. For Spinoza, God
is the all-encompassing substance and is thus deprived of any anthropomor-
phic attributes, while man can realise his nature and pursue the good only in
company with other men, since they are all equally empowered by God and
equally benefi t from combining their powers. Acquiescentia is the keyword of his
recipe of good life. It cannot be properly translated in any modern European
language. As suggested by Voegelin (1999: 129), it simply means islam – that
is, trustful surrender to God – though this is certainly closer to the Islam of the
philosophers and of the Sufi s than to the Islam of the jurists.
While by nature men are multitudes of monads individually empowered by
God, the traditional moral problem of performing good deeds for the benefi t of
alter and the wider community cannot be solved by implementing preordained
catalogues of injunctions, but only when individuals pool in their fragmented
powers into a common power. Thus they create rules governing the relation
between multiple egos and alters, which so regulate the collective life of wider
multitudes. Therefore, Spinoza delivers a view of the common good as the
product of a conscious option for power-sharing, while renewing, not rejecting,
the idea of a shared higher good, consisting in a good life of reason, solidarity
and acquiescentia (Voegelin 1999: 126–32). Spinoza’s approach carries the seeds
for a comparative view of the modern fundaments of political association. It is
particularly suitable to an analysis of multiple modernities, since it is not based,
like Hobbes’s model, on the idea of a metamorphosed Christian myth as the
basis of the modern polity but draws from a variety of sources.
The socio-political conditions and intellectual environments that favoured
the emergence of the radical views of Spinoza and of other thinkers variably
inspired by him took form in Western Europe during a period of intense socio-
political and economic transformations and political–military rivalry with the
Ottoman Empire. Yet the broader theoretical framework of this specifi c type of
Enlightenment, and the axial traditions from which its most advanced versions
were derived, were the product of a longer-term intercivilisational exchange
nurtured by bloody and genocidal confl icts, as in the epilogue of the Spanish
Christian reconquista that is at the root of Spinoza’s diasporic displacement. This
displacement facilitated his drawing from a variety of traditions and their combi-
nation into an original perspective. In particular for Spinoza, religion, properly
understood, is ethical speech, an axial discourse that formulates shared values
in order for human powers to create rules of connective justice and to support
stable socio-political orders. The infl uence of the Islamic philosophy’s idea of
prophecy is here unmistakable. Spinoza contended that the authority used
in this conversation is legitimate if it adheres to the ethical frame of religious
discourse and does not degenerate into the manipulative activity of stirring up
wrong beliefs, which he calls superstition and which can be the source of fanati-
cism. Spinoza’s rejection of priesthood in all religions was due to his conviction