Spinoza, Before and After the Rampjaar

ABSTRACT

Up to 1670, when the Theological-Political Treatise was published, Spinoza supported Johan De Witt’s government, against the House of Orange and the orthodox Calvinists. By 1676, while writing the Political Treatise, that fight had been lost, and Spinoza was now positively opposed to the sovereign of his country. Scholars argue that the violence that marked the intervening “year of disaster” of 1672 saw security prioritised in the Political Treatise, where the Theological-Political Treatise had focused on freedom. This essay contests this view. Analysing the Political Treatise’s response to contemporary events, and comparing the two books, it sees the Political Treatise as less concerned than the earlier text with the stability of the sovereign, and more concerned with the subjects’ freedom from oppression by the sovereign: more than a dispassionate treatise on the organization of the state, it is a plea for the role of the ordinary citizen, written in response to authoritarian times.

KEYWORDS:

• Spinoza
• Johan de Witt
• William of Orange
• 1672
• concordia
• rebellion
• secrecy

Acknowledgment

My thanks to two reviewers for very helpful comments on an earlier version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

^1. References to Spinoza’s Political Treatise (hereafter TP, from the Latin Tractatus Politicus) cite chapter and paragraph numbers as in the Opera Posthuma. References to the Theological-Political Treatise (hereafter TTP, from Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) cite the chapter and paragraph numbers in Edwin Curley’s edition of Spinoza’s Collected Works, Volume II, and the page number of vol. 3 of Carl Gebhardt’s Spinoza Opera.

^2. James, Spinoza, 5.

^3. Steinberg, Spinoza’s Political Psychology, 10.

^4. In order not to fall into the trap of reading Spinoza’s work as a homogenous unit, and because we do not really know when many of the parts of the Ethics were written, I will not use points from the Ethics to bolster my arguments.

^5. McShea, Political Philosophy of Spinoza, 198. On the pressures on the De Witt regime and Spinoza’s reaction, see James, Spinoza, 286–89.

^6. See Spinoza, Collected Works, 488 note 245.

^7. Neither text explicitly defines political sovereignty, but we can understand it in both texts broadly as law-making power. Both TTP 27.49–55 G209–210 and TP 2.17 describe sovereignty (imperium) or the powers of the sovereignty-holder (imperium tenentis) as making and repealing laws, deciding war and peace, fortifying cities, and choosing administrators or judges. Spinoza, TTP Additional Note 38 and TP 8.17 and 29 give cognate pictures of the sovereign’s power of delegation. See also TP 4.2.

^8. Spinoza, TTP 20.12 G241.

^9. Melamed and Sharp, Spinoza’s Political Treatise.

^10. Negri, Savage Anomaly, 18 and 125.

^11. Feuer, Spinoza, 139.

^12. Ibid., 151.

^13. Verbeek, “Spinoza,” 156–60. I admit that I am not convinced by Verbeek’s reading of any of the three elements he cites of Spinoza’s description of democratic government. Very briefly: he confuses a statement in TP 11.2 about why aristocratic states end up becoming hereditary for one on susceptibility to the passions generally, which he says would make political philosophy redundant; he extrapolates unwarrantedly from the admission in TP 11.2 that a democratic council may be smaller than an aristocratic council to an admittance of conflicting passions in the democratic council; he sees a difference which is not there between TP 8.1 and 11.2, overlooking that hereditary voting rights are both by law and by chance.

^14. Van Bunge, Spinoza, 97 and 98. It is not clear why van Bunge here puts “1672” in inverted commas.

^15. Taylor, “Reasonable Republic,” 648–50 and 658.

^16. Van Bunge, Spinoza, 97.

^17. Taylor, “Reasonable Republic,” 654 note 79.

^18. Balibar, Spinoza et al politique, 63 (my italics).

^19. Ibid., 63–64.

^20. Ibid., 65; Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 53. The inverted commas on “revolution” are Balibar’s own.

^21. Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 117 (italics in original). Here, I am citing the English edition of Balibar’s book, a far more interesting book than the original French version because it includes a final chapter on “Politics and Communication,” which arrives at conclusions on the TP which go far beyond those achieved in the French text. The additional chapter (pages 99–124) is based on a lecture Balibar gave at the Université de Créteil, published in 1989 (Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 99 note 1).

^22. Ibid., 119–20.

^23. Ibid., 120.

^24. Ibid., 121.

^25. Troost, Stadhouder-Koning, 111.

^26. Israel, The Dutch Republic, 819–20.

^27. Israel, “The Banning,” passim and especially 8–11; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 275–79.

^28. Israel, The Dutch Republic, 815–21.

^29. Troost, Stadhouder-Koning, 113, 117, 136.

^30. Spinoza, TTP Pref.10 G7 and 18.20–25 G224–26.

^31. Spinoza, TP 5.7, 6.3–6.5.

^32. Ibid., 7.5.

^33. Ibid., 10.2 and 10.10.

^34. Rowen, The Princes of Orange, 138.

^35. Israel, The Dutch Republic, 817.

^36. Rowen, The Princes of Orange, 140.

^37. Spinoza, TP 7.5, 7.18, and 9.14.

