Potentia

Potentia
Hobbes and Spinoza on Power
and Popular Politics

SANDRA LEONIE FIELD

1
 3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Field, Sandra Leonie, author.
Title: Potentia : Hobbes and Spinoza on power and popular politics / Sandra Leonie Field.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020008321 (print) |
LCCN 2020008322 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197528242 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780197533864 (paperback) | ISBN 9780197528266 (epub) |
ISBN 9780197528259 (updf) | ISBN 9780197528273 (online)
Subjects: LCSH: Political science—Philosophy. |
Power (Philosophy) | Hobbes, Thomas, 1588–1679. |
Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632–1677.
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For Simon
 Contents

Acknowledgements ix
Note on Sources xi

1. Introduction 1

I . HO B B E S
2. Relational Power 25
3. Juridical Politics 55
4. The Political Problem 78
5. Repressive Egalitarianism 107

I I . SP I N O Z A
6. Ethics and Efficacy 147
7. The Power of Producing Effects 175
8. Nature’s Indifference 199
9. Civic Strengthening 235

Bibliography 265
Index 277
 Acknowledgements

Writing this book has been a long and uncertain journey, over many years
and across several continents. My worries about the shape of human collec-
tive life, and philosophy’s capacity to grasp it, were already were brewing as a
student. I had my formative intellectual experiences in Australia with Moira
Gatens and Paul Patton, against the backdrop of the University of Sydney’s
lively and fractious student politics; then I swam in the rich scholarly soup
of the Princeton Department of Politics and the Princeton University Center
for Human Values, under the guidance of Philip Pettit, Dan Garber, and Alan
Patten. Over the eight years since I graduated, I have been working at Yale-​
NUS College, where the book’s progress has been delayed but simultaneously
immensely enriched. Coming to grips with postcolonial Singapore’s ambiva-
lent political legacy has forced me to get serious in my political thinking; the
intense, student-​focussed environment of the college has forced me to main-
tain broad intellectual horizons rather than settling into some comfortable
narrow specialization.
Yale-​NUS College has provided for me richly in financial and organiza-
tional support. Senior colleagues Rajeev Patke and Nomi Lazar were patient
and encouraging during the long period of the book’s gestation. Facing dif-
ficulty in bringing North American scholars to Singapore, instead a manu-
script workshop for the book was held at the Princeton University Center for
Human Values. The event was facilitated by Philip Pettit; Dan Garber gra-
ciously acted as host; and Steven Nadler, Arash Abizadeh, Michael Rosenthal,
and Hasana Sharp served as my respondents. Funding for the event was pro-
vided by Yale-​NUS College, through a Book Manuscript Workshop Grant
(BMW18-​002). Other Yale-​NUS funding for the book includes Start-​up
Grant (R-​607-​263-​181-​121); Political Theory Research Cluster Grant (IG16-​
RCS004-​CWG); Subvention Grant (C-​607-​261-​042-​001); and Internal Grant
(IG17-​SR101). Jade Koh Gek Hiang and Jessie Wong Fong Kee have been un-
failingly helpful as I negotiated administrative matters. I also received assis-
tance from student associates Theo Lai Wenming, Ng Sai Ying, Patrick Wu,
and Vincent Lee Zheng Yang.
x Acknowledgements

Chapters 2–​4 rework material that was first published as Sandra Field,
‘Hobbes and the Question of Power’, Journal of History of Philosophy 52, no. 1
(2014): 61–​86; with permission from Johns Hopkins University Press.
The full circle of those who helped in one way or another in the develop-
ment of the manuscript includes too many to list. Here I indicate only those
who very directly contributed, providing feedback on drafts at varying stages
of completion: Sinja Graf, Kinch Hoekstra, Gordon Hull, Mike LeBuffe, Neil
Mehta, Haig Patapan, Ben Schupmann, Ericka Tucker, and Robin Zheng.
There are a few friends in political theory to whom I am especially thankful,
not just for comments on my drafts, but for their special role in helping me
keep up my stamina to complete the project: in the United States, Loubna
El Amine and Geneviève Rousselière; and in Singapore, Koh Tsin Yen and
Christina Tarnopolsky.
Finally, some more personal thanks. Always my biggest cheerleaders,
my parents are reliable enthusiasts for whatever scholarly project I may be
working on, and they have always done everything in their power to smooth
the way for me. To their and my delight, alongside this scholarly work, I have
become a parent myself, to three wonderful little people, Samuel, Oscar, and
Eamon. Life is larger than scholarship, and the kids force me to keep the
demands of scholarly work in perspective and within strict temporal limits.
But none of this, neither the scholarship nor the family life beyond it, would
be possible without my partner Simon: his labour, his ideas, his love. I dedi-
cate this book to him.
 Note on Sources

1. Note on Gendered Language

I generally reformulate Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s arguments in gender-​neutral

language, as I do not believe that the specific points on which I focus rely
essentially on the gendered language in which they were originally framed.
There is one point at which the gendering is more problematically imbricated
in the analysis, as I will specifically discuss (Chapter 9, Section 9.2).

