The Political Treatise, like every book of philosophy with political aims, ultimately has no sense other than as an intervention. Let us quickly move past the obvious: even less than in the Theologico-Political Treatise, if this is possible, does Spinoza here address himself to the masses. The latter, fighting for their own oppression by giving their favour to the partisans of the most rigorous interpretation of the doctrine of predestination, had already encouraged the execution of the Grand Pensionary Oldenbarnevelt in 1619; now they had lynched the Grand Pensionary De Witt, placing all their forces at the service of intolerance.

We know on the other hand that the Republic was an aristocracy in fact (dominated by the commercial class of the Regents, responsible for the staggering economic rise of Holland), but that this form was poorly ensured by equivocal institutions (the monarchic militaro-clerical pole of the Stadtholder, claimed by the House of Orange; the parliamentarian pole represented by the office of the Grand Pensionary, and dominated by the Regents).

Finally, we know that Spinoza tended to privilege a fundamental alternative between the popular or democratic tendency, essentially peaceful, tolerant, and civilised, and the tyrannical tendency, by its nature bellicose, devout, and barbarous, incarnated by monarchy become absolute (incidentally, it was not the least of his merits to have somehow described in advance, in his analysis of the monarchical regime, the entire evolution of the reign of Louis XIV, from the real authority of Mazarin and the power of sedition of the Grands under the apparent reign of an infant king, up to the final devout and warlike act, plunging the country into misery).

In this way, the people is at once vulgus and multitudo: a mass of anxious and credulous ignorants, and nevertheless the immanent source of all sovereignty, and thereby the source of its meaning. One cannot count on it; no more can one renounce it. There is an apparent ambivalence here only if one forgets once again the rectified image of child: the question is that of civilisation, and by all accounts Spinoza ties this question to the becoming of the multitude. Throughout the Political Treatise, in fact, the concept of the multitude is shaped by the free-slave distinction, which receives its full con-sistency in the opposition barbari-culti, barbari-civiles.