Frédéric Lordon and the Possibility of a Spinozistic Social Science

• Published in: The Philosophical forum Vol. 46; no. 3; pp. 319 - 337
• Main Author: Earle, William James
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.09.2015
• Subjects: Logic; Lordon, Frederic; Philosophy; Social sciences
• ISSN: 0031-806X; 1467-9191
• DOI: 10.1111/phil.12072

It's interesting--and in my idiolect "interesting" is just about the highest compliment that can be bestowed on anything--to see contemporary social reality through the lens fashioned by Spinoza. Frédéric Lordon, director of research at Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and accredited to the Bureau d'économie théorique et appliquée (Strasbourg), has for some time been developing a Spinozistic perspective on contemporary social, and especially economic, reality. Trained as an economist, he has become through interest--and in my judgment--competence, a philosopher. Although there are traces of Lordon in the Anglophone world and one of his books has been translated into English, he should be better known among us, not for his sake but for ours. (It is regrettable that globalization seems to mean the flow of money and the migration of jobs across national borders, but not very much movement of serious nous.)