Spinoza was a penetrating political theorist whose writings have
enduring significance. In his two political treatises, Spinoza advances a
number of forceful and original arguments in defense of democratic governance,
freedom of thought and expression, and the subordination of religion to the
state. On the basis of his naturalistic metaphysics, Spinoza also offers
trenchant criticisms of ordinary conceptions of right and duty. And his account
of civil organization, grounded in psychological realism, stands as an
important contribution to the development of constitutionalism and the rule of
law.
Despite being perhaps the most tolerant country in early-modern Europe—a
sanctuary for free thinkers and members of religious minorities—the United
Provinces were riven by religious conflict, as the Dutch sought to establish
their identity after gaining independence from Spain. The confessional rifts of
the seventeenth century were certainly an important part of context in which
Spinoza composed his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus [hereafter: TTP].
The early part of the seventeenth century was marked by a religious
schism that rapidly took on political significance. In 1610, forty-four
followers of liberal theologian Jacobus Arminius—referred to as Arminians—wrote
a formal “Remonstrance,” which articulated the ways in which they deviated from
orthodox Calvinism, particularly with respect to the issues of
self-determination and grace. The Arminians, or Remonstrants, defended
religious toleration on the grounds that faith is expressed in the conscience
of the individual, and so is not subject to the coercive power of the state.
The doctrinal and political views of the Remonstrants were opposed by the
conservative Gomarists (followers of Franciscus Gomarus), or Counter-Remonstrants.
For a little over a decade (roughly 1607–1618), the dispute raged on, expanding
outward from Holland and Utrecht. Finally, in 1618, a national synod convened
(the Synod of Dort) to define more clearly the public faith. The fallout from
the Synod of Dort was disastrous for the tolerant Arminians. The Advocate of
the States of Holland, Johan Oldenbarnevelt, who staunchly defended the
Remonstrants, was put to death. And Arminians throughout the country were
purged from town councils and universities (Israel 1995, 452ff).
The second half of the century witnessed its own major
theologico-political dispute in the United Provinces. At the center, once
again, were two theologians: Johannes Cocceius, a liberal theology professor at
Leiden, and Gisbertus Voetius, Dean of the University of Utrecht. Disputes
between Cocceian and Voetians began over abstruse theological matters, but
developed into a larger political and cultural affair. The Voetians led the
assault on the Cartesian philosophy being taught in the universities. They
thought that the new science advocated by Descartes, with its mechanistic view
of the material world, posed a threat to Christianity in a variety of ways
(Nadler 1999, 151–2 and 308–310). Spinoza's philosophy was reviled not only by
the Voetians, but also by moderate Cocceian-Cartesians, who sought to distance
themselves from radicals.
Spinoza was no stranger to religious persecution. As is well known, he
was himself excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam in 1656.
While Spinoza apparently endured the excommunication with characteristic
equanimity, fellow Dutch apostate Jew, Uriel da Costa, was unable to bear the
indignity of excommunication from the Amsterdam Jewish community. In 1640—when
Spinoza was only eight years old—da Costa, who had denied the immortality of
the soul and challenged the status of the Torah as divine revelation, took his
own life.
Da Costa's suicide surely made a lasting impression on Spinoza, but it
did not affect him as personally as did the treatment of his friend Adriaan
Koerbagh at the hands of Dutch authorities in the years leading up to the
publication of the TTP. In 1668 Koerbagh published two treatises that provoked
the wrath of the Calvinist clergy. In the more scandalous of the two—Een Bloemhof
van allerley lieflijkheyd (A Flower Garden of all Kinds of Loveliness)—Koerbagh
ridiculed a number of traditional religious doctrines and practices, and, in
the process, articulated his own religious and metaphysical views. Among the
shocking views that he advanced were that Jesus is not divine, that God is
identical with nature, that everything is necessitated by the laws of nature
(the laws of God), and that miracles are impossible. These are all positions
that Spinoza consistently endorsed. However, while Spinoza was famously
cautious, Koerbagh was not, publishing the works in Dutch (thereby making them
accessible to the general literate public) under his own name. Consequently,
Koerbagh was tried and sentenced on charges of blasphemy. During his subsequent
imprisonment under squalid conditions Koerbagh became ill, and he died soon
thereafter (in 1669). It is generally supposed that it was Koerbagh's
imprisonment and death above all else that precipitated the publication of the
TTP (Nadler 1999, 170).