2. Editions for Primary Sources

Hobbes

Hobbes’s complete works (excepting the Short Tract and the Anti-​White) are
available in English and Latin in the 1839 Molesworth edition, but in light of
the inadequacies of that edition, I have used a number of later editions.
I primarily rely on chapter/​paragraph referencing, because all of Hobbes’s
texts (apart from Behemoth and Liberty and Necessity) are divided into
short paragraphs that are standardly numbered between English and Latin
versions.

Short Tract (ST) (?1630)

Hobbes, Thomas. ‘A Short Tract on First Principles’. In The Elements

of Law, Natural and Politic, edited by Ferdinand Tönnies, 2nd ed.
(London: Frank Cass, 1984), 193–​210.

The Elements of Law (EL) (composed 1640, published 1650)

The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, edited by Ferdinand Tönnies,

2nd ed. (London: Frank Cass, 1984).
xii Note on Sources

De Cive (DC) (1642)

Latin: De Cive, edited by Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1983).
English: On the Citizen, edited and translated by Richard Tuck and Michael
Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Anti-​White (AW) (1643)

Latin: Critique du De Mundo de Thomas White (Paris: Vrin, 1973).

English: Thomas White’s De Mundo Examined, translated by Harold
Whitmore Jones (London: Bradford University Press, 1976).

Leviathan (L)

English (1651) and Latin (1668): Leviathan, edited by Noel Malcolm

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014).

NB: I have used the Clarendon edition text and pagination, but
I have additionally included the chapter/​ paragraph numbering
from the Hackett edition, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: With Selected
Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668, edited by Edwin Curley
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994).

Liberty and Necessity (LN) (1652)

The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Vol. 4, edited by

William Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1839).

De Corpore (DCo) (1655)

Latin: Thomæ Hobbes Malmesburiensis Opera philosophica quæ latine

scripsit omnia, Vol. 1, edited by William Molesworth (London: John
Bohn, 1839).
English: The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Vol. 1, edited
by William Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1839).
 Note on Sources xiii

De Homine (DH) (1658)

Latin: Thomæ Hobbes Malmesburiensis Opera philosophica quæ latine

scripsit omnia, Vol. 2, edited by William Molesworth (London: John
Bohn, 1839).
English: ‘On Man’. In Man and Citizen, translated by Charles T. Wood,
T. S. K. Scott-​Craig, and Bernard Gert, edited by Bernard Gert
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 33–​86.

Behemoth (B) (completed 1668, published 1682)

Behemoth, or The Long Parliament, edited by Paul Seaward (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 2014).

Spinoza

Matters are simpler for Spinoza’s works: there is a complete standard Latin
edition and a complete standard English translation.

Latin: Spinoza Opera, edited by Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winter,

1972).
English: The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vols. 1 and 2, translated by Edwin
Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, 2016).

I make use of the following abbreviations:

Tractatus Theologico-​Politicus (TTP) (1670)

The Theological-​Political Treatise. I have used Curley’s chapter/​paragraph
numbering, but I have additionally provided the Gebhardt volume number
and pagination.

Ethica (E) (completed 1675, published 1677)

The Ethics. I have used the following system of abbreviations:

a: axiom
d: definition (if followed by a number); or demonstration (if not)
xiv Note on Sources

p: proposition
c: corollary
s: scholium
app: appendix

Tractatus Politicus (TP) (1677)

The Political Treatise. I have used the Gebhardt chapter/​
paragraph
numbering.

Epistolae (Ep)
The correspondence. I have used the Gebhardt letter number, volume
number, and pagination.
 1
Introduction

1.1. Context

The idea of the power of the people regularly resurfaces in our political dis-
course and practice. Mass plebiscites and referenda are hailed as revealing a
true will of the people, superior in its political authority to the deliberations
of parliaments; governments must defer to them, if they are to be anything
other than oligarchic regimes masquerading as democracies.1 Mass pro-
test movements understand themselves as asserting the moral and polit-
ical primacy of the people, and celebrate their unstructured spontaneity as
revealing a democratic authenticity; they hope to disrupt the ossified and
elitist structures of institutionalized politics.2 In both cases, the power of the
people is distinguished from the institutional forms that constrain or thwart
it: ‘constituent power’ is distinguished from ‘constituted power’. In an age of
growing disaffection with the standard operations of parliamentary democ-
racy, the idea of a popular power distinct from the institutionalized forms of
politics is a highly relevant one, and the hope to bring politics under its con-
trol is widespread.
Without denying the problems of institutionalized forms of politics,
nonetheless a solution appealing to spontaneous popular power as the
foundation of democracy invites some obvious critical questions. Are
plebiscites and social movements themselves always so pure? In what
sense are their decisions and actions more truly reflective of popular
power, whatever that might mean, than the institutionalized forms of poli-
tics? Consider first plebiscites. Plebiscites are all-​inclusive in the sense that
they invite an entire political community to vote, but how meaningful are
their results? Highly emotive advertising notoriously played some role in
the Brexit decision. Joseph Schumpeter famously drew attention to what

1 For example, the 2016 UK Brexit Referendum; the 2017 Australian Same Sex Marriage Postal

Survey.
2 For example, the antiglobalization protests of the late 1990s; the 2011 Occupy movement.

