Natural and Unnatural Communities: Spinoza Beyond Hobbes

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ARTICLE

NATURAL AND UNNATURAL COMMUNITIES:SPINOZA BEYOND HOBBES

Aurelia Armstrong

. . . as long as human natural right is determined by the power of each singleindividual and is possessed by each alone, it is of no account and is notionalrather than factual, since there is no assurance that it can be made good.1

ORIENTATION

In Spinoza, the passage from the state of nature to civil society is notrepresented in terms of a rupture or discontinuity. Socialization does notoccur, as it does in Hobbes, by virtue of the intervention of a juridical orderopposed to Nature and transcendent to the passional, conflicted field of pre-social interests which it organizes. Thinking against the grain ofseventeenth-century rationalism Spinoza avoids presenting man’s passionalnature as a difficulty to be overcome, regarding it instead as the very field ofinvestigation upon which ethical and political theory must by founded. Thisnaturalism is reflected in Spinoza’s deviation from Hobbesian contractar-ianism: there is, for Spinoza, no mediation of a contract required to socialize‘anti-social’ individuals, no total transfer of natural rights creating anobligation imposing itself as an external norm, no obligating force ofcommand at the origin of social relations, and no rational break with thepassional order of Nature: in short, there is in Spinoza very little evidence ofHobbes’ ‘antagonistic solution’ to the problem of human sociability.

This paper situates Spinoza’s account of the transition to civil societywithin the framework of his conception of human nature and the role theaffects and imagination play in shaping individuals and social relations. ForSpinoza, this transition is a process continuous with the exercise andcollective development of natural rights or powers, including the naturalpower of reason. Conceiving of civil society in this manner, Spinoza

*I wish to thank Deborah Brown for helpful comments in formulating this paper. I am also

grateful to Thomas Gibson and an anonymous reader for generous constructive criticisms.1Benedict Spinoza, Political Treatise in Spinoza: Complete Works, translated by S. Shirley

(Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002) 687. Henceforth TP.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17(2) 2009: 279–305

British Journal for the History of PhilosophyISSN 0960-8788 print/ISSN 1469-3526 online ª 2009 BSHP

http://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/09608780902761687

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by-passes the abstract question presupposed by Hobbesian contractarian-ism, the question of how harmonious social relations are possible, leavinginstead the practical problem of how, and to what extent, the passivity,impotence and antagonisms characteristic of life in a state of nature can betransformed into activity, consonant with the life of reason. I argue,however, that the utopian strand in Spinoza’s thought is in direct tensionwith the very naturalism that sets his view apart from the contractarianismof Hobbes, and suggest the price the view pays is that a society of rationalbeings not in need of a state is, on Spinoza’s view, essentially unrealizable.

Hobbes and Spinoza: Power, Sociability and the

Constitution of Political Society

Hobbes and Spinoza confront the same problem in their political theory, theproblem of how to conceive of the nature and foundations of politicalsociety. In Hobbes’ account the passage from the state of nature to thesocial state requires the voluntary transfer of every individual’s natural rightto the profit of a third party, the sovereign, which institutes the conditions ofpossibility for harmonious relations between individuals or citizens. Indeed,Hobbes argues that ‘during the time men live without a common Power tokeep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre . . .’,and again, that ‘men have no pleasure (but on the contrary a great deale ofgriefe) in keeping company, where there is no power able to over-awe themall’.2 Hobbes’ characterization of the nature and operation of the powerwielded by the sovereign state derives from his conception of the power ofindividuals in the natural state.

In Leviathan Hobbes defines the power of a man as ‘his present means toobtain some future apparent good’.3 By itself, however, this definition doesnot suffice to explain Hobbes’ view of the irreducibly antagonistic characterof human relations in the state of nature, nor, therefore, the need for asynthesis of private powers by a mediating Power. In order to arrive at hisconclusion that the pursuit by individuals of their own interests always leadsthem into conflict with others, Hobbes must add a further postulate that

because the power of one man resisteth and hindereth the effects of the power

of another: power is simply no more, but the excess of the power of one abovethat of the other. For equal powers opposed, destroy one another.4

2Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by C. B. Macpherson (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1968)

185.3Hobbes, Leviathan, 150.4Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, edited

by Bernard Gert (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1928, 1991) Pt I,

ch. 8.

280 AURELIA ARMSTRONG

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Only by gaining a margin of power over the power of others can individualsin the state of nature guarantee their continued preservation and success andsatisfy their desires – the struggle for power and for resources being the twooverriding aims of human life. In other words, the power of an individual toobtain what he wants is effectively equivalent to his ability to ‘master thepersons of other men’.5 For this reason human life appears to Hobbes as a‘perpetuall and restless desire of Power after power’ which gives rise at theinter-individual level to a ceaseless competitive struggle for more power ordominion over one another.

A number of commentators have suggested that Hobbes’ pessimisticassessment of human relations in the natural state should be attributed tothe quantitative and cumulative model of power which his argumentspresuppose. Paul Patton notes, for example, that

Hobbes appears to assume a quantitative essence common to all the means by

which agents seek to attain their objectives. It is this one-dimensional conceptionof power which allows him to assume that an individual’s power is increasedsimply by accumulating or incorporating the existing powers of others.6

That may be so, but the question remains as to why Hobbes privileges thequantitative model over other models that do not reduce all the means ofenhancement of power to the capture and instrumental use of the power ofothers. One reason for this may lie with Hobbes’ atomic conception of theindividual as a pre-constituted, independent and isolated individual,threatened from without by others whom it must, therefore, master if it isnot to be mastered by them. It is precisely by rejecting this conception ofhuman beings in the state of nature that Spinoza is able to envisage analternative to authoritarian models of government.

SPINOZA’S REJECTION OF CONTRACTARIANISM

In Chapter sixteen of the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza takes upHobbes’ theory of the social contract in his discussion of the foundations of

5See Hobbes, Leviathan, 184–5:

And from this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himselfe,

so reasonable, as Anticipation; that is, by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all

men he can, so long, till he see no other power great enough to endanger him: And this

is no more than his own conservation requireth . . . such augmentation of dominion

over men, being necessary to a man’s conservation, it ought to be allowed him.6Paul Patton, ‘Politics and the concept of Power in Hobbes and Nietzsche’, in Nietzsche,

Feminism and Political Theory, edited by Paul Patton (London and New York: Routledge,

1993) 149. See also Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault, (Oxford, UK

and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), esp. chs 1 and 2; see also C. B. Macpherson, The

Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962),

ch. 2.

SPINOZA BEYOND HOBBES 281

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the state. Although Spinoza describes the constitution of a sovereign powerhere with reference to the contractual mechanism, as a function of a transfer ofright, he redefines the notion of right in such a way that it can no longer playthe role attributed to it by Hobbes. According to Spinoza, right must bedefined in relation to power, ‘my natural right is determined by power alone’.7

To say that I have the right to act in a certain way means that I have the desireto act, the physical and intellectual capacities to do so, and that there are nointernal or external impediments preventing me from acting. From thisassumption of the strict identity of right and power, Spinoza concludes that atotal transfer of rights is quite impossible, for power (and therefore right) is notan additional attribute or property of an individual, but is characteristic of hisor her essence or nature: natural right is primary power (potentia) and,consequently, inalienable. It follows that ‘[n]obody can so completely transferto another all his right, and consequently his power, as to cease to be a humanbeing, nor will there ever be a sovereign power that can do all it pleases’.8

The significance of this definition of right in the context of Spinoza’schallenge to Hobbes is evident from the implications of the second part ofthis statement: if there can be no complete transfer of right/power, nor canthere be any such thing as absolute sovereignty, if by ‘absolute’ weunderstand an unlimited power in which all the power and right is on theside of the sovereign. Human beings, Spinoza contends,

have never transferred their right and surrendered their power to another socompletely that they were not feared by those very persons who received theirright and power, and that the government has not been in greater danger from

its citizens, though deprived of their right, than from its external enemies.9

The very possibility of civil disobedience presupposes the impossibility of atotal transfer of power. What, then, could Spinoza mean by a (partial)transfer of right or power?