Spinoza's political thought draws
from a number of sources, both classical and modern. As one commentator puts
it, “Spinoza formed new conclusions from facts and concepts borrowed from others”
(Haitsma Mulier 1980, 170). It is worth briefly considering some of the sources
of the “facts and concepts” that he inherits.
At some point in the mid-1650's
(around the time of his cherem, or excommunication) Spinoza began studying
Latin with Franciscus Van den Enden. Van den Enden was an ex-Jesuit and radical
egalitarian with revolutionary tendencies. He was put to death in 1674 after
having been found guilty of conspiring to depose Louis XIV in order to
establish a free republic in Normandy. Van dan Enden was an anti-clerical
democrat who appears to have profoundly influenced Spinoza. One commentator has
gone so far as to call Van den Enden “the genius behind Spinoza,” claiming that
Van den Enden's writings “contain a political theory which is in fact the same
as the one worked out by Spinoza” (Klever 1996, 26). Whether or not this
assessment is fair, it is clear that Spinoza's thinking was nourished through
his association with Van den Enden and the larger radical Cartesian circle in
Amsterdam (Nyden-Bullock 2007).
Hobbes' influence on Spinoza is
unmistakable. We know that Spinoza read De Cive carefully and that it was among
his possessions when he died in 1677. He might also have read Leviathan, which
appeared in Latin in 1668, as Spinoza was completing the TTP, although we do
not know this for sure (Sacksteder 1980). I will discuss Spinoza's work in
relationship to Hobbes' in some detail below (sections 2.1 and 2.2, below).
Here I want to mention the impact of Dutch Hobbesians on Spinoza. Hobbesian
thought was introduced into Dutch political discourse by Lambert van
Velthuysen, an anti-clerical, liberal physician (Tuck 1979; Blom 1995).
Velthuysen's Dissertatio is an unabashed defense of Hobbes' thought, in which
the duty to preserve oneself is given pride of place (esp. Sect. XIII). Spinoza
read and admired Velthuysen as a “man of exceptional sincerity of mind,” and
was thus disconcerted when Velthuysen denounced the TTP as the work of a
cunning atheist (Epistles 42 and 43).
Aside from Velthuysen, the other
primary Dutch conduits for Hobbesian thought prior to Spinoza were the De la
Court brothers (Petry 1984; Kossman 2000). Most of the De la Courts' writings
were published by Pieter De la Court after the death of his brother Johan in
1660. However, because it remains unclear how much Pieter added and how much he
profited off his studious younger brother, I will refer to these authors of
these writings simply as the De la Courts, so as to avoid attribution problems.
The De la Courts were ardent republicans who maintained good relations with
Johan De Witt. Indeed, De Witt is thought to have written two chapters in the
second edition of their book Interest van Holland (see Petry 1984, 152). The De
la Courts adopted the basic features of Hobbesian anthropology, but eschewed
juridical concepts like “right” and “contract” (see Malcolm 1991, 548), opting
to analyze the civil condition in terms of the competing interests of
participants. According to them, the aim of the state is to ensure that the
interests of rulers are tied to the interests of the ruled, which is possible
only if one adopts a series of institutional measures, such as the use of blind
balloting, the removal of hereditary posts, and the rotation of offices.
Republics, they argued, will be marked by greater checks against
self-interested legislation than monarchies (see Blom 1993). Spinoza evidently
studied these works carefully; his institutional recommendations in the
Tractatus Politicus [hereafter: TP] reflect his debt to the De la Courts (Petry
1984; Haitsma Mulier 1980).
It was likely the writings of the De
la Courts that impressed upon Spinoza the perspicacity of Niccolo Machiavelli.