Potentia. Sandra Leonie Field, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197533864.001.0001
2 Potentia

he called ‘human nature in politics’. The majority of people do not gener-

ally have clearly formed political opinions, and even when they do, they
often fail to take serious cognizance of the implications of their positions,
because the impact of their political action is so infinitesimal in national
politics. Many people come to assent to political positions that are grati-
fying to them, regardless of their coherence. In result, the ‘popular will’ is
the complex outcome of many causal factors in a political system, not least
the efforts of opportunistic political entrepreneurs who, like advertisers,
seed and cultivate political views in order to harness ‘the people’ to their
own ends.3 Schumpeter concludes that the popular will does not drive
democratic political systems: ‘The will of the people is the product and not
the motive power of the political process.’4
Perhaps it can be objected that this troubling possibility of strategic cap-
ture of popular will does not apply so intensely to social movements, be-
cause they do not rely on a single punctual moment of voting, but instead
extend over time and demand deeper involvement and commitment from
their participants. But then a second Schumpeterian problem comes into
play: value pluralism.5 The democratic credentials of social movements
might seem obvious when it comes to the case of an entire population op-
posing a narrow elite. But those credentials are less obvious when it comes to
the more standard situation of a partial social movement that does not find
universal support from the populace, and may even find itself in opposition
to another partial movement.
What is the significance of these critical observations for democratic
theory? Is it the case that there is a coherent concept of popular power,
which regrettably often fails to be met in practice (as would be the view
of many radical democrats)? Or is the problem deeper: is the very con-
cept of popular power irredeemably confused, such that democratic
politics would benefit from the concept being abandoned? Schumpeter
himself presents his critical observations not in order to call for a better
realization of popular power, but to excoriate the theoretical incoher-
ence and practical danger of any concept of popular power. Schumpeter
was a reactionary who assented to the gloomy status quo predicament
of democratic politics as he characterized it. On his own proposed

3 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper

Perennial, 2008), 256–​264.

4 Ibid., 263.
5 Ibid., 251–​256.
 Introduction 3

positive conception, democracy is nothing more than technical term

for a system of government organized around a competition for polit-
ical leadership: an ‘institutional arrangement for arriving at political
decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means
of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote’.6 The very ideas of pop-
ular power, popular will, or mass political agency are altogether aban-
doned as untenable and naive relics of eighteenth-​century thought; he is
entirely uninterested in establishing any new criterion to identify more
or less genuine expressions of popular power. Beyond the minimal pre-
sumption of a free press, Schumpeter makes no discrimination between
better or worse ways for this electoral competition to run; he accepts
that the standard result is a system of inequality and manipulation.7 For
Schumpeter, there is just an incorrigible imperfection to human exist-
ence, and nothing is legitimately to be gained by promoting incoherent
ideas of popular power. Indeed, such ideas are dangerous: the leaders
who most ardently invoke the lofty name of the people are generally
demagogues, using it as cover for their nefarious attempts to crush their
political opponents.8
Schumpeter’s concerns are often discounted.9 Certainly, his positive pro-
posal to abandon the very idea of popular power altogether may strike us as
defeatist. But his critique of romantic tendencies in theories of democracy,
and, in particular, his critique of the conceptual difficulties that beset ap-
peals to popular power, cannot be so swiftly dismissed. In this book, I ex-
plore some current approaches to theorizing popular power, arguing that
they rely on an uncritical conception of the populace, as well as a prob-
lematic analysis of power. But the central goal of this book is fundamen-
tally anti-​Schumpeterian. In the face of conceptual difficulties, rather than
abandoning the very idea of popular power, I put forward a new and better
conception. I offer a path beyond the analytical slipperiness and practical
romanticism of prevalent conceptions of popular power, articulating and
defending an analytically clear and practically robust theoretical account of
popular power.

6 Ibid., 269, also 269–​283.

7 Ibid., 271–​272.
8 Ibid., 268.
9 Lynn M. Sanders, ‘Against Deliberation’, Political Theory 25, no. 3 (1997): 354–​ 357; Bruce
Ackerman, We the People: Foundations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1991), 308–​309.
4 Potentia

I take my point of departure from recent efforts to understand popular

power and radical democracy through the thought of seventeenth-​century
philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza. In these recent
interpretations, Hobbes and Spinoza have been invoked as providing the
historical and conceptual foundations for the anti-​ institutionalist idea
whereby popular power finds its exemplary expression in plebiscites or
social movements. In this book, I heartily agree that the recourse to those
philosophers is fruitful, but I argue that it is fruitful for reasons diametri-
cally opposed to those normally offered. I use Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s anal-
yses to demonstrate that the phenomena of plebiscites and social movements
have only a weak claim to express popular power, both because they are in-
sufficiently popular (they either fail to eliminate their own internal oligar-
chic structure, or they fail to encompass the whole populace) and because
they are the wrong kind of political phenomenon to count as a power (they
produce merely secondary effects that are often weak or evanescent, and in
any case can only be properly understood in relation to the larger social and
institutional ecology of society). Drawing on Hobbes and Spinoza, I artic-
ulate a precise concept of and standard for popular power: I propose that a
political phenomenon should be said to express popular power when it is
both popular (it eliminates oligarchy and encompasses the entire polity) and
also powerful (it robustly determines political and social outcomes). The re-
sult is a chastening of expectations regarding the spontaneous expression of
popular power. First, there is no such thing as a pure or authentic popular
multitude. Human collective life is always already institutionally shaped, for
better or for worse; and only some of the shapes that it might take deserve to
be counted as genuinely popular. Second, the existence and strength of pop-
ular power cannot be established by momentary or transient phenomena;
the measure of popular empowerment in a society will be the ongoing mani-
festation of the multitude’s equal and inclusive popular form in political and
social outcomes over time.
Once popular power is understood as I propose, it becomes clear that
it is a mistake to pin all one’s democratic hopes on mass movements or on
plebiscites with an aspiration to transcend ordinary institutional politics.
Rather, the slow meticulous work of organizational design and maintenance
is the true centre of genuine popular power. Within this framework, mass
movements and plebiscites surely may serve important roles, but not because
they are themselves fundamental sources of popular legitimacy or the privi-
leged site of mass agency. Or so I will argue.
 Introduction 5