Spinoza’s response to this question can be extracted from his discussion ofthe ways in which an individual may be under the authority or power ofanother. According to Spinoza, this may occur either as the result of force(‘One man has another in his power if he holds him in bonds, or hasdeprived him of the arms and means of self-defence or escape’) or throughfear and favour (‘or has terrorized him, or so attached the other to himselfby benefit conferred that the man would rather please his benefactor thanhimself and live as the other would wish rather than at his own choosing’).10

These two modes of being under another’s authority correspond to the

7Benedict Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise in Spinoza: Complete Works, translated by S.

Shirley (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002) 529. Henceforth TTP.8TTP, 536.9TTP, 536.10TP, 686.


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difference between the slave and the subject. The slave ‘is one who has toobey his master’s commands which look only to the interests of him whocommands’ whereas a subject is one who, ‘by command of the sovereignpower, acts for the common good, and therefore for his own good also’.11 Atransfer of right is enacted, then, when an individual or group, eitherthrough fear of retribution or hope of further benefits, desires to act in theinterests of another and thus puts their power at the disposal of the other.

What such a transfer signifies, however, cannot be conceived on the model ofHobbes’ quantitative and ‘possessive’ model of power since it involves noalienation of power. On the contrary, Spinoza claims that an individual must,in fact, physically retain power in order to be able to act in the interests ofanother whose utilization of this power necessarily depends on the maintenanceof the desire and, thus, on the active participation of its actual ‘possessor’. Evenmore importantly, because this ‘transfer’ of power is motivated by fear or hope,it cannot be irreversible: as soon as the fear and hope cease, so too does thetransfer itself – ‘When one or the other is removed, the man remains in controlof his own right.’12 When Spinoza speaks of a transfer of right, then, thiscannot be understood in a juridical sense for it does not imply that transcendenttransfer which results in an irreversible obligation on the part of the transferee.It is, rather, a process by means of which a new (and only relatively irreversibleor stable) relation of forces is established.13 It is this essentially affective andcorporeal process that Spinoza draws on in his articulation of the foundations,constitution and effective power of the sovereign or state.

Sovereignty and the Power of the Multitude

The term ‘contract’ appears only once in the Political Treatise coincidingwith Spinoza’s specification of the transfer of right which constitutes theright/power of the (non-democratic) sovereign.14 According to Spinoza, thecontract results in a monarchical system of government based on a law‘whereby a people (multitudo) transfers its right to one council or oneman’.15 With the introduction of the concept of the multitudo in this context

11TTP, 531.12TP, 686.13See Alexandre Matheron, ‘La Fonction Theorique de la Democratie chez Spinoza et Hobbes’,

Studia Spinozana 1 (1985) 259–73 for a comprehensive discussion of the difference between

Hobbes and Spinoza on the notion of a transfer of right.14For discussions of these issues, see, for example, Alexandre Matheron ‘Le probleme de

l’evolution de Spinoza du Traite Theologico-Politique au Traite Politique’ in Spinoza: New Issues

and Directions, edited by Edwin Curley and Pierre Moreau (New York and Leiden: E. J. Brill,

1990) 258–70; and Individu et Communaute chez Spinoza, (Paris: Minuit, 1988) 307–30; see also,

Douglas Den Uyl Power, State and Freedom (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1983) chs 2 and 3; see also

Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, translated

by Michael Hardt, (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) 108–19.15TP, 698.


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the conceptual terrain that we have been exploring thus far is significantlytransformed. If there is a right of the multitude which it ‘transfers’, then, bydefinition, there must also be a power of the multitude, its power. Themultitude must thus be regarded as denoting a complex (social) body orunified collective entity, not merely an aggregate of distinct individualpowers. Balibar makes this point, arguing that in Spinoza’s work

[n]atural right is now, for the first time, thought explicitly as the power of themass (potentia multitudinis), hence as the ‘right of number’ (since

jus¼ potentia), not, of course, in the sense of an arithmetic sum but in thesense of a combination, or rather, an interaction of forces.16

It should be clear that Spinoza’s social contract is not the Hobbesian one forthere is already a kind of sovereign power ‘determined by the power of thepeople that is guided as though by a single mind’.17 An important implicationof this is that the power that defines the right of government cannot beconsidered, in a straightforward sense, its own power (potestas) which could,as such, be located outside of any particular empirical configurations andrelations of force. Rather, this power must actually be conceived as anelement of the power of the people as a whole, of the multitude that is guided‘as though by a single mind’; the power of the government is a function of thepower of the multitude itself. Thus, for Spinoza, the political problem doesnot reduce, as it does in Hobbes, to two terms – individuals and the state –and the relations between them. Rather, Spinoza considers individuals andthe state as abstractions, which can only be adequately apprehended whenrelated through the multitude which includes them both.

Spinoza’s challenge to Hobbes’ juridical view is thus posed through thedevelopment of two interrelated demonstrative chains, one detailing thepassage from individuality to community (the production of sociability),and the other concerned with the genesis of sovereignty and the state. Bothproceed from the same general concern; namely, from his desire to derivefrom Nature itself, and from the ‘general nature or position of mankind’, theconditions for the growth of reason and of freedom, the conditions, in otherwords, for the development of the powers of individuals.18 In order toexplore the contours of this development in Spinoza’s thought, we need,

16Etienne Balibar, ‘Spinoza, the Anti-Orwell: The Fear of the Masses’, in Masses, Classes,

Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, translated by James Swenson

(New York and London: Routledge, 1985) 15.17TP, 692. See also TP, 687: ‘This right, which is defined by the power of a people [potentia

multitudinis], is usually called sovereignty [imperium].’18As Spinoza explains in the TP, 682:

since all men everywhere, whether barbarian or civilized, enter into relationships with

one another and set up some kind of civil order, one should not look for the causes

and natural foundations of the state in the teachings of reason, but deduce them from

the nature and conditions of men in general.


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first, to reconsider his claim that the construction of sociability does notrequire a voluntaristic break with nature. How is this unified collectivepower – the multitude – actually produced? How is the transition from thestate of nature to the civil state possible without the intervention of atranscendent organizing power?

Unsociable Sociability: The Constitution of the Multitude

Spinoza’s first answer to these last questions is found in the followingremark:

Since men, as we have said, are led more by passion than by reason, itnaturally follows that a people will unite and consent to be guided as if by one

mind not at reason’s prompting but through some common emotion, suchas . . . a common hope, or common fear, or desire to avenge some commoninjury. Now since fear of isolation is innate in all men inasmuch as in isolation

no one has the strength to defend himself and acquire the necessities of life, itfollows that men by nature strive for a civil order, and it is impossible that menshould ever utterly dissolve this order.19

The first point to note here is that the type of sociability that defines themultitude does not have its sources in reason, but predominantly in thepassions. What binds individuals together in the multitude is ‘a commonhope, or common fear, or desire to avenge some common injury’, in otherwords, some common passion. In an extremely condensed formulation,Spinoza links the universality of the fear of solitude to the claim that ‘menby nature strive for a civil order’ and can never ‘utterly dissolve this order’.In making this move from the experience of a common fear to theirreducibility of the civil state Spinoza seems to be indicating – contraHobbes – the possibility of providing a positive argument for theredundancy of a contract or artificial convention in order to ‘take’individuals from the state of nature into the civil state. Passions arepresented here as having a directly socializing function. In fact, they arecited as the primary cause of the constitution of the multitude. Tounderstand how the passions can play this unifying role in forming thenetwork of individual powers that defines the multitude, it is necessary toturn to the third part of the Ethics where the passions are treated, not onlyas sources of unsociability and antagonism, but at the same time ofcommunity and sociability. Once again, a preliminary contrast with Hobbesserves as an instructive point of departure.

Through the concept of a ‘state of nature’, Hobbes illuminates hisvision of life lived without those normative constraints and institutional

19TP, 700–1.


