The reasonable republic? Statecraft, affects, and the highest good in Spinoza’s late Tractatus Politicus

ABSTRACT

In his final, incomplete Tractatus Politicus (1677), Spinoza’s account of human power and freedom shifts towards a new, teleological interest in the ‘highest good’ of the state in realising the freedom of its subjects. This development reflects, in part, the growing influence of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Dutch republicanism, and the Dutch post-Rampjaar context after 1672, with significant implications for his view of political power and freedom. It also reflects an expansion of his account of natural right to include independence of mind, a model of autonomy that in turn shapes the infamous sui juris exclusions of his unfinished account of democracy. This article focuses specifically on the Tractatus Politicus, a hitherto under-addressed work in Spinoza’s corpus and one too often considered indistinct from his earlier Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670). It argues for a reconsideration of its importance to early modern political thought, particularly regarding the role of the state in realising the freedom and harmony of its subjects through reasonable laws.

KEYWORDS:

• Spinoza
• natural right
• sovereignty
• teleology
• democracy
• collective power

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Continuum, 2004), 29; Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Michael Mack, Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity (London: Continuum, 2010).

2 Standard referencing used with Spinoza’s works: E = Ethics; Ep = Letters (Epistolae); KV = Short Treatise on God, Man and his Well-being (Korte Verhandeling van God, de Mensch en des zelfs Welstand); TIE = Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione); TP = Political Treatise; TTP = Theological-Political Treatise. References to TTP and TP indicate chapter number followed by section e.g. TTP 20.6 is Chapter 20, section 6. References to Ethics follow standard format: app = appendix; df = definition; p = proposition; pref = preface; s = scholium. E.g. E4p37s2 refers to Ethics Part 4, proposition 37, second scholium. Editions used: Benedictus de Spinoza, Spinoza Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt, 4 vols. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1925); The Collected Works of Spinoza: Vols I-II, ed. trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, 2016).

3 This is no new phenomenon: though included in the 1677 Opera Posthuma, there is little extant engagement from contemporaries, nor does it feature in the early biographies of Lucas and Colerus. As Yitzhak Melamed and Hasana Sharp have observed, the TP was rarely translated until the 19th century, and Bayle, Diderot and D’Alembert’s encyclopaedia entries on Spinozism, decisive to the dissemination of Spinoza’s ideas over the 18th century, make no mention of it. Yitzhak Y. Melamed and Hasana Sharp, eds. ‘Introduction’, in Spinoza’s Political Treatise: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1.

4 As Steven Barbone and Lee Rice argue in their perceptive introduction to Spinoza, Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 20.

5 Curley, Collected Works II, 491; Moreau in Melamed and Sharp, eds. ‘Introduction’, 1.

6 Ibid.

7 Alexandre Matheron, ‘Le probleme de l'evolution de Spinoza du Traite theologico-politique au Traite politique’, in Études sur Spinoza et les philosophies et l’âge classique (Lyon: ENS, 2011), 205; the analysis expands on his earlier Individu et communauté chez Spinoza (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), 328–29.

8 Matheron, ‘Le probleme de l’evolution’, 211.

9 Ibid., 212–3, relying tenuously on TP 6.1.

10 Matheron, Individu, 295–6

11 Others who claim Spinoza rejects contractarianism include Antonio Negri, Savage Anomaly, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 30; Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, trans. Peter Snowdon (London: Verso, 2008), 50; Michael A. Rosenthal, ‘Spinoza’s Political Philosophy’, in The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, ed. Michael Della Rocca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 409; and Barbone and Rice’s introduction to Spinoza, Political Treatise, 12

12 Rosenthal, ‘Spinoza’s Political Philosophy’, 410; Matheron, Individu, 37–8.

13 Curley, Collected Works II, 491.

14 E.g. TP 3.3, 6.5, 7.5, and 8.2.

15 Matheron, ‘Le probleme de l'evolution’, 206–8.

16 TP 11.4; Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas, trans. James Swenson (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), 26; Steinberg, Spinoza’s Political Psychology: The Taming of Fortune and Fear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 166. Feminist critiques of Spinoza’s reasoning tend to pitch Ethics’ anthropology of power against the TP. See, inter alia, Lloyd, Part of Nature: Self- Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell, 1994), ch5; Gatens, Imaginary Bodies (London: Routledge, 1996), 134; Susan James, ‘Democracy and the Good Life in Spinoza’s Philosophy’, in Interpreting Spinoza: Critical Essays, ed. Charles Huenemann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 146; Beth Lord, ‘“Disempowered by Nature”: Spinoza on the Political Capabilities of Women’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19, no. 6 (2011): 1087.

