Journal of the History of Philosophy

This book is a significant accomplishment, and for now the most comprehensive intervention in a debate that has been more than three hundred years in the making. At least since Pierre Bayle, commentators have imagined a sort of paradox in the pairing of Spinoza’s irreproachable way of life with his scandalous philosophy, in contrast with the perfect fit between Leibniz’s optimism for the status quo with his supposedly opportunistic relation to his courtly benefactors. Together with these biographical coordinates, to which Lærke’s work is attentive and sensitive, there is a philosophical opposition that is supposed to be absolute: each philosopher is the other’s perfect opposite. Matthew Stewart’s bestseller The Courtier and the Heretic is the latest iteration of this myth, and Lærke’s study might best be summed up as the perfect antidote to Stewart’s: it is a rigorous, dense, and, most importantly, a just treatment of the authors themselves, whose own words often belie the roles in which they would posthumously be cast. While Lærke acknowledges that there is indeed an easy opposition one can construct between the major metaphysical commitments of the two thinkers, he nonetheless wants to know how their systematic differences might have grown out of an intense engagement on Leibniz’s part with a philosophy he indeed ended up opposing, yet against which he felt compelled to articulate his own views, and back to which he often seemed in danger of returning.

One of the virtues of Lærke’s rich study is that it reveals the seamless continuity between recent scholarship in the history of philosophy, on the one hand, and on the other that buffer [End Page 108] zone of sorts that we label ‘reception history’. Our scholarship is itself part of this history, even if this is never easy to see in the present. Lærke has thoroughly mastered the entire history of commentary—from the perceptions of Leibniz and Spinoza’s contemporaries such as Bayle and Arnauld; through Lange, Wolff and others; into the pantheism debate of the high Enlightenment; the birth of a rigorous academic discipline of historiography of philosophy in the nineteenth century; through Gueroult, Stein, Friedmann, Jacob Freudenthal, et al.; and up to the most recent work of Goldenbaum, Adams, and Kulstad—a mastery that lends his work a depth of field much greater than that of some of the recent scholarship (mostly English-language) he cites in the spirit of thoroughness.

It is often supposed that Leibniz’s ultimate rejection of Spinoza resulted from a youthful attraction to him, circa 1676. Lærke shows convincingly that in one of the drafts of the system laid out in the so-called De summa rerum papers, Leibniz indeed takes inspiration from Spinoza’s system in order to build up his own. Yet his borrowing of elements of Spinozism occurs in connection with a number of philosophical and theological aims that Lærke rightly identifies as Leibnizian. Part of the appearance of quasi-Spinozism may in fact arise from Leibniz’s consistent strategy of differentiating between the various components of a contemporary’s philosophy, dividing it into “relatively distinct thematic blocks.” This is a facet of Leibniz’s “conciliatory eclecticism,” Lærke maintains, borrowing a phrase from Christia Mercer, that will result in Spinoza being cast in a more sympathetic light by Leibniz than one might expect.

I cannot possibly mention all of the aspects of the relationship treated in the book (there are more words in Lærke’s table of contents alone than the amount allotted for this review), and here am focusing principally on the author’s position vis-à-vis the tradition of commentary. But again, it is important to emphasize the central importance of engaging critically with this tradition in order to recover the real enjeux of Leibniz’s engagement with Spinoza’s thought. A good example of this arises from...