The notion of balancing the interests of competing parties was ultimately
derived from Machiavelli (see Haitsma Mulier 1993, 254–255). Spinoza's
Political Treatise is shot through with Machiavellian insights and
recommendations. Right at the outset of the work, Spinoza parrots Machiavelli's
critique of utopian theorizing, elevating statesmen over philosophers, since
only the latter begin with a realistic conception of human psychology (TP 1/1;
cf. Machiavelli's Prince I.15). Machiavellian realism pervades Spinoza's
political writings, playing a particularly large role in the constitutional
theorizing of the TP. Spinoza, like Machiavelli, understood that prescriptions
for improving the governance of a state can be offered only after one has a
proper diagnosis of the problems and a proper grasp of human nature.
Basic Features of Spinoza's Political
Philosophy
Three of the most striking
and important claims of Spinoza's Ethics are that (1) all things come to
exist and act necessarily from the laws of God's nature (e.g., EIP29 and
EIP33), (2) nature does not act on account of some end or purpose (EI
Appendix), and (3) nature is everywhere and always the same (EIII
Preface). Collectively, these three claims entail that human behavior, like the
behavior of everything else, is fully necessitated by, and explicable through,
the immutable—and non-providential—laws of God or Nature. This forms a
significant part of the metaphysical backdrop against which Spinoza develops
his political theory. For the sake of simplicity, I will call the view that is
constituted by these three theses Spinoza's naturalism. This naturalism led him
to adopt radical views regarding the source and status of rights, obligations,
and laws, distinguishing his work from other seventeenth-century political
theorists.
Spinoza's naturalism
excludes transcendental conceptions of God. Those who believe in a transcendent
God “imagine that there are two powers, distinct from each other, the power of
God and the power of natural things…. they imagine the power of God to be like
the authority of royal majesty, and the power of nature to be like a force and impetus”
(TTP 6/81). Of course, on Spinoza's account, God is not a transcendent
legislator, God is nature itself. Spinoza's naturalism entails that all claims
of entitlement deriving from God's will are specious. This is a direct rebuke
not only of defenders of the divine right of kings, but also of most accounts
of natural rights as entitlements that were embraced by many
seventeenth-century theorists.
Moreover, this naturalism
also rules out dualistic views of nature according to which there is a
normative order of things, or a way that things should be, that stands in
contrast to the actual order of things. This view undermines the teleological
assumptions that form the basis of natural law theory, whether Thomistic or
Protestant. Even those who wished to separate natural law from theology (e.g.,
Pufendorf), and those who de-emphasized the role of God's will—as Grotius does
in his famous etiam si daremus passage—still supposed that there is a
way that things ought to be, a normative natural order that can be decoupled
from the actual order of things. According to this view, humans act contrary to
nature when they act contrary to the prescripts of right reason. Spinoza
attacks this view, according to which “the ignorant violate the order of nature
rather than conform to it; they think of men in nature as a state within a
state [imperium in imperio]” (TP 2/6). The phrase “imperium in
imperio” famously appears also in the preface to Ethics III, where
Spinoza is characterizing the non-naturalist view that he opposes. In both of
these passages, Spinoza criticizes the assumption that man is governed by his
own set of rational, normative laws, rather than the laws that govern the rest
of nature. It is precisely this position that Spinoza undercuts when he writes
in the Ethics that “the laws and rules of Nature…are always and
everywhere the same” (EIII preface) and in the TP that “whether man is
led by reason or solely by desire, he does nothing that is not in accordance
with the laws and rules of nature” (TP 2/5).
In short, by adopting the
view that nature is univocal and that man is governed by the same laws as
everything else in nature, Spinoza rejects the natural law tradition (Curley
1991; A. Garrett 2003; for contrasting views, see Kisner 2010 and Miller 2012).
And even if Spinoza's naturalism is viewed as part of a larger naturalistic
trend in Dutch political thought (Blom 1995), his disavowal of normative
conceptions of nature and rejection of teleology indicates a clear break with
tradition. To appreciate the depth and significance of Spinoza's naturalism, it
will be helpful to compare his views on natural right and obligation to
Hobbes'.
