Having established the role that Spinoza's repeated use of Machiavelli plays in his constructive philosophical-political project, we can now turn to the extensive changes that Spinoza's encounter with Machiavelli's theory of history and politics produced in his metaphysics. In this chapter, I will demonstrate that the passage from a conception of being organised serially, which Spinoza articulates in the TdIE, to a conception of being characterised as connexio, put forth in the Ethics, corresponds to Spinoza's elaboration of a theory of temporality that allows him, on the basis of several Machiavellian insights, to distance himself ante litteram from any philosophy of history. In chapter 4, I will traverse Lessing's and Vico's philosophies of history in order more precisely to carve out the stakes of this problem, which at first sight could seem purely terminological, through an analysis of the conceptual structures that they use in their readings of Spinoza.

Theory of Politics and Theory of History

In chapter 2, we analysed Spinoza's repetition of several essential touchstones in Machiavellian political theory. We can now take up the question of the meaning that this repetition assumes within Spinoza's overall architectonic. We have emphasised, first, Spinoza's reprisal of the conceptual pair virtue and fortune as part of a theory of history free from every projection of anthropomorphic categories on to its development. Second, we emphasised the claim that every form of power rests on the power of the multitude and the passions that traverse it, a claim that radically demarcates Spinoza's thought from both a theory of the legitimation of the political through the transcendence of the divine word, and the imposition of a moral model of humanity. The common notions are in play at this level of reflection. The use of common notions characterises the second kind of knowledge, and they have the function of giving adequate knowledge of things by means of their common properties. Regarding politics and history, Spinoza therefore draws from Machiavelli the common notions on the basis of which the common properties of the political body, that is, mixed bodies (to use Machiavelli's language), are able to be adequately thought.