17 Steinberg, Spinoza’s Political Psychology, 37.

18 This view of the political as inherently conflictual in Spinoza, and its basis in Machiavelli, is outlined in Filippo Del Lucchese, Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza (London: Continuum, 2009), 29–32.

19 On the historical context of the TTP, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment, ch. 16; M.J. Petry, ‘Hobbes and the Early Dutch Spinozists’, in Spinoza's Political and Theological Thought, ed. C. De Deugd (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing, 1984), 150–70; Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 44–52, and Susan James, Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 1.

20 Cf. Ep 30 to Oldenburg.

21 Ep 44 to Jelles (17th February 1671). There is a strong argument by Duijkerius, reproduced by Curley in Collected Works II, 390 n30, that J.H. Glazemaker was the translator, and that Jelles subsidised the translation, hence Spinoza’s entreaty. Glazemaker was a friend of Spinoza and an accomplished translator in his own right, and author of the first Dutch translation of the TTP, belatedly published in 1693.

22 For more on the Dutch context, see J.L. Price, Dutch Society: 1588–1713 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), chapter 5; Maarten Prak, The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Diane Webb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 50–2; and Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), chapter 31.

23 Though there was no formal ban against the work by the States of Holland until June 1674, circulation was suppressed from the outset. See Jonathan Israel, ‘The Early Dutch and German Reaction to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus: Foreshadowing the Enlightenment’s More General Spinoza Reception?’ in Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise: A Critical Guide, ed. Yitzhak Y. Melamed and Michael A. Rosenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 76–85.

24 See Ep 48 to J. Louis Fabritius (30^th March 1673); and Ep 72 to G.H. Schuller (18th November 1675).

25 Ep 68 to Henry Oldenburg (September 1675).

26 Ibid.; cf. Ep 69 to Lambert van Velthuysen (Autumn 1675), which also requests in writing his criticisms of the TTP.

27 A total of 39 exist, though most seem to have been produced by later translators, with only five agreed on as close to authoritative. See Curley, Collected Works II, 60.

28 Ep 84, undated.

29 TP title-page.

30 Numerous commentators have observed the expansion of the affects in Spinoza’s late philosophy, compared to TIE and KV. It is possible that through work on the TTP, Spinoza became aware of the affective and imaginative nature of the political, compelling an expansion of what had been one chapter-treatment of the affects into Parts 3 and 4 of Ethics, separating human servitude to the affects from our freedom or power over them. The TTP repeatedly pairs ‘justice and loving-kindness’ as the social goods taught by true religion, e.g. pref.26, Ch. 14, 19.6–9.

31 Aristotle, Politics, trans. T.A. Sinclair (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 1252a1.

32 1252b27.

33 Ep 56 (October/November 1674).

34 The study of Spinoza’s intellectual development dates to ground-breaking works by Freudenthal and Wolfson; more recently, Yitzhak Melamed’s edited The Young Spinoza (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) contains numerous essays that challenge the idea that Spinoza’s thought remained static and fully-formed over his life. On Spinoza/Aristotle, see Jacob Freudenthal, ‘Spinozastudien’, in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 108 (1896): 238–82; 109 (1897): 1–25; Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, vol. 2 (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 47–8; Dimitris Vardoulakis, ‘Equality and Power: Spinoza’s Reformulation of the Aristotelian Tradition of Egalitarianism’, in Spinoza’s Authority: Resistance and Power in Ethics, eds. A. Kiarina Kordela and Vardoulakis (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 11–31; Hasana Sharp, ‘Family Quarrels and Mental Harmony: Spinoza’s Oikos-Polis Analogy’, in Spinoza’s Political Treatise, eds. Melamed and Sharp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 93–110.

