Potentia by Sandra Leonie Field

Author:Sandra Leonie Field
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

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1 Multitudo, multitude or crowd, is a term found in both Hobbes and Spinoza. Hobbes contrasts multitudo, as a mass of individuals without reference to juridical organization, to populus, the people as a juridically defined mass agent (DC 6.1; see my Chapter 3, Section 3.2). In Spinoza’s hands, the term appears to have a similar meaning, but it does more positive work in his politics even as its precise conceptual structure remains elusive. This has generated disagreement amongst interpreters, as I will elaborate subsequently.

2 Only the Theological-Political Treatise was published during Spinoza’s lifetime. By Curley’s estimation, the first two parts of the Ethics were written by around 1665; the Theological-Political Treatise was completed in 1669; the remaining three parts of the Ethics were written by 1675; and the Political Treatise was still in progress at the time of Spinoza’s death in 1677, resulting in an incomplete discussion of democracy (as I will consider in detail in Chapter 9). Benedict de Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol, 1, translated by Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 405–406; Benedict de Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. 2, translated by Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 59, 491.

3 Curley offers this only as a provisional characterization, before subsequently emphasizing deeper differences between the two thinkers and outlining Spinoza’s similarities to Machiavelli. Edwin Curley, ‘Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan’, in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, edited by Don Garrett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 315–318, 328–333.

4 The inventory of Spinoza’s library on his death includes Hobbes, Elementa Philosophica (Jacob Freudenthal, Die Lebensgeschichte Spinoza’s in Quellenschriften, Urkunden und Nichtamtlichen Nachrichten [Leipzig: Verlag von Veit & Comp., 1899], 163). Elementa Philosophica is the title of Hobbes’s three-volume systematic presentation of his philosophy, including De Corpore, De Cive, and De Homine. It is not clear from the somewhat telegraphic inventory whether Spinoza held all three volumes; but commentators presume he held at least De Cive. Spinoza did not read English, but it is likely he had access to Leviathan: a Dutch translation appeared in 1667, and the Latin Leviathan was republished in Amsterdam in 1668. Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and Spinoza’, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 41, 47. Schoneveld claims that Spinoza had access to the in-progress Dutch translation of Leviathan while he was writing the Theological-Political Treatise. Cornelis W. Schoneveld, Intertraffic of the Mind: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Anglo-Dutch Translation (Leiden: Brill, 1983), 40.

5 Prima facie differences include a significantly diminished theoretical prominence of a social contract; the emergence of the concept of the multitude; the greater consideration of monarchy and aristocracy; the lesser attention to imagination, religion, faith; and the more minute focus on institutional design.

6 For an overview of the historical and political context of Spinoza’s writing, see footnotes 27 and 28 in Chapter 1.

7 There is a considerable literature that limits itself exclusively to the earlier Theological-Political Treatise. But of those commentaries that read the two texts together, notable accounts of the change

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