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frameworks that, in the social state, counteract the essentially divisivepassions of men. For Hobbes, the idea of a ‘common’ passion understood asa form of social bond, as something that unites individuals, is hardlyimaginable. Thus, although fear afflicts everyone in Hobbes’ state of nature,it cannot really be regarded as a shared or common passion. Rather, fear isthe motive that prompts each individual, separately, to enter into a covenantto relinquish their right to act as private persons.

Spinoza, on the other hand, eschews the atomistic individualism thatinforms Hobbes’ views and, thus, escapes his pessimistic conclusions aboutinter-individual relations. His ability to do so can be seen to derive, in part,from his elaboration of a mechanism of passional life which he calls‘affective imitation’ (affectuum imitatio). The theme of affective imitation isintroduced in EIII to account for the way in which resemblances thatindividuals perceive between themselves and others form the basis ofimaginary identifications. These identifications provide the basis for variouskinds of common collective affection. In EIIIP27, Spinoza claims that:

P27: If we imagine a thing like us, toward which we have had no affect, to be

affected with some affect, we are thereby affected with a like affect.

Dem: the images of things are affections of the human body whose ideasrepresent external bodies as present to us (by IIP17S), that is (by IIP16), whoseideas involve the nature of our body and at the same time the present nature of

the external body. So if the nature of the external body is like the nature of ourbody, then the idea of the external body we imagine will involve an affection ofour body like the affection of the external body. Consequently, if we imagine

someone like us to be affected with some affect, this imagination will expressan affection of our body like this affect. And so, from the fact that we imaginea thing like us to be affected with an affect, we are affected with a like affect.

But if we hate a thing like us, then (by P23) we shall be affected with an affectcontrary to its affect, not like it, q.e.d.

Schol.: This imitation of the affects, when it is related to sadness is called pity(on which, see P22S); but related to desire it is called emulation, which,

therefore, is nothing but the desire for a thing which is generated in us from thefact that we imagine others like us to have the same desire.20

Affective imitation is an inevitable consequence of Spinoza’s metaphysics inwhich there is just one substance and the human mind is the idea of thebody. Since bodily affections are physical changes wrought by the impact of

20Benedict Spinoza, Ethics in The Collected Works of Spinoza, translated by E. Curley

(Princeton NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1985) Pt III, Proposition 27. When referring to the

Ethics I will use the standard abbreviations in the main text: a Roman numeral to refer to the

part, ‘D’ for ‘Definition,’ ‘A’ for ‘Axiom,’ ‘P’ plus an Arabic numeral for a proposition, ‘Cor’

for ‘Corollary’, ‘Dem’ for ‘Demonstration’, ‘S’ for ‘Scholium’.


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other bodies, the mind’s initial ideas of its body’s states include awareness ofthese affecting bodies (by EIIP16). For Spinoza, then, the mind’s initialideas or imaginings are not a reflection of the body’s affections, but are theseaffections under the attribute of thought and, consequently, it is our wholepsychophysical state which is modified as we interact with external bodies.Thus, we cannot but affectively imitate others because to be affected by theaffects of others with whom we identify just is to express a certain state ofour body and mind like that of the affecting individual.

All affects, moreover, bear some relationship to power, both individualand communal. To experience an affect is to experience either an increase ordiminution of one’s power.21 Because sadness is a restraint and diminutionof my power of acting, it gives birth to hatred towards its imagined causesand to a desire to destroy these causes. If, on the other hand, the other withwhom I identify is affected with joy, I will be similarly affected, with joy andlove for the sources of this joy and an increase in my power of acting.Common collective affections are born from the production and reinforce-ment of affects and desires through the imitation of those of others. BecauseI am directly affected by what affects the other, the other’s interests anddesires cannot be strictly separated from my own. The dynamic of affectiveimitation gives rise in me to a desire to do that which I imagine pleasesothers and to refrain from doing that which I imagine is displeasing to them.In this way I enhance my own joy or power of action and at the same timethat of the other. Commenting on the connection between self-affirmationand affirmation of the other22 – and the interest that individuals have inpromoting agreements with others with reference to the workings of self-esteem – Spinoza explains that ‘if someone has done something which heimagines affects others with joy, he will be affected with joy accompanied bythe idea of himself as cause, or he will regard himself with joy’ (EIIIP30).23

To rejoice in the joy which I believe I have procured for others, then,amounts to the same thing as loving myself through the mediation of thelove they bear me. In other words, what I seek in the striving to bring joy toothers is approbation, or the joy of having merited their praises. In short,my effort to please others is determined by my desire to reproduce my ownself-love which is ‘glory’.

21Spinoza acknowledges only three primary affects: desire, joy and sadness, which are defined at

EIIIP9S and EPIIIP11S.22Here we can see Spinoza effectively unsettling the distinction between egoism and altruism as

fixed alternatives. For a discussion of this aspect of Spinoza’s thought see Genevieve Lloyd,

Spinoza and the Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) 74–7. Also relevant here is

Michael Collier’s claim that if Spinoza’s individual is understood as inclusive of its relations, it

ceases to be possible to maintain a clear distinction between self-interest and the interests of

others (Michael Collier, ‘The Materiality of Morals: Mind body and interests in Spinoza’s

‘‘Ethics’’,’ Studia Spinozana, 7 (1991) 285–308).23See also EIIIP34: ‘The greater the affect with which we imagine a thing we love to be affected

toward us, the more we shall exult at being esteemed . . .’.


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According to Spinoza, this striving for glory is really ambition and it isthe foundation of both sociability and unsociability. Spinoza definesambition as the effort ‘to bring it about that everyone should approve hislove and hate’ (EIIIP31S).24 Because our loves and our hates (our values of‘good’ and ‘bad’) are to a large extent constituted through a process ofaffective imitation – being reinforced, modified or counteracted by theopinion (the loves and the hates) of others – it is possible to envisage agradual convergence of individual appetites, desires, opinions and values,and the construction of common goods, starting from a range of individualappetites and strivings.25 In the course of his analysis of the socialization ofthe passions, however, Spinoza draws attention to certain causes of discordthat permanently menace the production and the stability of such passionalagreements. These causes of hatred are fundamentally differences in the wayin which individuals imagine the objects they all desire. The particularexample Spinoza offers in this context is that of jealousy where ‘we imaginethat someone enjoys some thing that only one can possess’ (EIIIP32).Drawing once again on the logic of affective imitation, Spinoza describeshow the other’s enjoyment of something leads us to love that thing and todesire to enjoy it, but that when we imagine ‘his enjoyment of this thing asan obstacle to our own joy [we] strive to bring it about that he does notpossess it’. This conflict of desires which arises when the loved object isimagined to admit of possession by only one person transforms ambition forglory into ambition for domination, and gives rise to a paralysing vacillationof mind for each individual: I want the other to ‘live after my owntemperament’, to approve what I approve, to love what I love, but at thesame time I envy her her joy in the loved thing in so far as I imagine it toexclude my own, and so wish to deprive her of it. I do not, however, want todeprive her of the joy that the mutually desired object procures for her, forher joy encourages my own. It is this ambivalence in my relation to the otherwhich is the source of my vacillation of mind.26

How might this conflict of desires be resolved and my vacillation of mindcounteracted? Perhaps it could be resolved if I were to succeed in making theother submit to my own value system, that is, if I were to succeed inredefining her relation to the goods we both desire in such a manner that the(new) relation would no longer pose a threat to my continued enjoyment ofthese goods. This might involve, for instance, directing attention to general

24See also EIIIP29S where Spinoza defines ambition as the ‘striving to do something (and also

to omit from doing something) solely to please men’.25As Spinoza argues ‘we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and

desire it’ (EIIIP9S) See Lloyd, Spinoza and the Ethics, 74.26See also EIVP37S1:

He who strives, only because of an affect, that others should love what he loves, and

live according to his temperament, acts only from impulse and is hateful – especially to

those to whom other things are pleasing, and who also, therefore, strive eagerly, from

the same impulse, to have other men live according to their own temperament.