35 Frédéric Manzini, Spinoza: une lecture d’Aristote (Paris: PUF, 2009), Introduction. References are to chapter, section and sub-section number in an electronic edition. On Spinoza’s library, which contained works by Machiavelli and the De la Courts, see Henri Krop, ‘Spinoza’s Library: The Mathematical and Scientific Works’, Intellectual History Review 23, no. 1 (March 2013): 27–30.

36 Some pose whether there is something teleological in the conatus doctrine of Ethics (E3p6–p9). Jonathan Bennett uses a push/pull analogy: while the conatus as an efficient cause would involve a pushing motion (striving as its nature), there is in fact a pulling final cause: striving purposively to what will aid one’s preservation (A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1984), §50). But this issue can be remedied by considering desire, as humanity’s consciousness of the conatus, as something necessarily drawing on affective and imaginative ideas like ends and purposes, which are not necessarily veridical. Spinoza explicitly discourages finalism here (e.g. E1app), whereas the TP actively encourages it, marking a sea-change in its use of Aristotle.

37 Compare TTP 16.1–3 with TP 2.21, 4.4; cf. E4p35.

38 TP 1.1, 1.4; Politics, 1252b27–1253a7.

39 1264b15, 1278b6, 1296b16, 1309b16 – compare TP 2.15–17.

40 E.g. 1308b32, and across Book V. Echoed in Niccolò Machiavelli later, Discourses on Livy, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), III.23, and TP 5.2.

41 1264a1.

42 1279a32. It is also notable that Spinoza does not endorse a ‘mixed government’ of the three as per Aristotle, Cicero and later Locke, though places a common principle of popular sovereignty in each.

43 1278b6–1279a16.

44 1281a44–b1; cf. TP 6.20.

45 1286a31–32; cf. Manzini, Spinoza, 1.5.2.

46 E.g. 1280b29.

47 TP 6.1.

48 TTP 16.6–9.

49 For deeper historical work on this context, see Arthur Weststeijn, Commercial Republicanism in the Dutch Golden Age: The Political Thought of Johan & Pieter de la Court (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 26–35, and Hans Blom, Causality and Morality in Politics: The Rise of Naturalism in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Political Thought (Utrecht: University of Utrecht, 1995), 89–100, and 175–7.

50 For a systematic comparison on both, highlighting a common view of the political as inherently conflictual (a view shared by Hobbes) and their emphasis on the popular sovereignty of the multitude, see Del Lucchese, Conflict. Pace Morfino, it is Tacitus, not Machiavelli, that shapes the realism of the TTP; the TP by contrast clearly reproduces or expands explicitly on Machiavelli’s work (Vittorio Morfino, ‘Memory, Chance and Conflict: Machiavelli in the Theological-Political Treatise’, in Spinoza’s Authority: Resistance and Power in the Political Treatises, ed. A. Kiarina Kordela and Dimitris Vardoulakis (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 7–26.

51 Weststeijn, Commercial Republicanism, 35

52 TP 7.17, 8.9, echoing Machiavelli, Discourses III.24, in the De la Courts, Politike Discoursen, I.III.18 – cf. Weststeijn, Commercial Republicanism, 164.

53 TP 8.3–4, echoing Discourses, I.58, and in the De la Courts’ Politike Weeg-Schaal II.I.3 – cf. Weststeijn, Commercial Republicanism, 265–6.

54 TP 7.17; Discourses III.24

55 TP 10.10, echoing Discourses III.24.

56 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Peter Bondanella (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), I.3, 28.

57 Discourseş chs.III–IV.

58 TP 1.1; Manzini notes similarities with Aristotle’s Poetics (1460b33–34), wherein Sophocles is said to portray people as they ought to be, and Euripides as they are – Spinoza, 1.5.1.

59 He refers to ‘a very wise Dutchman, V.H.’ in TP 8.31 – V.H. being the initials ‘Van den Hove’, the Dutch equivalent of ‘De la Courts’. Machiavelli is referred to in TP 5.7.