One of the most notorious
features of Spinoza's political thought is his account of natural right. He
introduces this concept in TTP 16, where he boldly writes:
By the right and order of nature I merely
mean the rules determining the nature of each individual thing by which we
conceive it is determined naturally to exist and to behave in a certain way.
For example fish are determined by nature to swim and big fish to eat little
ones, and therefore it is by sovereign natural right that fish have possession
of the water and that big fish eat small fish. For it is certain that nature,
considered wholly in itself, has a sovereign right to do everything that it can
do, i.e., the right of nature extends as far as its power extends…since the
universal power of the whole of nature is nothing but the power of all
individual things together, it follows that each individual thing has the
sovereign right to do everything that it can do, or the right of each thing
extends so far as its determined power extends. (TTP 16, 195; cf. TP 2/4).
In claiming that the right
of nature is coextensive with the power of nature and that the coextensivity of
right and power applies mutatis mutandis to the individuals in nature,
Spinoza is simply rejecting non-naturalism, rather than making a positive
normative claim. So although Spinoza is often seen as subscribing to the view
that “might makes right” (see Barbone and Rice 2000, 19; McShea 1968, 139),
this is misleading in a sense, if it is taken as implying that Spinoza is
redefining right in terms of power. In fact, I take it that the coextensivity
thesis is not to be understood as offering a new normative standard; rather, it
is intended as a denial of any transcendental standard of justice (see Curley
1996, 322; Balibar 1998, 59). To say that something is done by right in
Spinoza's sense is just to say that there is nothing in virtue of which that
action can be judged impermissible. So, even if Spinoza's account implies that
Cortés conquered the Aztecs by right, it does not follow that it was
necessarily the right, or proper, thing to do (see TP 5/1; see section 2.3).
Spinoza's brazen denial of
natural proscriptions on what one can do roused the ire of early readers (e.g.,
Pufendorf 1934, 159). Of course, Thomas Hobbes, Spinoza's great predecessor,
had made a similar claim. Indeed, Spinoza's account of natural right is often
taken as evidence that he is a Hobbesian. Hobbes' account of natural right has
been the subject of much interpretative dispute, in part because it seems to
undergo a shift between his early political writings and Leviathan. In De
Cive Hobbes defines right as “the liberty each man has of using his natural
faculties in accordance with right reason” (1.7). In other words, natural right
is the liberty to do anything consistent with the natural law (ibid. 2.1). This
includes the right to do anything that one judges to be necessary for one's
preservation (1.8–1.9). Hobbes adds one proviso here, which may be called the
“sincerity clause,” namely that one violates the law of nature, or acts without
right, when one acts in a way that one does not sincerely believe contributes
to one's preservation (1.10n). And later Hobbes suggests that because
“drunkenness and cruelty” cannot sincerely be thought to contribute to
self-preservation, drunken and cruel actions are not performed by right, even
in the state of nature (ibid., 3.27). In short, as A. G. Wernham puts it, on
Hobbes' view, man's natural right “covers only some of his actions” (Wernham
1958, 14). Specifically, it covers those actions that are not contrary to the
law of nature.
In Leviathan,
however, Hobbes seems to advance an account of natural right that is apparently
not bound by such normative constraints (Ch. 14). But while it may seem that in
the later work Hobbes strips the concept of natural right of all normative
content, even the view expressed in Leviathan may be seen to be at odds
with a thoroughgoing naturalism. To see this, consider Spinoza's reply to his
friend to Jarig Jelles, when asked what sets his views apart from Hobbes':
With regard to political theory, the
difference between Hobbes and myself, which is the subject of your inquiry,
consists in this, that I always preserve the natural right in its entirety [ego
naturale jus semper sartum tectum conservo], and I hold that the sovereign
power in a State has right over a subject only in proportion to the excess of
its power over that of a subject. (Epistle 50)
What Spinoza is criticizing
here is the Hobbesian view of contracts (covenants) or the transference of
one's natural right. The transferability or alienability of one's natural right
to judge how to defend oneself serves as the foundation of Hobbes' political
theory; it allows him to explain the formation of the commonwealth and the
legitimacy of the sovereign. In Spinoza's view, however, Hobbes violates
naturalism here. By conceiving of one's natural right as something like an
entitlement that can be transferred, which in turn leads him to drive a wedge
between right and power in the commonwealth, Hobbes never fully rids his
account of the vestiges of the juridical tradition that Spinoza sought to
overturn.