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(or common) properties of the loved thing, to those properties which couldbe appreciated by others without challenging my own ‘possession’ of theobject. To imagine such a course is illuminating because it demonstratessomething important about Spinoza’s analysis of the different forms ofambition. Although the attempt to redefine the other’s relation to a commonobject of desire involves a (tyrannical) imposition of my loves and hates, itnevertheless proceeds from a desire to please and to be approved of byothers, a desire which, under these conditions, can only be expressed in theeffort to constrain the other to adopt my system of values.27 Thus, it appearsthat the same mechanism of affective imitation which assures sociabilitysimultaneously engenders unsociability. These two groups of inter-individualpassions, pity and ambition for glory, and envy and ambition to dominate,must, therefore, be regarded as forming a single network.28

This interweaving of sociable and unsociable passions in the state ofnature results in a general state of fear and uncertainty: ‘When all alike wantthis (others to live according to their own temperament), they are alike anobstacle to one another, and when all wish to be praised, or loved, by all,they hate one another’ (EIIIP31S). It is this fear that Spinoza points to asthe source of the transition to civil society. By utilizing the principle ofaffective imitation which shows how fear can become a common collectiveaffection, Spinoza is able to develop an analysis of this transition as a purelynatural process whose constitutive force derives, not simply from individualcalculations of self-interest, but from the immanent and dynamic interplayof sociable and unsociable passions in the state of nature.

As Matheron has argued, Spinoza generally invokes the idea ofindignation when explaining the causes of the dissolution of the state. InChapter IV of the Political Treatise, for example, Spinoza argues that thecommonwealth’s power to preserve itself depends on its maintenance of thecauses of fear and reverence in the multitude: failing to foster these causes byproceeding to ‘to slaughter subjects, to despoil them, to ravish maidens andthe like turns fear into indignation, and consequently the civil order into acondition of war’.29 Matheron argues that in this explication of the causes ofrevolution, Spinoza relies crucially on the notion of indignation or ‘hatetowards someone who has done evil to another’ (EIIIDAffXX andEIIIP27C1). If each individual, in isolation, feared the tyrant withoutthinking of the harm done to others, there would be no danger ofrevolution; but since, on Spinoza’s view, individuals are immediatelyaffected by the affects of others, the harm done to particular individuals bythe tyrant will tend to provoke indignation in others who identify with them,

27See EIIIP32S: ‘We see, then, that from the same property of human nature from which it

follows that men are compassionate, it also follows that the same men are envious and

ambitious.’28This is one of Matheron’s principal theses in Individu et Communaute chez Spinoza. See, for

example, 172.29TP, 697.


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thus engendering a collective hatred, and potential revolution against theperpetrators of violence.30

Matheron claims that precisely the same logic can be used to explain thecauses of the production of the state – ‘indignation engenders the state inexactly the same way that it causes revolutions’.31 What we need to do inorder to comprehend this, he suggests, is

to replace the initial solitude of each in the face of the tyrant by the solitude ofthe state of nature, the tyrant by the ensemble of individuals as aggressors, and

the subjects by the ensemble of all individuals considered as victims.32

Thus, in the natural state, acts of aggression towards individuals engenderindignation in others who identify with them, prompting them to come totheir aid against the aggressors, and thereby bringing them into conflict withthese aggressors. Others, who identify with the (now aggrieved) aggressors,come to their aid, and this process is repeated numerous times resulting,eventually, in the production of a consensual and collective imagination anddetermination of a common good (and bad) – expressed in the form ofshared customs, attitudes, beliefs and values – which acts to promote‘sociable’ behaviour and discourage ‘unsociable’ behaviour; that is,individuals, whether from fear of eliciting the disapprobation of themultitude (from ambition for glory) or from the motive of utility (fromreason) – or, rather, from a mixture of the two – would be disinclined tobehave in a way that might risk provoking the counter-action of the (morepowerful) majority. On this account, sociability appears as the combinedeffect of the rational rule of reciprocal utility and of the unstable passionalbonds arising from our imaginary relations to others.

To the extent that the behaviour of individuals is effectively regulated bythese common norms – norms which are sustained by the collective power ofthe multitude or the combined powers of all individuals – the multitudeexists as a (democratic) imperium, and holds sovereignty, albeit in aninformal way.33 We can understand, then, Spinoza’s claim that whatdistinguishes the civil from the natural state is not, as in Hobbes, thecessation of natural rights in the former, ‘for in a state of Nature and in a

30See Etienne Balibar, Spinoza et la politique (Paris: PUF, 1985) 102 on hate as a (contradictory)

‘social bond’.31Matheron, ‘Le probleme de l’evolution de Spinoza du Traite Theologico-Politique au Traite

Politique’, 264. My translation.32Matheron, ibid, 264. My translation.33See TP, 687: ‘This right, which is defined by the power of a people, is usually called

sovereignty.’ Shirley renders multitudo as ‘people’ on the grounds that, in English, the term

‘multitude’ has somewhat pejorative connotations. This seems to me questionable. In any case, I

render multitudo as ‘multitude’ in line with the practice adopted by a number of recent

European commentators. As I see it, the advantage of the term ‘multitude’ is that it carries less

conceptual baggage than terms such as ‘the people’ or ‘the masses’.


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civil order alike man acts from the laws of his own nature and has regard forhis own advantage’. Rather, ‘the main difference between the two conditionsis this, that in the civil order all men fear the same things, and all have thesame ground of security, the same way of life’.34

The Imaginary Foundations of the State

In his hypothetical recreation of the foundations of the Hebrew theocracy,Spinoza outlines the relation between society and the state. In this accountof the genesis of the state’s legislative power and juridical functions he againemphasizes the foundational role played by the affects and imagination.

In the Theological-Political Treatise Spinoza describes how the Jews, aftertheir liberation from bondage under the Egyptians, find themselves boundby no laws and by the right of no other nation. However, although they arewithout laws and state, the Jews are nevertheless connected to one anotherthrough their common collective hatred (for their oppressors) and lovetoward their imagined liberator whom they, in their ignorance of naturalcauses, call ‘God’. Imagining their liberation to be the result of God’sprovidential intervention on their behalf, the Hebrews agree to make acovenant with him and ‘[w]ithout much hesitation they all promised, equallyand with one voice, to obey God absolutely in all his commands’.35 Spinozasuggests that this theocratic covenant amounts to the institution of ademocratic form of political organization since, in fact, the Hebrews retainsovereignty: ‘all had an equal right to consult God, to receive and interprethis laws; in short, they all shared equally in the government of the state’.36

As a people grown accustomed to slavery, however, the Jews do not at thisstage have the capacities necessary to enable them to frame a wise code oflaws and to keep the sovereign power vested in their own hands. Their fearof approaching ‘God’ directly prompts them to make a second covenantwith Moses, abrogating the first one by transferring their right to interpretGod’s decrees to Moses. With the assumption of sovereignty by Moses theform of government becomes effectively monarchical.

For our purposes, the importance of this account of the foundations ofthe Hebrew theocracy lies in Spinoza’s analysis of the interdependence ofthe two founding covenants. The first covenant with God can be understoodas the imaginary institution of democracy through the imaginary displace-ment of the Hebrew’s collective sovereignty; but precisely because of itsimaginary quality – because what is instituted in this way is still only theformal idea of the law rather than a system of binding rules for conduct –this original political organization is entirely unsustainable: it can only be

34TP, 690.35TTP, 539.36TTP, 540.


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made viable and stable through the effective legislation of Moses. By thesame token, however, the establishment of a quasi-monarchy under Moses’rule is only possible on the basis of the prior covenant with God. In theimagination of the Hebrews, Moses reoccupies the place of God that wascreated through the initial displacement or projection of their collectivepower. In other words, Moses’ authority over the Hebrew nation derivesfrom his (perceived) position as the sole rightful interpreter andpromulgator of the divine law – from the fact that he is thought to be themediator of God’s commands to the people. Here Spinoza presentssovereignty and the state as products of the collective, religious imaginationof the Jewish multitude; that is, as engendered from within the imaginaryprocesses operating in the state of nature itself.