1.2. Hobbesian and Spinozist Radical Democracy

I establish my new conception of popular power against the alternatives

posed by two broad radical democratic traditions that celebrate popular
power: the American public law tradition and the European post-​Marxist
tradition. In particular, I focus on two recent exemplary efforts to trace an
early modern European philosophical lineage for contemporary radical de-
mocracy. First, standing as a representative of the American public law tra-
dition, Richard Tuck recuperates Hobbes as a theorist of radical plebiscitary
democracy; and second, standing as a representative of the European post-​
Marxist tradition, Antonio Negri invokes Spinoza as the paradigmatic theo-
rist of the radical insurgent democracy and spontaneous social movements.
In this section, I sketch Tuck’s and Negri’s views, along with their exegetical
basis in Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s texts; I then also indicate their contemporary
practical political context and implications.
Hobbes is the canonical theorist of absolutism. In his view, in any state
there must be a single unitary holder of sovereignty who has the absolute
authority to rule and to make ultimate decisions. The practical motivation of
this absolutism is clear: Hobbes argues that any division of sovereignty opens
the door to political breakdown and civil war. If any constraint is recognized
on the sovereign’s power, then when subjects make allegations of sovereign
overreach, there is no higher authority to judge the case, and the disagree-
ment can be settled only by fighting. Hobbes gives juridical expression to
this fundamental political commitment through his famous device of a cov-
enant establishing sovereignty. From an anarchic and hostile state of nature
prior to politics, Hobbes argues that it is rational for individuals to estab-
lish a sovereign over them who will speak with one voice on their behalf; the
sovereign’s single voice is only possible if they hand over their rights fully and
irrevocably.
Where does Hobbes stand with respect to democracy? Certainly, he is often
characterized as authoritarian and anti-​democratic. First, he endorses a po-
litical order with a monarchical sovereign holding the absolute right to make
decisions, and within this order he allows no recourse for aggrieved subjects.
Second, he identifies various practical disadvantages facing democracy com-
pared to other regimes. Nonetheless, at the level of right, Hobbes insists that
all proper forms of sovereignty—​monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—​
are equal; and when his absolutist commitment to unrestrained sovereignty
is applied to a democratic sovereign, the result is an unflinching commitment
6 Potentia

to popular decision-​making. Hobbes sharply opposes mixed constitution-

alism, a form of political organization in which the people are conceived as
just one partial element of society, whose interests need to be tempered and
balanced against the interests of the nobles. In Hobbesian democratic sover-
eignty, there is no need to ‘balance’ the demands of the people with those of
the elite. Indeed, generations of thinkers after Hobbes seized on this feature
of Hobbes’s theory to develop their own accounts of radical democratic abso-
lute sovereignty. Rousseau and Kant were both close readers of Hobbes; they
differ from him only in denying that a sovereign could be other than popular.
Tuck has laboured to uncover this Hobbesian genealogy of later demo-
cratic thought,10 and the idea of radical democratic absolute sovereignty has
taken an increasingly central place in Tuck’s work. On Tuck’s interpretation,
even Hobbes himself does not see the practical objections to democracy as
insurmountable; Tuck has argued that Hobbes was in fact strongly favourable
to democracy.11 The key to this interpretation is the distinction between sov-
ereignty and government. In any state, the sovereign is the ultimate holder of
right and authority; the government is the body that carries out the mundane
affairs of ruling on a day-​to-​day basis. The government stands as the delegate
and executor of the fundamental authority of the sovereign. Tuck promotes
Hobbes’s model of a ‘sleeping sovereign’, according to which the sovereign
is mostly inactive, allowing the government to carry out its everyday busi-
ness. But the real locus of political power remains with the holder of sover-
eignty: for from time to time the sovereign ‘awakes’ to check the operations
of government, and when it does so, its rulings are authoritative.
Through the distinction between sovereignty and government, Tuck
is able to account for Hobbes’s apparent hostility to democracy. Hobbes is
certainly hostile towards direct democratic government. Mass deliberative
assemblies generate many problems that can be avoided in monarchical gov-
ernment. But this difficulty of democratic government has no bearing on the
question of sovereignty. According to Hobbes’s De Cive,12 the populace must
always first come together to become a democratic sovereign, even if it subse-
quently transfers sovereignty to a monarch or aristocratic assembly. In prin-
ciple any kind of sovereign could be a sleeping sovereign (for instance, a king

10 Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2015), 121–​142.

