  Finally, it is worth mentioning Spinoza’s influence on the democratic thought of the French Enlightenment. Jonathan Israel has examined the myriad ways in which Spinoza’s philosophy shaped egalitarian political thought, including, perhaps most significantly, the political thought of the encyclopédistes (Israel 2011). Spinoza’s influence here is primarily due to his naturalism, which inspired the materialist metaphysics that underpinned French democratic thought, rather than to his political arguments. And Spinoza’s realist and arguably anti-revolutionary political method suggests that even if Spinoza’s philosophy influenced revolutionary democratic thought, it may have had little to do with his actual political philosophy. (For divergent assessments of Spinoza’s attitude towards revolution, see Rosenthal 2013 and Sharp 2013). Nevertheless, one finds more than a whiff of Spinoza’s absolutist conception of democracy in the accounts of the general will [volonté générale] found in Rousseau (see Ekstein 1944; Williams 2010) and Diderot (Israel 2011).