^38. Temple, Observations, 87–88; see also Wernham’s note in Spinoza, The Political Works, 341 note 1.

^39. Spinoza, TP 6.20; Troost, Stadhouder-Koning, 55.

^40. Spinoza, TP 6.14, 6.34, 7.20.

^41. Ibid., 7.24.

^42. Troost, Stadhouder-Koning, 140.

^43. Geyl, Oranje en Stuart, 326.

^44. Ibid., 341.

^45. Spinoza, TTP 18.27 G227.

^46. Ibid., 18.36 G227–28.

^47. Spinoza, TP 9.14. “Count or representative” (comite vel vicario) undoubtedly refers, respectively, to the Count of Leicester or Philip II of Spain as the count (just as in TTP 18.36 G228), and to the Stadholder, the Prince of Orange, as the representative. The Nagelate Schriften (the contemporary Dutch translation of Spinoza’s Opera Posthuma) translates the reference to vicario in TP 9.14 as stadhouder. The Stadholders, literally lieu-tenants, were originally the Hapsburgs’ chief representatives in the Dutch provinces, and remained powerful after Dutch independence, when the office became the exclusive appanage of the house of Orange-Nassau. See Rowen, Princes of Orange, 1–7; Israel, Dutch Republic, 300–306.

^48. Curley, following Wernham’s and Shirley’s examples, translates the phrase “animorum unione sive concordia” as “union or harmony of minds.” In a context where Spinoza has spoken often already of concordia and of animorum unio, I think this is a mistranslation. Sangiacomo and Ramond understand the terms as separate. The presence of a comma, “animorum unione, sive concordiâ,” in the original Latin of the Opera Posthuma also supports this latter reading.

^49. Steinberg, “Benedict Spinoza,” 155.

^50. Spinoza, TP 5.4.

^51. For example, Spinoza, TP 1.6, 6.3, 7.2, 8.20–24; and TP 1.1.

^52. Spinoza, TP 7.2.

^53. Ibid., 7.11.

^54. Ibid., 7.12 and 7.17.

^55. Ibid., 7.31.

^56. Spinoza, TTP 14.34 G179, 15.11 G182, 16.30 G194, 17.104 G219, 18.18 G224, 20.37 G245, 20.40 G246.

^57. Ibid., 17.104 G219.

^58. Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.2–1.4.

^59. Del Lucchese, Machiavelli, 139–44

^60. Wernham, “Political Theory.”

^61. Del Lucchese, Machiavelli 140; James, Spinoza, 234 and 288 note 106; Wernham in his footnotes to the text of the TTP also points out the Machiavellian allusions.

^62. Taylor, “Reasonable Republic,” 652–54.

^63. Spinoza, TP 5.7.

^64. Taylor, “Reasonable Republic,” 654.

^65. Spinoza, TTP 20.14 G241.

^66. Spinoza, TTP 16.65–68 G213.

^67. Most notably, Balibar, Spinoza et la Politique, 63–64.

^68. Spinoza, Collected Works, Volume II, 506.

^69. One might argue with the translation of imperium/Heerschappy as “state” and prefer a more abstract “rulership” or something similar, but that seems hard to defend in the context of the chapter as a whole.

^70. Most translations I’ve consulted offer the same reading as Curley’s. One that doesn’t is Andrea Sangiacomo’s translation into Italian: la sicurezza, invece, è virtù del governo (Spinoza, Tutte le Opere).

^71. Spinoza, Ethics 4P54S cites the same cliché apparently without disapproval, which exemplifies the difficulty of extrapolating from one text to the other.

^72. Spinoza, TP 7.29.

^73. Ibid.

^74. Troost, Stadhouder-Koning, 110–12; Israel, Dutch Republic, 822.

^75. Spinoza, TTP Pref.10 G7.

^76. Spinoza, Traité Théologico-Politique, 698–99 note 11. Equally, the imperii arcana in TP 8.31 are not state secrets, but war and poverty (Traité Politique, 303 note 55).

^77. Spinoza, TTP 17.25, G225–26, and 20.45–46, G247, referring back to G225–26.

^78. Spinoza, TTP 20.45 G247.

^79. Ibid., 20.26 G243

^80. Ibid., 2039 G245.

^81. Spinoza, Collected Works, Letters 47 and 48.

^82. Schmaltz, Early Modern Cartesianisms, 40–45; Israel, The Dutch Republic, 896–98.

^83. Steinberg, “Spinoza’s Political Philosophy,” sec. 4.0.

^84. Spinoza, Collected Works, Letter 30 fragment 2. The letter was not part of the Opera Posthuma, but was first published in 1744, in the Works of Robert Boyle. The Latin text of Spinoza’s letter, as cited by Henry Oldenburg in a letter to Boyle, in available in Boyle, Works, 200–201.

^85. Spinoza, Collected Works, 4 and 14 note 23.

^86. Israel, The Dutch Republic, chaps. 18–19 and 28–31.

^87. Klever, “Spinoza’s Life and Works,” 40.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bartholomew Begley

Bartholomew Begley is a former Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at Dublin City University, adjunct lecturer in philosophy and French. He has published on John Toland and Jakob Thomasius, and a number of translations from Latin, French, and German.