The difference between
Hobbes and Spinoza on right bears directly on their distinct accounts of
obligation. Hobbes thinks that we incur binding obligations when we make
pledges under the appropriate conditions. By contrast, Spinoza maintains that
“the validity of an agreement rests on its utility, without which the agreement
automatically becomes null and void” (TTP 16/182; cf. TP 2/12). To demand
otherwise would be absurd, since men are bound by nature to choose what appears
to be the greater good or lesser evil. We are bound by nature to act on our
strongest interest and cannot be obligated by previous agreements to break this
inviolable psychological law of nature.
By adhering to a strict
naturalism about right and obligation and maintaining that “the sovereign power
in a State has right over a subject only in proportion to the excess of its
power over that of a subject” (Epistle 50), Spinoza, unlike Hobbes, places the
burden of political stability on the sovereign rather than the subject (see
Wernham 1958, 27). The commonwealth must be structured so as to promote
compliance; when there is excessive vice or non-compliance, the blame must be
“laid at the door of the commonwealth” (TP 5/3). So, whereas Hobbes argues that
the sovereign is always vested with nearly absolute legislative authority,
Spinoza claims that “since the right of a commonwealth is determined by the
collective power of a people, the greater the number of subjects who are given
cause by a commonwealth to join in conspiracy against it, the more must its
power and right be diminished” (TP 3/9). If a sovereign is to maintain its
right, it must legislate wisely, so as not to incite insurrection. So while
Spinoza does not accord to the people a proper right of revolution, he proposes
a naturalistic equivalent, since the right of the state is essentially
constituted, and limited, by the power of the people (TP 2/17) (see Sharp
2013).
Thus, when Spinoza points
to the differences between his view of natural right and Hobbes' in his letter
to Jelles, differences that might appear negligible to the casual reader, he is
identifying a significant distinction (see Wernham 1958, 35). Spinoza's
thoroughgoing naturalism leads him to reject the sharp distinction that Hobbes
draws between civil state—the product of artifice—and the state of nature,
along with the concomitant conception of obligation that arises with the
inception of the commonwealth. But given his naturalism and repudiation of
rights and obligations as traditionally understood, one might be left wondering
how or whether Spinoza could offer a normative political theory at all.
As Curley rightly points
out, to deny that there is a transcendental standard of justice is not to deny
that there is any normative standard by which we can evaluate action (Curley
1996). Even if one can act irrationally without violating nature that does not
mean that all of one's actions have the same normative status. As Spinoza puts
it, “it is one thing, I say, to defend oneself, to preserve oneself, to give
judgment, etc., by right, another thing to defend and preserve oneself in the
best way and to give the best judgment” (TP 5/1). The goodness of an action is
to be judged in relation to whether the action aids one's striving to preserve
and augment one's power (see EIVP18S; TP 2/8; TTP 16/181). The striving
to preserve and augment one's power, which constitutes one's actual essence (EIIIP7),
provides a standard for moral judgments: things are good or bad to the extent
that they aid or diminish one's power of acting (Curley 1973). And just as the
individual ought to do those things that maximize his or her own power or
welfare, Spinoza takes it as axiomatic that the state ought to do those things
that maximize the power of the people as a whole (e.g., TTP 16/184).
Spinoza
is often remembered for his contribution to the liberal tradition, due, in
large part, to his defense of the freedoms of thought and speech in TTP 20.