11 Ibid., 86–​
107; Richard Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Democracy’, in Rethinking the Foundations of
Modern Political Thought, edited by Annabel Brett, James Tully, and Holly Hamilton-​Bleakley
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 171–​172, 181–​189.
12 The second of Hobbes’s three books laying out his systemic political philosophy.
 Introduction 7

designating a vizier). However, in Hobbes’s own key examples, the sleeping

sovereign is the entire populace, with their will defined by their mass non-​
deliberative vote. This is Tuck’s favoured vision of radical democracy, and
in his view it is the properly modern conception of genuine democracy: the
voice of the people, via mass vote and without the distortions of deliberation,
suspending and cutting through all normal operations of politics.13
The distinction between popular sovereignty and the form of government
to which everyday rule is delegated is often expressed through the termino-
logical distinction between constituent and constituted power. According to
Sieyès, the popular sovereign is the constituent power, by whose authority
the constituted powers of government are put in place.14 But Tuck argues that
the Hobbesian democratic sovereign offers a better and more radical model
of popular power than Sieyès’s classic account. Tuck points out that even as
Sieyès identifies the constituent power as the source of legitimacy of govern-
ment, he still insulates politics from the populace. For Sieyès the constituent
power cannot act by itself; instead, it needs to be represented in a constituent
assembly of delegates.15 By contrast, for Hobbes, constituent power (in the
form of the sleeping democratic sovereign) can directly act, by taking a mass
plebiscitary vote on any issues it should choose.16 In a curious inversion of
the standard view, Tuck positions Hobbes as the true thinker of constituent
power.17
Through his focus on Hobbes’s sleeping sovereign, Tuck links Hobbes
to the tradition of French and American constitutional plebiscites, and
celebrates this as the most worthy conception of popular power for our
contemporary world. His view stands in contrast both to more liberal
views that are happy to limit popular power in the name of other values or
constitutional commitments; and to more institutional democratic views
that deny any voice to the people as such, apart from their ordinary po-
litical representation. Indeed, Tuck’s view aligns neatly with an American

13 Indeed, Tuck criticizes the constitutional order of the United Kingdom for lacking the properly

modern separation between sovereignty and government (Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, 250–​251).
14 Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, ‘What Is the Third Estate?’, in Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès: The Essential

Political Writings, edited by Oliver W. Lembcke and Florian Weber (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 88–​96.
Lee has traced the origin of the conceptual pair constituent power /​constituted power even earlier,
to the sixteenth century. Daniel Lee, Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 113.
15 Sieyès, ‘What Is the Third Estate?’, 92; Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, 162–​180.
16 Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, 101–​103.
17 Ibid., 255–​257. See also Murray Forsyth, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Constituent Power of the

People’, Political Studies 29, no. 2 (1981): 191–​203.

8 Potentia

valorization of ‘the people’ who express their power by rising up in oc-

casional ‘constitutional moments’. According to this understanding, the
legitimacy of the US Constitution itself lies in popular support; hence
it is possible for the populace to change the Constitution through a di-
rect vote, not only through the procedures specified within the constitu-
tional document itself.18 Tuck draws broad contemporary lessons from
his reading of Hobbes’s sleeping sovereign: he is in favour of more fre-
quent plebiscitary decisions (such as the Brexit vote) disrupting ordinary
operations of modern democratic states, characterizing these plebiscites
as a voice of the people and a solution to governmental unresponsiveness
and elitism.19
I now turn to consider the legacy of Benedict de Spinoza, whose thought
has been central to a quite different tradition of popular power: that of
European Marxism.20 The neo-​Marxist appropriation of Spinoza is carried
out against the backdrop of a less sympathetic reading of Hobbes. Whereas
the American tradition aligns constituent power with popular sovereignty,
for the Marxist tradition, by contrast, it is sovereignty that suppresses con-
stituent power. The critical distinction is not between sovereignty and gov-
ernment, but between the politics of concrete power potentia and the politics
of authorized power potestas. Sovereignty (summa potestas) is nothing but
the highest form of authorized power. On this schema, Hobbes stands as the
enemy, for he is the partisan of irresistible authority (potestas). Spinoza is the
radical democratic saviour, for he is the champion of irrepressible popular
multitude and its power as potentia, which finds its true expression in sponta-
neous popular movements. This conception of radical democracy has found
most prominent popular expression in Hardt and Negri’s immensely influ-
ential trilogy Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009).
They repeatedly claim that the theoretical core of these works is Spinozist
constituent power potentia against Hobbesian constituted power potestas,

18 Akhil Reed Amar, ‘Philadelphia Revisited: Amending the Constitution outside Article V’,

University of Chicago Law Review 55, no. 4 (1988): 1043–​1104; Ackermann, We The People, 3–​33; Joel
Colon-​Rios, ‘The Legitimacy of the Juridical: Constituent Power and Democratic Reform’, Osgoode
Hall Law Journal 48, no. 2 (2010): 199–​245.
19 Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, 248–​283; Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Democracy’, 185–​190.
20 Not all neo-​Marxists subscribe to this interpretation of Spinoza. Indeed, Althusser’s interest in