What is particularly significant in Spinoza’s account of this process ofproduction is his view of the double foundation of the law and the state.Although the genesis of state and law is explicable as an entirely naturalprocess whose constitutive force derives from the desire of the multitude topreserve itself, Spinoza shows how the power of the state to elicit obedienceto laws can also be ascribed to the manner in which the imagination tends toproduce fictions – like the fiction of a God-King as the ruler of nature – inorder to explain natural events in the absence of an adequate understandingof their true causes. On the issue of the ‘efficacy of the imagination infounding the rule of law’, Balibar makes the following suggestion. Heexplains that Spinoza

refers the institution of the [sovereign as a third party] to the effect oftranscendence implied in religious representations, or to the form of subjectionthat these representations introduce into history, without making history the

contrary of nature, since the religious imagination is a totally natural power.37

Thus, it is not divine right that is the actual source of Moses’ authority; stateand law do not actually have a transcendent or supernatural origin. Rather,on Spinoza’s account, it is the power of the imagination of the Hebrewmultitude that institutes the authority of the state and its effective power byrepresenting the law as the decree of a transcendent power. In other words,political authority is an effect produced and maintained within the religiousimagination of the multitude. What actually organizes collective power isthe constitutive power of the collective imagination. What founds theauthority of the civil law is the illusion of the law’s transcendence. With thisanalysis of the natural causes of the institution and functioning of the state,Spinoza completely demystifies the relation between society and state. In aninversion of Hobbes’ position, he presents the state as a stabilizing andstructuring power produced from within the play of power relations

37Etienne Balibar, (1985) ‘Jus – Pactum – Lex: Sur la constitution du sujet dans le Traite

Theologico-politique’, in Studia Spinozana 1 (1985) 129. My translation.


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operative in society. This has important implications, particularly as regardsSpinoza’s view of the extent and limits of state power.

THE LIMITS OF THE STATE: FREEDOMOF THOUGHT AND SPEECH

When characterized in this way state power appears to have an inbuilt limit.Because Spinoza does not define the state in terms of its legitimacy – so thatobedience to the law is not construed as a function of obligation, as a dutyto obey – the only possible test of the ‘validity’ of a law must reside in itsbeing actually regulative of behaviour. Since, for Spinoza, individuals retaintheir natural rights within the state and therefore continue to act inaccordance with that which they perceive to be useful to them, they cannotbe made to obey a law that they do not perceive to agree with or to furthertheir interests. It would, Spinoza argues,

be vain to command a subject to hate one to whom he is in indebted for someservice, to love one who has done him harm, to refrain from taking offence atinsults, from wanting to be free from fear, or from numerous similar things

that necessarily follow from the laws of human nature.38

To put this point slightly differently, because Spinoza conceives of the stateas a power to govern (potestas) that operates within the immanent horizonof (power) relations which it regulates, it must itself be regarded asdependent for both its existence and its continued efficacy on thepreservation of the (combined) power (potentia) of individuals. A statewhich tyrannizes – Spinoza mentions particularly the outlawing of freedomof thought and speech, intolerance of religious diversity, and the attempt tocontrol everything by laws – menaces that minimum of individual powerwhich is the active, constitutive element of its own power and therebythreatens its own existence.39 The danger courted by a state whichsuppresses individual liberty is only conceivable, however, on the basis ofSpinoza’s presentation of the multitude as an interaction of the powers ofstate and individuals, governors and governed alike. Since the state is not apower that transcends civil society, the violence exercised against individualsmust necessarily return against the state itself, for such violence inflames the

38TTP, 536.39See, for example, TTP, 569–70 (emphasis added):

Granted that human nature is thus constituted, it follows that laws enacted against

men’s beliefs are directed not against villains but against men of good character, and

their purpose is to provoke honourable men rather than to restrain the wicked. Nor

can they be enforced without great danger to the state. Furthermore, such laws are quite

ineffective; for those who are convinced of the validity of beliefs that are condemned

by law will not be able to obey the law . . . .


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hostile, antagonistic passions of the social body and thus turns the multitudeinto a potent revolutionary and ungovernable force. There are, Spinozadeclares,

certain conditions that, if operative, entail that subjects will respect and fear

their commonwealth, while the absence of these conditions entails theannulment of that fear and respect and together with this, the destruction ofthe commonwealth.40

Spinoza cannot, therefore, be regarded as an advocate of a ‘right of thestrongest’ or might¼ right theory of state power. On the contrary, as GailBelaief notes, while ‘in Hobbes’ view there is no distinction between forceand power with respect to the sovereign; in Spinoza’s view force must beguided by reason if it is to become power’.41 For Spinoza, a state whichrelies on mere force acts contrarily to reason, but only in the sense thatreason dictates the avoidance of actions that lead to the weakening ordestruction of a body’s power.42 Clearly, on Spinoza’s account, thetyrannical exercise of state power does in fact threaten the state since itrisks provoking the counter violence of the multitude.43 Against aHobbesian conception of state power which makes it inseparable fromdomination – albeit legitimate domination – Spinoza argues that althoughpower may historically have taken the form of domination, this is not at allessential and, furthermore, that societies based on a power of this kind aredestabilized by their own principle.

I suggested above that Spinoza’s arguments against tyranny relied onshowing the ‘contradiction’ involved in the attempt to reduce the powers ofindividuals to that point at which they would cease to be a potential sourceof resistance to state power. As a positive counterpart to the claim that thestate cannot completely absorb the individuality of its members, Spinozaasserts that the power of individuals as it is exercised in free thought and freeexpression of opinion ‘not only . . . can be granted without detriment topublic peace, to piety, and to the right of the sovereign, but also that it mustbe granted if these are to be preserved’.44 Here we see the consistentapplication and development of the principle that underpinned Spinoza’scriticisms of tyrannical governments. If the combined power or potentia of

40TP, 697.41Gail Belaief, Spinoza’s Philosophy of Law (The Hague: Mouton, 1971) 52.42See, for example, TP, 697:

a commonwealth does wrong when it does, or suffers to be done, things that can cause

its own downfall; and we then say that it does wrong in the sense in which

philosophers or doctors say that Nature does wrong, and it is in this sense we can say

that a commonwealth does wrong when it does something contrary to the dictates of

reason.43TTP, 536.44TTP, 572.


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individuals is the real constitutive force of the sovereign’s right – that is, ofthe sovereign’s power to govern – it cannot be threatened without at thesame time giving rise to revolutionary sentiments which threaten to dissolvethe state itself. By the same token, Spinoza argues that in order to conserveitself the state must not only preserve the powers of those subject to it, butmust also permit the free expression and development of these powers.

The implications of this claim are, I believe, poorly grasped wheninterpreted simply in terms of what it is physically impossible for the state toconstrain beyond a certain point. What Spinoza proposes here is a relatedbut stronger claim; namely, that the concession to individuals of a maximalliberty of thought and opinion is a necessary condition for both thecontinued authority of the state and for the stability of the commonwealthas a whole. Spinoza develops the connection between this liberty and theconservation and power of the state in the following terms:

Therefore, if honesty is to be prized rather than obsequiousness, and ifsovereigns are to retain full control and not be forced to surrender to agitators,

it is imperative to grant freedom of judgment and to govern men in such a waythat the different and conflicting views they openly proclaim do not debarthem from living together in peace. This system of government is undoubtedlythe best and its disadvantages are fewer because it is in closest accord with

human nature. For we have shown that in a democracy (which comes closestto the natural state) all the citizens undertake to act, but not to reason andjudge, by decision made in common. That is to say, since all men cannot think

alike, they agree that a proposal supported by a majority of votes shall havethe force of a decree, meanwhile retaining the authority to repeal the samewhen they see a better alternative. Thus the less freedom of judgment is

conceded to men, the further their distance from the most natural state, andconsequently the more oppressive the regime.45

In this passage Spinoza makes an implicit distinction between the authorityof government and the capacity of a government to retain a firm hold onauthority, between the right/power to govern and the best form ofgovernment. It is one thing, Spinoza writes in the Political Treatise, ‘torule and take charge of public affairs by right, another thing to rule in thebest way and to direct public affairs in the best way’.46 This distinction islinked here to the different modalities of desire that dispose individuals toobedience. While the right of the state is simply its actual power to preserveitself – in particular its capacity to maintain obedience to the laws of thecommonwealth – Spinoza suggests that the most powerful or ‘absolute’ stateis one that is supported not merely by ‘formal assent’ but by the ‘conviction’

45TTP, 570–1.46TP, 699.


