Political Power and Depoliticised Acquiescence: Spinoza and Aristocracy

Constellations 27 (4):670-684 (2020)
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Abstract

According to a recent interpretive orthodoxy, Spinoza is a profoundly democratic theorist of state authority. I reject this orthodoxy. To be sure, for Spinoza, a political order succeeds in proportion as it harnesses the power of the people within it. However, Spinoza shows that political inclusion is only one possible strategy to this end; equally if not more useful is political exclusion, so long as it maintains what I call the depoliticised acquiescence of those excluded.

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Sandra Leonie Field
Monash University

Citations of this work

Spinoza on the Fear of Solitude.Hasana Sharp - 2022 - Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy:137-162.
Marx, Spinoza, and 'True Democracy'.Sandra Leonie Field - forthcoming - In Jason Maurice Yonover & Kristin Gjesdal (eds.), Spinoza in Germany: Political and Religious Thought in the Long Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press.

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References found in this work

The German Ideology.Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels - 1975 - In Science and Society. International Publishers. pp. 19-581.
Politics: Books V and Vi.David Aristotle Keyt (ed.) - 1999 - Cambridge, Mass.: Oxford University Press UK.
The German Ideology.Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels - 1939 - Science and Society 3 (4):563-568.

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