Spinoza's Politics: Politics of Naturalization

In recent times, we have been seeing a tendency to dissociate Spinoza's politics from his ontology, as this dissociation allows one to assimilate him in the liberal framework. This way of conceiving Spinoza amounts to a Spinoza without his radical core. Interlinking Spinoza's political thoughts with his ontology, I will try to show that Spinoza's politics is an attempt to naturalize politics in accordance with the ''natural light of reason.” In other words, his political project, to put it in his metaphysical lexicon, is to elevate politics from the state of imagination to the state of reason. Before going any further, the ambiguous  meaning of the word “nature” needs to be clarified. For Spinoza, nature is not something normatively determined (as it is in Descartes), nor does the attempt to naturalize politics entail that it is a transition from non-nature to nature. Rather, it is a transition from the lower modality of nature (i.e. imagination) to the superior one (i.e., reason).


The bedrock of Spinoza's political philosophy, one can argue, is his double-edged concept of human nature. By nature, human beings are passionate entities, who long for “greater benefit” and seek to avoid “greater harm.” However, this is not the only aspect of human nature. This same conatus may also enable human beings to understand the world ade- quately. This is the rational bent of human nature.This aspect of human nature is actualized only through understanding of the actual order and connection among things. Thus, it is no surprise that Spinoza determines “understanding” as one of most important categories of his political theory. In political life, unlike the social life, desire is more powerful than reason.  The driving force of Spinoza's politics, to paraphrase philosopher Errol Harris, is the desire to devise a rational politics which neither suppresses nor gives free rein to the human agency (Spinoza's Philosophy: An Outline, 97).


The demarcation of reason from theology conditions Spinoza's conceptualization of rational theory of democratic state-form. Before entering into the discussion of his concept of state and sovereignty, it is required that we take a brief detour through this question. For  Spinoza, theology boils down to the singularity of prophecy and revelation, as it contains the knowledge as imagination at its most original form (since theological knowledge are not derivable by reason, it only can arrive through revelation). Being capricious and change- able, the sole “object of revealed knowledge is simply obedience”(TTP, 10). In a theocratic  state, this capricious knowledge (which, at best, is morally certain)  becomes the authority of both political and religious sphere. Collapsing faith into politics, this obedience-oriented political system compels citizens to remain stuck in the sphere of negative passion (e.g. fear). Spinoza's politics, in contrast, seeks to re-place politics based on knowledge of imagination with the knowledge of reason.

By carving the desires and by thinking through the dictate of reason, the rational-political agreement of citizens becomes the foundation of the democratic state. This very agreement  simultaneously elevates humans from the state of natural right to the state of civil right. In  the natural state, every “individual thing has the sovereign right to do everything that it can do” (195). In the rational-political state, citizens have to determine a sovereign who assumes  absolute power over individual citizens. In other words, citizens transfer their right to  sovereign. However, no finite entity, Spinoza says, can transfer the totality of his rights to  sovereign. This is where Spinoza definitively rejects Hobbesian concept of sovereignty, which presupposes an absolute transference of rights. By the same token, Spinoza's sovereign is not an abstract individual sovereign. The potentia or constitutive power of individual is inalienable, while the power of authority or potestas is transferable to the  sovereign. By explicating so, Spinoza strikes a delicate balance between the individual  and the sovereign. Ascribing absolute power (only insofar as potentia is concerned) to  the sovereign, Spinoza confronts the question of authority over sacred matters. Spinoza concludes that even in sacred matters citizens are compelled to follow the sovereign, since it will be the right way to obey the god . It may appear that Spinoza's absolutization of the  sovereign's domain poses a limit to the right of the individuals, contradicting his promise to maximize rights. Formulating this dilemma, Spinoza provides an original solution by linking the very sustenance of sovereignty with the individual freedom. That is, individual  freedom needed to be maintained for the sake of the sovereignty itself: “[F]or when...efforts are made to strip men of this liberty...antagonizes rather than frightens people...and incites them to take revenge” (TTP, 259).

Therefore, despite being shifted from the “state of nature”, Spinoza's politics is hinged upon the naturality of reason. This, of course, is not so much a politics in given nature, as rather it is a politics of naturalization. It won't be an exaggeration to maintain, along with Antonio Negri, that the TTP is to be reclaimed as the foundational document  of radical democratic theory.