60 Ibid., 1.2–4.

61 TP 1.4. Balibar, Spinoza, 50.

62 E3Pref.

63 TP 1.4.

64 E.g. Discourses, III.11, 286.

65 Prince, XV, 53.

66 TP 5.2.

67 Cf. Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), XII.8; Machiavelli, Discourses, IX, 36

68 Ferdinand Alquié, Leçons sur Spinoza (Paris: La Table ronde, 2003), 313.

69 E4p67–73, TTP 17.

70 TTP 13.8, 14.10–11, KV 2.6.

71 TIE 11.

72 TP 5.2.

73 TTP 20.9; cf. Balibar, Spinoza, 51.

74 TP 5.1.

75 Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, trans. Anthony Kenny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), I.2, 1214b10; cf. Manzini, Spinoza, I.3, comparing Aristotle to TIE 16.

76 TP 1.5.

77 TP title-page.

78 TP 1.6.

79 Balibar also remarks that the works ‘belong to two entirely different worlds’, a view this paper is sympathetic to: Spinoza and Politics, 50–1.

80 TP 2.7, echoing E4df8.

81 TP 2.15.

82 TTP Pref.10.

83 Spinoza uses this term to distinguish his preceding theory of natural right and democracy from the historical analysis of the Hebrew Republic under Moses that follows it (TTP 17.1).

84 Spinoza will do the same in his gloss of the Ethics, redefining Adam’s original sin as resulting from being subject to affects that prevented him from using his reason (TP 2.6), versus E4p68s, which peculiarly explains it through Adam’s imitation of the affects of the animals.

85 TP 2.8.

86 TP 2.10.

87 TP 2.11.

88 Aristotle also limits citizenship to those deemed ‘self-sufficient’ (1275b13).

89 TP 2.13; cf. E4p18s.

90 TP 2.15.

91 TP 2.16; TP 2.17.

92 TP 2.21; cf. TP 5.4, which makes this clearer.

93 TP 6.3.

94 TP 7.5.

95 Cf. TP 3.17, 4.6, 5.7, 6.3, 6.8, 7.3–5, 8.20, 8.44; cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), XXX.1.

96 Variants appear at TP 2.13, 2.15–16, 2.21, 3.2, 3.5, 3.7, 6.1, and 8.6. Organicist metaphors of the body politic are common, appearing prominently in Hobbes, Grotius and, ultimately, Aristotle, e.g. 1281b5, 1287b30.

97 E2p13s.

98 E2p40s, 4p31–p32 and 4p35.

99 TP 3.2; 2.21, 3.7.

100 E5p41–42.

101 Alexandre Matheron, ‘The Theoretical Function of Democracy in Spinoza and Hobbes’, in The New Spinoza, ed. Warren Montag and Ted Stolze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997), 217; Negri argues similarly in Savage Anomaly, 194–8.

102 TP 3.1.

103 TP 3.7.

104 Ibid.

105 1324a5.

106 TP 5.1, 5.5.

107 TP 2.21.

108 TP 5.4, echoing Politics, 1280a21.

109 All three emphasise public education for children, with a Baconian interest in pedagogy (Makin for educating girls in England, 1673). While Spinoza doesn’t address pedagogy directly, he had worked as a tutor (Ep 9), and his later Hebrew Grammar was produced as a teaching guide.

110 TP 5.2. Hobbes, On the Citizen, I.2; cf. Machiavelli, Discourses, II.29.

111 TP 7.27; cf. TTP 17.26.

112 TP 5.2; Discourses, III.29.

113 Curley, Collected Works II, 501.

114 Leviathan, XXX.6.

115 TP 9.14; Sharp, ‘Family Quarrels and Mental Harmony’, 110.

116 TP 10.9.

117 Filippo Del Lucchese, ‘The Symptomatic Relationship between Law and Conflict in Spinoza: Jura communia as anima imperii’, in Spinoza’s Authority: Political Treatises, ed. Kordela and Vardoulakis (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 38.

118 TP 10.9.