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of those under its authority, for ‘he who wholeheartedly resolves to obeyanother in all his commands is fully under another’s dominion’.47

The importance accorded by Spinoza to the motives for obedience to the lawis linked to his observation that a state is always in greater danger from its owncitizens than from external enemies.48 In Spinoza’s view a state comes closest tobeing absolute when it is most fully in possession of its right. Thus, the mostabsolute state is the least internally divided one, the state least vulnerable tocontestation of its authority and to the conflicts and seditions that threaten theunity and, therefore, the very form of existence of the social body. The morecause a state has to fear the multitude, the less absolute it is.49 In other words, astate comes closest to being absolute when it is most fully sustained by the activeparticipation or ‘conviction’ of the individuals whose combined powersconstitute its own power. Spinoza posits a direct connection between theencouragement of a mode of obedience that has the character of conviction andthe granting by governments of the freedom of thought and speech. He insists,furthermore, that it is only when this freedom is granted that harmonious livingis possible; that is, that the peace and unity necessary to the preservation andstability of the commonwealth can be assured. Certainly, Spinoza thinks that ifthis freedom is curtailed, then the power of the state is reduced; tyrannicalgovernments, he says quoting Seneca, ‘can never last long’.50

To make the connection somewhat clearer between freedom of thoughtand speech and the sovereignty of the state, it might be useful to recall that,for Spinoza, sovereignty is a collective production, a dynamic constitutiveprocess entailing the continuous ‘transfer’ of individual powers to the publicpower. The motor force in both the formation and preservation of statepower and authority is, therefore, the (combined) powers of individuals inso far as this power is determined as desire for this authority.51

Consequently, the relations of force that characterize the existence of anyparticular political association can only be relatively stable since they subsistonly so long as the desires that sustain them are also maintained. From theobservation that the desires of individuals are the actual source of thecontinued authority of the state, Spinoza draws a further consequence;namely, that the different modalities of desire from which states draw theirforce make a difference to the quality of the power of the states themselves.A state that elicits the obedience of citizens by relying predominantly ondesires born of passions – fear of punishment for infringing the law andhope of rewards for obeying it – cannot be said to be actively, but only to bepassively sustained by the citizens. To act at the bidding of an externalauthority in this way is to be more passive than active. Indeed, it is not to act

47TTP, 537.48TP, 702.49See TP, 725.50TTP, 530.51Spinoza defines desire as ‘the very essence of man, insofar as it is determined, from any given

affection of it, to do something’ (EIIIDAff.III).


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so much as to be acted upon.52 A commonwealth in which subjects areconstrained by mere force and which thus relies mainly on the passivity ofthese subjects differs but little from a state of nature.53 Under suchconditions, the relations between rulers and ruled are governed by reciprocalfear and, thus, marked by a fundamental instability. Spinoza contends that

For as long as men act only from fear, they are doing what they are mostopposed to doing, taking no account of the usefulness and the necessity of theaction to be done, concerned only not to incur capital or other punishment.

Indeed, they inevitably rejoice at misfortune or injury to their ruler even whenthis involves their own considerable misfortune, and they wish every ill on him,and bring this about when they can.54

For Spinoza, political associations of this kind are little more thangatherings of slaves. What they especially lack is that quality of peacewhich is the real content of a commonwealth’s security and the true aim ofthe state. In Spinoza’s words:

A commonwealth whose subjects are deterred from taking up arms only

through fear should be said to be not at war rather than to be enjoying peace.For peace is not just the absence of war, but a virtue which comes fromstrength of mind; for obedience (Section 19, Chapter 2) is the steadfast will tocarry out orders enjoined by the general decree of the commonwealth.

Anyway, a commonwealth whose peace depends on the sluggish spirit of itssubjects who are led like sheep to learn simply to be slaves can more properlybe called a desert than a commonwealth.55

Genuine peace, Spinoza adds further on in the Political Treatise, consists ‘inthe union or harmony of minds’.56 While the attainment of such peace isimpossible without the elimination of violence, it is not merely freedom fromfear and violence; rather, peace of this kind is founded on the virtue, powerand reason of citizens.57 It is established only when citizens actively obey thecommon laws by virtue of a ‘steadfast will to carry out orders enjoined bythe general decree of the commonwealth’. This practice of obedience is a

52On this issue, see Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality, (London

and New York: Routledge, 1996) 116.53TP, 699.54TTP, 438.55TP, 699.56TP, 701.57See EIVD8:

By virtue and power I understand the same thing, that is (byIIIP7), virtue, insofar as it

is related to man, is the very essence or nature, of man, insofar as he has the power of

bringing about certain things, which can be understood through the laws of his nature

alone.


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mode of life and type of sociability characterized by a ‘union or harmony ofminds’. The connection between the enhancement of the powers of citizensand the degree of unity and harmony of the social body – which togetherdetermine the quality of peace enjoyed by a commonwealth – is clarified inthe detail of Spinoza’s defence of freedom of thought and speech.

Spinoza argues that the state must allow free expression of the diversity ofindividual opinions and the free communication of these opinions while at thesame time restricting actions which abrogate the laws which sustain thecommon life. In this context, the prohibition against certain actions appears asa positive rule for the preservation of the powers of citizens since it is the meansby which encounters are organized so that individuals are less at risk of beingacted on purely fortuitously and, therefore, have greater scope for increasingtheir own powers. The permissive attitude towards the freedom of thought andopinion is an extension of this organization of collective power in the sense thatit opens up a space in which individuals are able actively to develop their ownpowers of thinking and understanding through the spread and debate of ideas.

The principal benefit to the state of the free expression and communica-tion of opinions is that it facilitates the growth of reason which wouldenable individuals to understand how the laws, as conditions of communallife, relate to their own striving for self-preservation. A political associationwhich promoted such understanding would thereby increase the chances ofrational decision-making processes within the commonwealth. Obedience tothe law which flows from an understanding of the necessity of the lawsand the state would be action in the strong sense, since an individual whoacts on the basis of such understanding (of necessity) is determined more byhis or her own power than by the power of external causes. Whenindividuals act in this way their behaviour is said to accord with the dictateof reason, that is, action which follows from the foundation of seeking theirown advantage.58 As Spinoza explains in the Ethics:

a man who is guided by reason is not led to obey by fear, but insofar as hestrives to preserve his being from the dictate of reason, that is, insofar as he

strives to live freely, desires to maintain the principle of common life andcommon advantage.

Consequently, he desires to live according to the common decision of the state.Therefore, a man who is guided by reason desires, in order to live more freely,

to keep the common laws of the state.(EIVP73Dem.)59

58See EIVP24Dem:

Acting absolutely from virtue is nothing but acting from the laws of our own nature (by

D8). But we act only insofar as we understand (by IIIP3). Therefore, acting from virtue is

nothing else in us but acting, living, and preserving one’s being by the guidance of reason,

and doing this (by P22C) from the foundation of seeking one’s own advantage.59See also TTP, 428.


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It is clear from the preceding discussion that Spinoza does not oppose thestrengthening of individual power and the increase of the power of the state.To be subject to the authority of the state does not in itself make a freeindividual into a slave since, on Spinoza’s view, being dependent on thepower of the state can be a means to increase one’s own capacity to act, thatis, one’s freedom. Spinoza is very careful not to confuse the independenceenjoyed by the free or rational individual with the independence attached tothe state of solitude. An individual, Spinoza claims, ‘who is guided by reasonis more free in a state, where he lives according to a common decision, than insolitude, where he obeys only himself’ (EIVP73). By the same token, the rightof the supreme authority can be seen to increase in direct proportion to thedevelopment of the power and reason of individuals, since when individualslive under the guidance of reason they more freely and constantly keep thelaws of the state because they understand these laws as conditions for themaintenance of a common life and, therefore, as conditions for the pursuit oftheir own advantage. In short, Spinoza presents the increase of state powerand the increase of individual powers as fundamentally interrelated andmutually interdependent processes.