Spinoza runs along quite different lines than Negri’s: for Althusser, Spinoza offers a way to remove
problematic Hegelian elements from Marx (the teleology; the conception of ideology as error; the
primacy of the whole over parts) (Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-​Criticism, translated by Grahame
Lock [London: NLB, 1976], 135–​142). In Chapters 6–​9, I will characterize Matheron and Balibar as
importantly opposed to core elements of Negri’s view.
 Introduction 9

and advert to Negri’s earlier scholarly monograph The Savage Anomaly to

support this claim.21
In order to understand what is at stake in the contemporary radical dem-
ocratic appropriation of Spinoza’s idea of the multitude’s potentia, it is first
necessary to provide a standard sketch of the key theses of Spinoza’s polit-
ical philosophy, which is likely to be less familiar to an anglophone audi-
ence compared to that of Hobbes. Spinoza’s Theological-​Political Treatise
initially provides a fairly straightforwardly Hobbesian analysis of politics in
Chapter 16, only to challenge its very foundations in the following chapter.
Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty would be fine in theory, but Spinoza argues
that it does not function in practice. In theory, subjects transfer all right and
power potentia to establish a sovereign as summa potestas over them. But
in practice, nobody can transfer all right and power without limit: regard-
less of any transfer of right or promise of obedience, each person’s power
potentia remains physically located in the person’s body, and some sov-
ereign commands simply will not be carried out. The result is devastating
for Hobbes’s project of overcoming war: indeed, historically Spinoza points
out that sovereigns are more troubled by internal dissent than by external
enemies, even when they are technically absolute in the Hobbesian sense.
When the primary theoretical focus is shifted from questions of right and au-
thority potestas to questions of concrete power potentia, it becomes clear that
nothing is gained by insisting upon Hobbesian absoluteness, not even for a
democratic sovereign. In result, liberal democracy emerges as a regime that
best accommodates and channels subjects’ individual potentiae.
Spinoza’s second political work, the Political Treatise, follows through
more deeply on the political ramifications of an analytical focus on potentia.
The critical theoretical innovation is the concept of the multitude, multitudo.
The multitude is the populace considered apart from any juridical structure;
Spinoza argues that the multitude and its power potentia multitudinis are the
foundation of any political order whatsoever. This gives rise to a new way of
privileging democracy. Whereas the Theological-​Political Treatise promotes
liberal democracy, the Political Treatise now considers the inner power
structure of any regime, regardless of the official designation of regime type

21 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

2000); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
(New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press, 2009); Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics
and Politics, translated by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
10 Potentia

according to the formal holder of sovereignty. In all cases, the central ques-
tion is how the internal organization of the regime channels, develops, or
thwarts the actual passions and desires of its subjects. The more democratic
the internal structure (the more inclusive and participatory its decision-​
making structures, the more responsive it is to popular needs), the stronger
the regime, even if it remains officially a monarchy or an aristocracy.
The radical democratic interpretation of Spinoza’s political philosophy
develops its conception of popular power by homing in on the idea of the
multitude’s power. Spinoza believes it is important to understand the con-
crete determinants of human action, even troubling disruptive action: cen-
trally, it is important to understand that popular indignation can lead people
to rise up against formally rightful regimes. The democratic Hobbes stands
resolutely opposed to such spontaneous movements of the multitude.
Hobbes insists that ‘the people’ can only speak through their sovereign rep-
resentative; he denies there even is such a thing as popular power apart from
its expression through the state. Outside of sovereignty, the multitude is an
amorphous mob without any ability or authority to act. From the radical
Spinozist point of view, to the contrary, moments of insurgency attest to the
power of the multitude as such, and this power is an irrepressible real force
in the world, fundamentally oriented towards equality. The multitude will
rise up against even a democratic sovereign, because democratic sovereignty
may not link well with potentia of people: for instance, majority tyranny may
provoke indignation and sedition. For Spinozist radical democrats, when
Spinoza embraces the power potentia of the popular multitude as the real
foundation of all politics, he thereby shows the disruptive ‘inner truth’ of all
regimes, and endorses the world-​historical agency of the rising multitude as
it resists unjust regimes. Popular power is the power of the multitude, and it
finds its exemplary expression in social movements.
One might wonder why radical democrats in a Marxist tradition find it
necessary to turn to Spinoza. After all, Spinoza himself was a member of the
bourgeoisie, and his seventeenth-​century viewpoint has no premonition of
the future developments of capitalism.22 But observe that Marx and Spinoza
both deprioritize the formal juridical question of right: just as Spinoza takes
seriously popular indignation even against formally rightful political orders,
similarly Marx argues that a formally universalistic political order (such as

