Baruch Spinoza, a Dutch philosopher, is rightly regarded as one of earliest Enlightenment thinkers to champion individual rights and to begin defining the proper limits of the state. For Spinoza, when people were free to live as they saw fit, and when the state was limited to maintaining order and justice, people would flourish. Spinoza’s ideas of religious toleration, individual rights and even democracy set the stage for later Enlightenment thinkers to develop ideas that would eventually lead to the classical liberal traditions many take for granted today. Watch this video to learn more, and visit www.EssentialEnlightenment.org.