It is not surprising that, when confronted with this affirmation of theinterdependence of the authority (and absoluteness) of the state and theautonomy of individuals, a great many, especially liberal, commentatorshave accused Spinoza of serious confusion and inconsistency. Lewis Feuer,for one, concludes that Spinoza’s political thinking must be regarded as‘divided against itself’ in respect of this problem.60 Etienne Balibardiagnoses the problem here as an inability to grasp an alternative that‘practically escapes the basic antinomies of metaphysics and ethics whicharise from ontological dualism’.61 According to Balibar, Spinoza argues

(against ‘individualism’) that the autonomy or power of the individual is not

reduced, but enlarged, by the constitution of a State or Civil Society, and(against ‘holism’) that the sovereignty or power of the State is not reduced, butenlarged by the growing autonomy of the citizens (especially by their freedom

of thought and expression).62

Balibar and Antonio Negri see Spinoza’s circumvention of this abstractopposition in the realm of his political analyses as made possible by hiswillingness to think in terms of the multitude rather than in terms ofindividuals and the state. I have suggested that, for Spinoza, the multitude is aconcept that includes both state and citizens. In other words, the (combined)power of individuals and the power of the state are different modalities of the

60Lewis Feuer, Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958) 103.61Etienne Balibar, ‘From Individuality to Transindividuality’, Mededelingen vanwege het

Spinozahuis (Delft: Eburon, 1997) 8.62Balibar, ‘From Individuality to Transindividuality’, 8.


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same collective power of the multitude. To take the multitude as the primaryobject of Spinoza’s political thought is to depart from the standard account ofsocial transition in Spinoza as a passage from atomic, asocial individualism touniversal harmony. The reading defended here suggests that this transition isbetter conceived as a passage from imaginatively grounded associations inwhich peaceful co-existence and conformity to prescribed laws are establishedby appealing to passive emotions, to more rational forms of community inwhich harmonious social relations and law-abiding behaviour are the result ofan increasingly adequate understanding of the link between the individual’sown good and the common good.

FREEDOM AND UTOPIA

According to the arguments sketched above, politics may act as a bridge tothe active. Although the power and stability of the state are a function of itsability to maintain obedience to the laws of the commonwealth, its power ismaximized when obedience follows from the rational rather than passionatedesires of citizens. It is, therefore, in the interests of the state to foster theconditions for the development of reason and freedom. Spinoza’scharacterization of the ultimate purpose of the state in the Theological-Political Treatise seems strongly to support this conclusion:

[The state’s] ultimate purpose is not exercise dominion nor to restrain men byfear and deprive them of independence, but on the contrary to free every manfrom fear so that he may live in security as far as is possible, that is so that he

may best preserve his own natural right to exist and to act, without harm tohimself and to others. It is not, I repeat, the purpose of the state to transformmen from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but rather to enable them todevelop their mental and physical faculties in safety, to use their reason

without restraint . . . Thus the purpose of the state is, in reality, freedom.63

Commenting on this passage, Moira Gatens observes that the ‘contrastbetween obedience and knowledge is certainly one way in which we coulddistinguish between an association of human beings founded on fear and acommunity of rational beings’.64 In stressing the distinction betweenobedience and knowledge in this context, Gatens is echoing Spinoza’sclaim that ‘since human freedom is the greater as a man is more able to beguided by reason and control his appetites, it would be incorrect to call thelife of reason ‘‘obedience’’.’65 Exactly why this should be so is prima faciepuzzling. Is not obedience to just laws a rational act? To answer this

63TTP, 567.64Gatens, Imaginary Bodies, 116.65TP, 688.


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question, let us turn to the typology of law outlined in the Theological-Political Treatise, where in characterizing an ideal democracy66 Spinozaexplains the incompatibility of freedom and obedience:

[s]ince obedience consists in carrying out orders simply by reason of theauthority of a ruler, it follows that this has no place in a community where

sovereignty is vested in all the citizens, and laws are sanctioned by commonconsent. In such a community the people would remain equally free whetherlaws were multiplied or diminished, since it would act not from another’s

bidding but from its own consent.67

‘Democracy’, as defined here, is a success term. It does not represent therational reformation of motives for obedience to the law or the growth ofactivity and joy in the direction of freedom and reason, but the realization ofa definitive end. This definition of a fully fledged democracy evokes an idealof a community in which the relations of command and obedience have beendefinitively overcome – the state as law giver, as dispenser of rewards forobedience and punishments for disobedience, has withered away in thefulfilment of its end. The exteriority of the law as command has given way toa citizenry capable of ruling itself directly and entirely under the guidance ofreason. An association constituted in this manner would be a communityof rational beings. The figure of democracy would thus refer to the existenceof a substantially unanimous and free multitude, a multitude that hadsuccessfully mastered its own passions through greater understanding of theorigins of divisive and competitive passions. Individual members of a freemultitude would be restrained only by a love of liberty and bound together,not by the externality of the law and command, but by the commonenterprise of knowledge.

This vision of a democratic utopia suggests just the kind of rational breakwith the passional and imaginary order of nature that Spinoza explicitlyrepudiates. It thus poses a serious problem for Spinoza in his own terms.This problem can be brought into focus by situating the contrast betweenobedience and freedom in the context of the relation between the passions,imagination and reason. In terms of the definition of democracy as the‘rationalization’ of the social body, the disappearance of obedience could beread as the complete elimination of ignorance, imagination and thepassions. Certainly, if obedience is taken to entail subjection to the ideaof the law as an imperative issued by a superior, external power, it is clearlycaught up in the economy of imaginary life.68 Thus, the distinction between

66See TTP, 531.67TTP, 439.68On this point, see TTP, 515:

Moses’ aim was not to convince the Israelites by reasoned argument, but to bind them

by a covenant, by oaths and by benefits received; he induced the people to obey the


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obedience and freedom here could be mapped onto the distinction betweenthe life of imagination and that of reason. To make this equation, however,is to interpret the achievement of freedom and rationality as the eradicationor transcendence of passional and imaginary life. But if it were possible forthe multitude to free itself entirely from passivity – if the community ofrational beings were a realizable goal – then surely it would reconstitute thehuman order as an imperium in imperio, thereby contradicting Spinoza’sinsistence on our status as a ‘part of nature’.

In more general terms, the difficulty posed by the concept of democracy asthe realization of reason’s goal – the constitution of a community of rationalbeings – is that it introduces a rupture between nature and humaninstitutions, between what is and what ought to be. The utopian ideal ofdemocracy would thus stand in a relation of transcendence to ‘what is’,serving both as the telos of history and the normative principle by which wemight pass judgment on the real. To think of democracy as a final order – asthe pure realization of reason’s ideal – is to think in utopian terms that runcounter to the spirit of the Spinozist project, which explicitly rejects suchnormative language. It would put Spinoza on the side of those philosopherswho ‘shower extravagant praise on a human nature that nowhere exists’ and‘conceive men not as they are, but as they would like them to be’.69

To read the figure of democracy in this way, as the promise of a futureliberation, would make Spinoza a philosopher of a revolutionaryemancipation.70 This manner of reading Spinoza certainly contradicts theapproach adopted here. I have suggested that Spinoza’s political thoughtprovides us with a means of thinking human freedom and flourishing ascontinuous with the practical political project of organizing the conditionsof collective life so that individuals are affected in ways that enable them toincrease their powers. To be consistent with Spinoza’s naturalism, theprocess of rationally reforming the imaginary foundations of communitymust be conceived as building on and transforming, rather than transcend-ing or breaking with, primitive imaginative forms of sociality. Can weinterpret the idea of a ‘community of rational beings’ in a way that isconsistent with this conception of immanent transformation?