22 Spinoza was the son of dried-​fruit importer, and spent time running the business on his father’s

death. Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 81–​89.
 Introduction 11

bourgeois representative democracy) can be the ideological instrument of

class rule; it is necessary for the class that has no class (the proletariat) to
rise up and overthrow it.23 Furthermore, the turn to Spinoza promises to an-
swer some of the difficulties of twentieth-​century Marxism.24 First, Marxist
social theory offers an unduly reductive conception of social struggle and
progress, often privileging the struggles of the male industrial proletariat
against capitalists, to the neglect of other sites of domination and resistance
(women, the indigenous, the unemployed, and so on). By contrast, Spinoza’s
account does not prejudge the possible forms that human domination and
resistance may take. Second, even at the same time as Marxist organizations
fought the capture of state power by the ruling class, they themselves often
took a hierarchical bureaucratized form, alienating power from the masses.
By contrast, Spinoza’s analysis of the power of the multitude promises to un-
dermine the structures of domination in any organization whatsoever. Thus,
the old Marxian idea of the universal class (the proletariat) as a mass agent
which rises through history is given some democratic fine-​tuning by being
reconceived as a Spinozist multitude tending towards unalienated and inclu-
sive horizontality.
Neither the radical Hobbes nor the radical Spinoza matches the main-
stream view within the respective scholarly fields of study. It is more com-
monplace to read Hobbes as a thinker who is equally or more comfortable
with absolute monarchy; it is more commonplace to read Spinoza as a liberal
democrat who is leery of insurgency. But the radical Hobbes and the rad-
ical Spinoza pose challenging questions for politics, beyond the narrow ex-
egetical context of their writings. Tuck points to various eighteenth-​century
French and American constitutional plebiscites that showed optimism and
trust in the people:25 his defence of Hobbesian democratic sovereignty leaves
us with the question, how can we not favour more extensive use of democratic
plebiscites? Negri points to social movements that have justice on their side
and which, through history, have assumed an ever more open and inclusive

23 Karl Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’, in The

Marx-​Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 62–​65.
24 In particular, the difficulties that troubled Italian autonomist Marxists. For a brief historical

overview, see Sylvère Lotringer, ‘Introduction’, in A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of
Contemporary Forms of Life, edited by Paolo Virno (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 7–​20; Kathi
Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 92–​96. See also Enrique Dussel, Twenty Theses on
Politics, translated by George Cicciarello-​Maher (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), xvi;
Mario Tronti, ‘The Strategy of Refusal’, Autonomia: Post-​political Politics 3, no. 3 (1980): 28–​35.
25 Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, 146–​161, 189–​237.
12 Potentia

structure:26 his celebration of the power of the multitude leaves us with the
question, how can we not support the spontaneous upswell of mass power
against constituted authorities? In sum, together the two traditions of radical
democracy demand an answer to the question, what could be more desir-
able than the unfettered grounding of politics in popular power? Certainly,
the Schumpeterian worries already outlined may still niggle, but insofar as
Schumpeter himself seeks to eliminate any appeal to the power of the people,
his worries are often dismissed as signs of a reactionary lack of faith in the
people: an elitist anti-​democratic tendency, or a privileged conservatism.
Given that Tuck’s and Negri’s positions are admittedly not the dominant
views in the specialist literatures on Hobbes and Spinoza, should we simply
assess their claims about popular power and democratic politics on their own
terms and drop the reference to Hobbes and Spinoza? Or is something to be
learnt from the very texts that they appeal to? This book pursues the latter pos-
sibility. First, I argue that the radical democratic accounts of Hobbesian and
Spinozist popular power gravely misrepresent the philosophers’ own views.
Second, I argue that the ways in which the radical democrats go wrong are
illuminating. Using the question of popular power as a focus for interpreting
Hobbes and Spinoza can also enrich and improve the mainstream scholarly
understanding of their respective philosophies. Third, and putting aside the
specialist Hobbes and Spinoza literatures, I argue that the results of my inves-
tigation have significance for contemporary democratic theory more gener-
ally. I offer a new approach to conceptualizing popular power that overcomes
the impasse between radical enthusiasm and Schumpeterian scepticism.

1.3. Potentia: The Core Argument of the Book

It is often claimed that the critical point of differentiation between the polit-
ical philosophies of Hobbes and Spinoza is the concept of potentia: Spinoza’s
concrete power potentia of the multitude is contrasted with Hobbes’s author-
ized power potestas of the people. This Latin distinction, sometimes obscured
by an indifferent English translation of both terms as ‘power’, is especially
central to the radical democratic appropriation of Spinoza’s work. But it is
not often noted that Hobbes offers a very interesting conception of potentia

26 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 69–​88.