However, the tolerationism expressed in TTP 20 appears to stand in tension with
the Erastian claim of TTP 19. How can Spinoza be a liberal about religious
practice while also defending the view that the state maintains full right over
matters of religion (TTP, Ch. 19)? Three things must be noted in response to
this puzzle. First, unlike Locke's tolerationism, Spinoza's defense of civil
liberties in TTP 20 is not fundamentally a defense freedom of worship (Israel
2001, 265–266). Rather, it is essentially a defense of the freedom to
philosophize; freedom of worship is at best an incidental byproduct of this
primary aim. Second, Spinoza sharply distinguishes between one's outward
expressions of faith and one's inward worship of God. Sovereign authority over
religious expression concerns only the former, leaving the latter the domain of
the individual, for reasons that we will examine in a moment. Both of these
positions can be understood as lending support to the Arminian cause against
Calvinist Theocrats (Nadler 1999, 12). Finally, it should be mentioned that
Spinoza's denial that freedoms concerning outward religious expression must be
protected points to the limited nature of his brand of toleration. The
sovereign retains full discretion to determine which actions are acceptable and
what forms of speech are seditious. As Lewis Feuer ruefully notes, Spinoza does
not offer anything resembling Oliver Wendell Holmes's standard of “clear and
present danger” to constrain sovereign intervention (1987, 114).
What
are Spinoza's arguments for his, albeit limited, defense freedoms of thought
and speech? The first argument is that it is strictly impossible to control
another's beliefs completely (20, 250–51). Since right is coextensive with
power, lacking the power to control beliefs entails lacking the right to do so.
However, since Spinoza admits that beliefs can be influenced in myriad ways,
even if not fully controlled, this argument amounts to a rather restricted
defense of freedom of conscience.
Next,
the argument shifts from considering what the sovereign can do to what
it would be practical or prudent for a sovereign to do.
Spinoza offers a battery of pragmatic reasons in defense of non-interference.
For instance, he argues that “a state can never succeed very far in attempting
to force people to speak as the sovereign power commands” (20, 251). Men are
naturally inclined to express what they believe (ibid.), and so just as
attempts to regulate beliefs fail, so do attempts to regulate the expressions
of these beliefs. Moreover, even if a state were to regulate speech, this would
only result in the erosion of good faith [fides] on which civil
associations depend, since men would be “thinking one thing and saying
something else” (20, 255). It is thus foolish to seek to regulate all speech,
even if it is also “very dangerous” to grant unlimited freedom of speech (20,
252).
Spinoza
also argues that in general the more oppressively a sovereign governs, the more
rebellious the citizens will be, since most people are “so constituted that
there is nothing they would more reluctantly put up with than that the opinions
they belief to be true should be outlawed” (20, 255).
The source of oppression
and the resistance to it have a common root on Spinoza's account, namely, ambition,
or the desire for others to approve of the same things that we do (see EIIIP29;
cf. Rosenthal 2001 and 2003). Men being constituted as they are, when
differences of opinion arise—as they inevitably do—they are inclined to foist
their standard on others and to resist others' attempts to do the same. So,
however common attempts to regulate the beliefs, speech, and behavior of others
may be, it is politically unstable to do so. Moreover, Spinoza argues that it
is often the least wise and the most obnoxious who initiate moral crusades, and
just as it is often the wisest and most peace-loving who are the targets of
such campaigns (20, 256–58).
It
is worth noting that these arguments in defense of civil liberties are
thoroughly pragmatic; they rely on psychological principles and empirical
observations to illustrate the instability and imprudence of oppressive
governance (see Steinberg 2010b). They are not principled arguments that depend
on rights or the intrinsic value of liberty, much to the frustration of some
commentators (Feuer 1987; Curley 1996).
A
good deal of scholarly attention has been placed on Spinoza's account of the
social contract in the TTP. Spinoza introduces the contract in Chapter 16, when
considering how people escape the pre-civil condition. Here he claims that
“[men] had to make a firm decision, and reach agreement, to decide everything
by the sole dictate of reason” (16, 198), which requires, as he later makes
clear, that each transfers one's right to determine how to live and defend
himself to the sovereign (16, 199–200); cf. EIVP37S2). He also cites
the establishment of the Hebrew state, with Moses as the absolute sovereign, as
an historical example of a social contract (19, 240). The social contract seems
to confer nearly boundless authority on the sovereign. So long as we are
rational, “we are obliged to carry out absolutely all commands of the sovereign
power, however absurd they may be” (16, 200).
