Abstract

Despite the ideological differences among the most influential contemporary interpretations of Spinoza’s political philosophy, they all agree in considering Spinoza as a radical, subversive, revolutionary political thinker who defends the sacred inviolability of individual liberties and recognises the multitude as genuine subject of democracy. They relegate or simply ignore, however, polemic and yet central topics of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus such as Spinoza’s negative considerations on the multitude, his resolutely anti-revolutionary tone and his view of the State as an absolute power principally concerning the regulation of public opinion. These ideas contradict the radical democratic Spinoza of contemporary interpretations, because of their apparently anti-democratic nature. In this paper I argue that these ideas, on the contrary, are consistent with Spinoza’s conception of democracy. Furthermore, I claim that they can help for re-thinking politics and the political in the context of today’s crisis of democracy and democratic State, since they make visible the conflict and struggle for power inherent to all democracy between political and apolitical actors. This paper firstly analyses 1) the distribution of power and the different social/political actors in Spinoza’s democratic state; 2) the administration/regulation of public opinion and Spinoza’s concern on rebellion and revolution; and 3) the current crisis of democracy in the light of Spinoza’s political thought.