Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Notes on Translation and Acknowledgements
- A Revolutionary Beatitude: Alexandre Matheron’s Spinozism
- I Spinoza on Ontology and Knowledge
- 1 Idea, Idea of the Idea and Certainty in the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione and the Ethics
- 2 Essence, Existence and Power in Part I of the Ethics: The Foundations of Proposition 16
- 3 Physics and Ontology in Spinoza: The Enigmatic Response to Tschirnhaus
- 4 The Year 1663 and the Spinozist Identity of Being and Power: Hypothesis on a Development
- 5 Eternal Life and the Body According to Spinoza
- 6 Intellectual Love of God, Eternal Part of the amor erga Deum
- II Spinoza on Politics and Ethics
- 7 State and Morality According to Spinoza
- 8 Ethics and Politics in Spinoza (Remarks on the Role of Ethics IV, 37 Scholium 2)
- 9 Indignation and the Conatus of the Spinozist State
- 10 Passions and Institutions According to Spinoza
- 11 The Problem of Spinoza's Evolution: From the Theologico-Political Treatise to the Political Treatise
- 12 Is the State, According to Spinoza, an Individual in Spinoza’s Sense?
- 13 The Ontological Status of Scripture and the Spinozist Doctrine of Individuality
- 14 Spinoza and Power
- 15 Spinoza and Property
- 16 Spinoza and Sexuality
- 17 Women and Servants in Spinozist Democracy
- 18 The ‘Right of the Stronger’: Hobbes contra Spinoza
- 19 The Theoretical Function of Democracy in Spinoza and Hobbes
- 20 Spinoza and the Breakdown of Thomist Politics: Machiavellianism and Utopia
- Appendix 1 Interview with Laurent Bove and Pierre-François Moreau
- Appendix 2 Chronology of Works by Matheron
- Works Cited
- Index
20 - Spinoza and the Breakdown of Thomist Politics: Machiavellianism and Utopia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Notes on Translation and Acknowledgements
- A Revolutionary Beatitude: Alexandre Matheron’s Spinozism
- I Spinoza on Ontology and Knowledge
- 1 Idea, Idea of the Idea and Certainty in the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione and the Ethics
- 2 Essence, Existence and Power in Part I of the Ethics: The Foundations of Proposition 16
- 3 Physics and Ontology in Spinoza: The Enigmatic Response to Tschirnhaus
- 4 The Year 1663 and the Spinozist Identity of Being and Power: Hypothesis on a Development
- 5 Eternal Life and the Body According to Spinoza
- 6 Intellectual Love of God, Eternal Part of the amor erga Deum
- II Spinoza on Politics and Ethics
- 7 State and Morality According to Spinoza
- 8 Ethics and Politics in Spinoza (Remarks on the Role of Ethics IV, 37 Scholium 2)
- 9 Indignation and the Conatus of the Spinozist State
- 10 Passions and Institutions According to Spinoza
- 11 The Problem of Spinoza's Evolution: From the Theologico-Political Treatise to the Political Treatise
- 12 Is the State, According to Spinoza, an Individual in Spinoza’s Sense?
- 13 The Ontological Status of Scripture and the Spinozist Doctrine of Individuality
- 14 Spinoza and Power
- 15 Spinoza and Property
- 16 Spinoza and Sexuality
- 17 Women and Servants in Spinozist Democracy
- 18 The ‘Right of the Stronger’: Hobbes contra Spinoza
- 19 The Theoretical Function of Democracy in Spinoza and Hobbes
- 20 Spinoza and the Breakdown of Thomist Politics: Machiavellianism and Utopia
- Appendix 1 Interview with Laurent Bove and Pierre-François Moreau
- Appendix 2 Chronology of Works by Matheron
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
It might seem that nothing is more straightforward than the first two paragraphs of Chapter I of the Political Treatise. Spinoza, rejecting his predecessors wholesale, divides them into two groups: the philosophers, on the one hand, whose many theories have as a common denominator their being perfectly inapplicable; and the ‘politicians’ on the other hand, who, without any theory, knew how to draw from their own practice a certain number of lessons that were very pertinent but too limited in scope. And his ambition, proclaimed in the next five paragraphs, is to present for the first time a theory that would be adequate to practice. A banal pretension, it might be said: what political thinker did not propose to overcome the opposition between a doctrinaire irrealism and an unprincipled empiricism? But there are a thousand ways to undertake such an overcoming; Spinoza’s, as we will see, involves an approach ‘as difficult as it is rare’! And above all, banalities themselves have their histories: the dichotomy in question here, far from having always been insisted upon as though it went without saying, only gained its meaning in light of a problematic that, in the seventeenth century, was entirely novel. The interest of these two paragraphs emerges precisely when we give an account of this problematic, coupled with a reflection on its genesis – and at the same time, implicitly, with a reflection on the conditions of the possibility of Spinozism.
‘Philosophers’, Paragraph 1 says. Which ones? All of them, apparently. If not, Spinoza would have spoken of ‘some’ of them, or of ‘the majority’ of them. A bit further on he would use that kind of language, but only with regard to their ethics (plerumque pro Ethica Satyram scripserint), being careful to specify that what he says about their politics admits of no exception (nunquam Politicam conceperint, etc.).
Now this doesn't come without some problems; for at first glance, the content of this initial paragraph hardly seems to lend itself to such a generalisation. Spinoza, in a first step, indicates to us what constitutes, according to him, the theoretical foundation of the politics of philosophers; his description, once we allow for the requirements of polemic, ultimately provides a good account of the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas;
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- Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza , pp. 319 - 352Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020