In his Political Treatise, Spinoza repeatedly compares states to human beings. In this interpretation of the comparisons, I present a progressively more restrictive account of Spinoza’s views about the nature of human beings in the Ethics and show at each step how those views inform the account of states in the Political Treatise. Because, like human beings, states are individuals, they strive to persevere in existence. Because, like human beings, states are composed of parts that are individuals, states' parts also (...) strive to persevere in being. Finally, because in states, as in human beings, a change to the power of striving of a part can be at the same time a change to the whole that differs in kind, strong states can be bad for their citizens and states that serve their citizens well may nevertheless be weak. Spinoza’s principal project in the Political Treatise is to design states that are stable and good for their citizens. This account of the comparisons shows why that project is so difficult: one cannot design a good state simply by designing a stable state. (shrink)

According to a recent interpretive orthodoxy, Spinoza is a profoundly democratic theorist of state authority. I reject this orthodoxy. To be sure, for Spinoza, a political order succeeds in proportion as it harnesses the power of the people within it. However, Spinoza shows that political inclusion is only one possible strategy to this end; equally if not more useful is political exclusion, so long as it maintains what I call the depoliticised acquiescence of those excluded.

Para determinar la relación entre saber y poder en el Tratado político de Spinoza, debe observarse que a medida que la potestas del imperio se comparte, es decir, a medida que las instancias de discusión racional aumentan , la instancia de un saber independiente de la posesión del poder va desapareciendo. Mientras que la instancia del saber racional es indispensable reconocerla en la monarquía, como opuesta a la potestas de uno solo , parece que se diluye y comparte a medida (...) que la potestas vuelve a la multitud, pasando por el gobierno aristocrático. La inconclusión del TP no puede mostrarnos la lógica de esta disolución de la autoridad de la razón en el régimen democrático, la potestas absoluta. (shrink)

Western society has been diverted from the goal of spiritual freedom and autonomy as expressed in the ancient Pythagorean 'theory of the cosmos'. Indeed, following Heidegger's analysis, it can be seen that modern Western society has arrived at the opposite pole of anthropocentric 'absolute subjectivism' in which the entire non-human world is seen as a material resource to be consumed in the satisfaction of our egoistic passive desires. It is further argued that Spinozism is actually a modern version of the (...) 'theory of the cosmos' which, when supplemented by a vision of man's identity with the ecological world, would provide us with the only adequate portrayal of the God/Nature/Man relationship. (shrink)

There is currently a growing interest in the philosophy and political thought of Baruch de Spinoza following many years of comparative neglect, particularly within political philosophy. The focus of this paper is Spinoza's major work, the Ethics, and its relation to his political writings. It explores Spinoza's distinctive formulations of imagination and affect and considers some of the ways in which these impact upon his political thought, specifically via his reflections upon democracy and knowledge. The discussion draws particular attention to (...) the aporetic status of imagination and its tendency towards ambivalence. It argues that this dynamic account of imagination introduces provisionality and contingency into Spinoza's reflections upon politics that may, in turn, enrich discussions seeking to introduce an awareness of the affective resonances of communication and identification to democratic theory. (shrink)

In Spinoza, what I call the ‘Being Individual Multiple’ is the multitudo. Its form of life is Democracy, understood as the autonomous and conflictual organization of collective dynamics and not one form of government among others. Combining an original mode of argumentation with a critical discussion of opposing interpretations, I maintain that democracy is the translation into politics of the third and highest kind of knowledge in Spinoza, intuitive science. I argue moreover that the multitudo self-organized in a democracy has (...) the capacity to experiment and express a different rationality with respect to the singular individual. Wisdom and democracy thus converge to give life to something unknown and original in western political modernity. (shrink)