The notion of a community of rational beings or democracy evokes anideal form of sociality in which peace and harmony follow from the rationalrecognition of a shared human nature, rather than resulting from theregulation of behaviour by laws that restrict behaviour as a means to makeindividuals agree. In the former case, peace and harmony directly expressthe rational activity of individuals, while in the latter peaceful co-existence is

Law under threat of punishment, while exhorting them thereto by promise of rewards.

These are all means to promote obedience, not to impart knowledge.69TP, Introduction, 680.70See on this point Manfred Walther’s review of Negri’s The Savage Anomaly: ‘Negri on

Spinoza’s Political and Legal Philosophy’, in Spinoza: Issues and Directions, edited by Edwin

Curley and Pierre Moreau (Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1990) 291–2.


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achieved passively by forcing individuals to agree and be compatible.Although cooperation and harmony in this latter case do not follow from anadequate understanding of one’s true advantage and can, therefore, only besaid to accord with rather than to express reason, this organization ofcollective life nevertheless enhances the powers of individuals. Adequatepolitical and social institutions ensure that the relations between individualsare more likely to be cooperative and mutually beneficial and, thus, thatindividuals are more likely to experience joyful passions and to act on thebasis of desires born of joy. In an important passage in the Ethics, Spinozaexplains the link between joyful passive affections and reason. Joy, he says,

agrees with reason, (for it consists in this, that a man’s power of acting isincreased or aided), and is not a passion except insofar as the man’s power ofacting is not increased to the point where he conceived himself and his actions

adequately. So if a man affected with Joy were led to such a great perfectionthat he conceived himself and his actions adequately, he would be capable –indeed more capable – of the same actions to which he is now determined from

affects which are passions.(EIVP59D)

Here, Spinoza indicates that there is only a small gap separating joyfulpassions from adequate activity. The importance of this claim is that itsuggests that favourable external circumstances and influences, in relation towhich we are passive, may nevertheless increase our powers of thinking andacting, bringing us to the brink of adequate understanding and action. Theidea of a passive increase of the power of acting that is evoked here hasalready been established by Spinoza in his account of how we come to formthe adequate ideas that comprise reason. At EIIP39, Spinoza observes that:

P39: If something is common to, and peculiar to, the human body and certain

external bodies by which the human body is usually affected, and is equally inthe part and in the whole, its idea will also be adequate in the mind.

Cor: From this it follows that the mind is the more capable of perceiving manythings adequately as its body has many things in common with other bodies.

Spinoza here acknowledges the role played by external, material circum-stances in the development of our powers of thinking and acting. Ourcapacities for adequate thought and action are enhanced when ourinteractions with others are so organized that joyful passions dominate oversad passions.71 That is, to participate in a common way of life and enjoy

71See Gilles Deleuze Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, translated by Martin Joughin New

York: Zone Books, 1990) 276, where he argues that Spinoza distinguishes between more and

less universal common notions. The less universal represent ‘a similarity of composition


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harmonious relations with others who ‘agree with our nature’ (EIVAppVII)is to be affected in ways that increase our capacities to think and actadequately. In other words, the degree of activity and independence we enjoydepends on more or less supportive interactions and favourable externalinfluences. Therefore, while the state relies on passive means – on the exter-nality of the law and constraint – to enforce peace and agreement, it is wrongto construe such an organization of collective life as simply a hindrance to ora mere limitation of the natural powers of individuals. On the contrary,prohibition and constraint can function as positive rules for the preservationand development of individual and collective power, as we saw clearly in thecase of the constitution of the Hebrew theocracy. Recall how the Hebrewmultitude’s desire to preserve itself, combined with its incapacity for self-rule,leads to the acceptance of Moses’ authority and the institution of the MosaicLaw. Although this law takes the form of a restrictive code seemingly at oddswith the rational development of individual conatus, subjection to the law is,in fact, the only way in which the Hebrews are able to preserve and developcollective power, given their present capacities; that is, given their incapacityto govern themselves, the Hebrews’ desire for political community can onlybe realized through the mediation of Moses and the legislative power heenacts. Moses can, therefore, be regarded as the immanent, causative instru-ment for the formation of the Hebrew state. It is true that, once collectiveright is ‘transferred’ toMoses, the Hebrews are effectively subjected to a formof coercive rule with respect to which they are, by definition, passive; but inthis instance passivity and dependence appear as enabling conditions for thepreservation and strengthening of collective power. Dependence andconstraint should not, therefore, be abstractly opposed to freedom oractivity. For Spinoza, they are more complexly related.

To conclude, let us briefly consider the democratic ideal of collectiveliberation in terms of this complex relationship between passive and activepower. To understand democracy as denoting a future state of activity andindependence – the pure realization of reason’s goal – beyond theconstraints and passivity of social and political life, is to construe freedomas liberation from dependence on external forces. This teleologicalformulation immediately alerts us to the fact that, in Spinoza’s terms, weare dealing with a fiction. There are no ends in Nature. We act on account ofends, which we misconstrue as final causes whereas in fact they indicate onlythe state of our appetites and desires (EIApp). Although this type ofteleological thinking entails a perfectionism and finalism that misrepresentsthe natural order, Spinoza recognizes its utility in ethics and politics. In theEthics Spinoza appeals to a ‘model of human nature’ which, according toMichael Rosenthal, is an example of a broader category of exemplary ideas,‘each of which creates a standard on the basis of which value judgements

between bodies that directly agree, and this from their own viewpoint’. Deleuze regards these

common notions as the most useful, since they are the first we have the chance to form.


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can be made’.72 In acting as a standard of perfection, a model or exemplarserves to define a common end towards which things should tend, and thusallows for judgements of relative perfection and imperfection in terms of thedegree of conformity to that ideal end. An exemplar thus functions as aregulative ideal on the basis of which universal values can be established andby reference to which norms of right conduct can be prescribed. The socialand political value of such fictional models is clear; they create a commonstandard of value that can serve as a reference point for legal and normativeconstraints, and they orient citizen’s desires for their own advantagetowards the collective good.

If we understand democracy as a regulative ideal, that is, as the imaginaryrepresentation and projection of the multitude’s desire for freedom and socialharmony, which is inadequately conceived as an external end towards which itstrives, the tension with naturalism disappears. The multitude is, by definition,passive with respect to this fictitious ideal. Yet, by encouraging a positiveidentification with the social whole that promotes respect for the law,obedience and cooperative behaviour, this fiction effectively contributes tocreating the conditions for a real enhancement of individual and collectivepower. Were some individuals, by virtue of this passive increase of theirpowers, able to acquire a more adequate understanding of themselves andtheir situation, they would come to realize their necessary dependence on thelarger (social and natural) wholes of which they are a part.73 Thisunderstanding would eliminate the imaginary component in the idea ofdemocracy – the representation of freedom as a (future) state of independenceand pure activity beyond social and political life. What would be retained,however, is the true kernel of this idea, which consists in the affirmation of thelink between my own advantage and the advantage of others, or the mutualinterdependence of the process of individual and collective power enhance-ment. Since this collective transition to greater activity or freedom isimpossible without (good) laws and institutions which neutralize the damagingeffects of the passions and so facilitate the development of active power, thestate too must be affirmed as the necessary, immanent instrument for thepreservation and expansion of individual and collective right.

University of Queensland

72Michael A. Rosenthal, ‘Why Spinoza Chose the Hebrews: The Exemplary Function of

Prophecy in the Theological-Political Treatise’ (History of Political Thought, vol. XVIII, No. 2,

Summer 1997) 215.73Freedom cannot, for Spinoza, be realized in a state of independence from external forces. It is

impossible, Spinoza tells us, ‘that a man should not be a part of Nature, and that he should be

able to undergo no changes except those which can be understood through his own nature

alone, and of which he is the adequate cause’ (EIVP4). Our ontological status as finite modes

makes exposure to external affection an irreducible feature of existence. Freedom is only

incompatible with those forms of dependence that we do not adequately understand, and with

respect to which we are, therefore, passive.


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Natural and Unnatural Communities: Spinoza Beyond Hobbes

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Transcript of Natural and Unnatural Communities: Spinoza Beyond Hobbes