John Robertson explores the terms in which Spinoza adapted sacred history, as recorded in the Jewish Bible and Christian Old Testament, to support his political thinking in the Theological–Political Treatise (1670). Rather than reading this work in the light of Spinoza’s philosophy, the focus of most scholarship, Robertson argues that Spinoza sought to understand sacred history on its own terms, as constituted by the three ‘constants’ of revealed religion: prophecy, a sacred text, and the ‘Word of God’ contained within the text. Spinoza’s understanding of these concepts is shown to have shaped the lessons which he proceeded to draw from the history of the Hebrews, their religious customs and their commonwealth. Spinoza’s approach to sacred history is then compared with that of Hobbes, drawing out both similarities and differences. A final section asks what became of this interest in sacred history as a source for political thinking in the Enlightenment, suggesting that its repudiation by some (such as Rousseau) was offset by a shift in the interest of others (such as Vico) from the Hebrews to the gentiles.

When did the emotions become political? It would be natural to view a formal political analysis of emotions as a classical phenomenon that was reprised under new and more decisive terms in late humanism and reimagined in the eighteenth century. In such a history we would expect to encounter the work of Thomas Hobbes and Giambattista Vico. It would also be natural to take Hobbes and Vico at their word and read this recovery of the political dimension of emotion as a rejection of medieval philosophy. I will propose the opposite: the grounds for this political turn were laid in late medieval scholasticism. The precedent for humanist and Enlightenment-era political thought about emotion lies with a repudiated scholasticism and its reinvention of classical Greek thought. It is the history of rhetoric that reveals this turn to the political. The thread that links these transformations together is the political reception and re-absorption of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the modern assimilation of the Rhetoric began in earnest with the most influential statecraft treatise of the Middle Ages, De regimine principum, written about 1277 by the scholastic theologian Giles of Rome.

Edward Said’s lifelong commitment to Romance philology and the discipline of Comparative Literature gave him an unusual and critical angle on the globalization of culture and ideas. This chapter explains that heritage and demonstrates the usefulness and power of that critique.

Throughout this chapter I referred to attempts to separate, in different historical and cultural periods,'inferior' and 'superior' thinking and knowing, and to difficulties in maintaining such a separation. Some scholars, like Aristotle and Jacob argued that scientific and mythical reasoning fulfil, at least to some degree, similar functions: they both aim at explaining fundamental questions about the universe,the origin of matter and life; and they are both based on imagination, representations of the world, and they explore powers that rule it.

Although the categories of mythos and logos have created controversies since ancient Greece, they have been maintained throughout centuries together with the conviction that on its road towards progress humankind will shed off irrational beliefs and myths. However, today, the mixture of myth and science still characterizes the thinking of ordinary citizens, scientific popularisers and political ideologists. It may even permeate thinking of scientists who, whether with or without awareness, are prone to propagating ‘scientific myths’. But search for coherence takes different paths; for scientists like Einstein or Wiener, boundaries between different kinds of knowing like science, religion, ethics and aesthetics were not rigid, but totally fluid and open towards creative and imaginative thought.

This chapter traces historical roots of common sense from Aristotle, and through the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ideas associated with the scientific revolution gave rise to new perspectives in arts, artisanships and technology, all these influencing the emergence of social sciences. The chapter focuses on the work of the Italian scholar Giambattista Vico who, in many respects, can be viewed as a precursor of the idea of the dialogical mind although Tagliacozzo emphasizes that Vico’s ideas had no influence until the nineteenth century. If we find traces of Vico’s ideas in the creators of the dialogical mind ranging from Herder, Hamann, Humboldt through to Cassirer, Bakhtin and Moscovici among others, this shows the originality and foresight of Vico’s oeuvre as a whole. Already in the early eighteenth century he viewed natural and human sciences as being of different kinds. For Vico, human beings humanize nature by acting on it, by establishing communities, social institutions, traditions and political organizations. It is common sense that forms the basis of historicity. From his critique of the Cartesian method, Vico developed a modern conception of common sense based on verum factum, the logic of imagination, language and ethics.