However,
if Spinoza really relies upon the social contract as a source of legitimacy,
several problems arise. First of all, it seems unlikely that such a contract
could ever have been formed, since the legitimating strength of a social
contract seems to depend on the farsighted rationality of humans, and yet Spinoza
clearly thinks that the majority of men are not generally rational (see Den Uyl
1983).
But
even if such a contract were possible, a much greater problem remains for
Spinoza. How can we take seriously a legitimacy-conferring contract without
violating the naturalism that is at the core of Spinoza's metaphysics? What is
this right that is surrendered or transferred? And how can one really transfer
one's right, given the coextensivity of right and power? Moreover, Spinoza's
naturalistic, utility-based account of obligation (see 2.2, above) seems to
preclude the possibility of a binding social contract.
Some
commentators take these problems with Spinoza's social contract to be
insurmountable, and for this reason they regard him as coming to his senses
when be abandons the contract in the TP (Wernham 1958, 25–27). Others have
tried to reinterpret the contract in a way that is makes it consistent with his
naturalism. For instance, Barbone and Rice distinguish between two concepts
that have been rendered in English as “power.” On the one hand there is potentia,
which is the power that is essential to the individual (Barbone and Rice 2000,
17). This power in inalienable. What is transferable is one's potestas,
i.e. one's authority (Barbone and Rice 2000, 17) or coercive power (Blom 1995,
211).
While
this interpretation has the virtue of cohering with Spinoza's claim that he
“always preserve[s] the natural right in its entirety” (Epistle 50), since
one's right, or potentia, always remains intact, it leaves unexplained
how potestas, which Barbone and Rice describe as a “super-added”
capacity, fits into the natural order. What can it mean to possess, transfer,
or renounce one's potestas? And how can transferring or revoking it
result in an obligation, given Spinoza's utility-based account of obligation?
The
best way to understand what it means to possess or give up one potestas
is in psychological terms. Curley suggests this when he looks to Hobbes' claim
in Behemoth that the “the power of the mighty hath no foundation but
in the opinion and belief of the people” (EW VI, 184, 237—cited in Curley 1996,
326) as a way of understanding Spinoza's conception of sovereign formation. One
could also cite Hobbes' famous claim in Leviathan that “reputation of
power is power” (Ch. 10) as an expression of the same point. These passages can
be understood as supporting the view that power is not transferred by way of a
speech act, but rather by standing in the psychological thrall of the
sovereign. Sovereignty is the product of psychological deference rather than
the formal transference of rights or titles. We may call this the psychological
interpretation of the social contract.
Some
evidence in support of the psychological interpretation comes in TTP 17, where
Spinoza claims that sovereign power or authority derives from the will of its
subjects to obey (17, 209–10; cf. TP 2/9–10). There are places in the text,
however, when Spinoza seems to imply that we have obligations to the sovereign
irrespective of our psychological or motivational state. In some of these
instances, a careful reading reveals that nothing of the sort is implied. For
instance, his claim that “we are obliged to carry absolutely all the commands
of the sovereign power, however absurd they may be” (16, 200) is contingent on
our behaving rationally and wanting to avoid being regarded as enemies of the
state. Still, there are other places when he does imply that de facto
obedience is neither necessary nor sufficient for establishing the legitimacy
of a civil body. For instance, he claims that the sovereign alone has right
over religious matters such as interpreting Scripture, excommunicating
heretics, and making provisions for the poor (19, 239 - 40), despite the fact
that the church had, in fact, been exercising power in these matters. But this
too can be reconciled with Spinoza's naturalism, provided that we understand
that the power or authority of clerics devolves upon them from the power or
authority of the sovereign.