 Introduction 13

of his own. In this book, the term potentia serves as the guiding thread for
exploring popular power.
For both Hobbes and Spinoza, power potentia is a term not limited to
human action, but is part of a broader natural philosophy. In their natural
philosophies, any thing’s potentia is relational and actual: analysing power
involves analysing what occurs, not analysing some unexpressed substrate
of what could potentially occur. I will argue that this has consequences for
understanding human action. For the power of a collectivity cannot simply
be conceived as the equal horizontal addition of individual powers. Insofar
as actual human relations may be harmonious or conflictual, equal or hi-
erarchical, helpful or exploitative, correspondingly the potentia of human
collectivities reflects those characteristics: the power of a patron together
with the patron’s clients differs from the power of a band of friends. In con-
sequence, for neither thinker is there anything necessarily good or authori-
tative in itself about the potentia of a human collectivity. Only under some
circumstances does the potentia of a collectivity deserve to be called popular
power; that is, popular power is a success term. Equally on a Hobbesian or a
Spinozist account, I will argue that a popular power worthy of the name will
be both popular (inclusive, equal, and not structured by oligarchic relations
of dependency) and powerful (durably productive of effects). Such power is
difficult to achieve, because forms of interpersonal dependency constantly
emerge in social relations. For my purposes, the major disagreement between
Hobbes and Spinoza lies in the disparate institutional-​organizational models
that each thinker believes optimally expresses popular power in this sense: I
have dubbed Hobbes’s model repressive egalitarianism; and Spinoza’s, civic
strengthening.
Despite Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s differences of substantial vision, more sig-
nificant is their shared understanding of state institutions as at least partially
constitutive of collective power. Against both the American neo-​Hobbesian
celebration of direct democratic voice and the Marxist neo-​Spinozist ro-
mance of the multitude, Hobbes and Spinoza display no radical democratic
suspicion of the state. Both camps of radical democrats worry about the ol-
igarchic and elitist state, and valorize popular power as that which opposes
the state. In so doing, they presume that non-​state forces have an inherently
horizontal structure and a meaningful direction, and that they can be gen-
uinely powerful when they are not suppressed. But first, this presumption
fails to recognize and address the private powers emergent within the multi-
tude, which may be just as oligarchic and oppressive as the state. Second, this
14 Potentia

presumption rests on a feeble account of political causality. The juridical au-

thority of plebiscites and the insurgent disruption of social movements both
stand as superficial phenomena compared to quotidian relational processes
that substantially determine political outcomes. Taking these two points on
board, complex political institutions need to be conceived as fundamentally
ambivalent with respect to popular power. On the one hand, it is surely pos-
sible for them to be alienating and oppressive and for them to be captured by
special interests. But on the other hand, they are indispensable for addressing
and containing informal oligarchy and for having real impact such that pop-
ular power becomes something more than a mere tragic gesture.

1.4. Conceptual Transformations and Political Models

Having provided a high-​altitude overview of the book’s argument, I now

provide an outline of my engagement with Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s texts.
The concept of power, potentia, serves as the book’s guiding thread, but the
concept proves exegetically and analytically slippery. The existing specialist
literatures are of little assistance. On the side of Hobbes studies, the Latin
distinction between potentia and potestas is generally obscured under the
common English term ‘power’; even when the distinction is noted, potentia
is given little philosophical attention. On the side of Spinoza studies, the
standard accounts of potentia, and in particular the potentia of the multitude,
remain equivocal, sometimes glossed as merely the production of effects,
but other times carrying ethical weight. To cut through the confusion, I start
by contextualizing the concept within its overwhelmingly dominant frame
of reference in the early modern period: scholasticism. Scholasticism, the
Christianized Aristotelianism that dominated European intellectual life over
the centuries leading up to Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s own time, placed a con-
ception of potentia at the very foundation of philosophy, and indeed of all
systematic thought from natural science to theology. On the scholastic view,
a thing’s potentia identifies its own proper nature, which (at least in natural
entities where free will does not intervene) tends to be expressed for the most
part. It offers an explanation of phenomena that is simultaneously descriptive
and normative: the natural world is understood as a domain of proper enti-
ties endowed with natural and proper tendencies. In seventeenth-​century
Europe, the scholastic conception of potentia was the focus of a fight over the
very nature of the scientific enterprise, and self-​styled new scientists such as
 Introduction 15

Descartes committed themselves to purging ‘occult powers’ in the name of a

more adequate mode of scientific mechanistic explanation. When Hobbes
and Spinoza appeal to potentia, despite being fully aware of and engaged in
the new science, we must be on our guard against uncritically attributing to
them an account of power reflecting the old scholastic patterns of thought.
In the first half of the book, Chapters 2 through 5, I discuss Hobbes.
I argue that Hobbes’s understanding of potentia undergoes a striking de-
velopment between his early and late works, with significant ramifications
for his science of politics. Undeniably, the tumultuous political events of
the period during which he was writing would have provided external
impetus for shifts in his political analysis; but this book’s contribution is
to trace the conceptual transformations within which the shifting polit-
ical analysis finds its voice. Early and late, Hobbes denies free will; thus,
when he offers a model of human potentia, it is more or less continuous
with a model of the potentiae of natural objects. But Hobbes’s early view
reflects his early education in scholastic natural science, whereas his later
view reflects the new mechanistic natural science. On the early scholastic-​
influenced view, individual human power potentia is understood as human
faculties, which are more or less equal in all adults. Individual humans can
properly combine their powers together only as a formal union, because
any informal association lacks a unifying principle. This neatly meshes
with Hobbes’s juridical theory of state authority potestas, which receives
a potentia commensurate to its potestas in virtue of the covenantal com-
bination of individual potentiae. But on the later view, reflecting the new
mechanistic science that seeks to eliminate the explanatory appeal to in-
herent dispositional powers, individual human potentia is understood as
whatever means a person may have to pursue their ends, including the
assistance or deference of other people. As such, human potentia is re-
lational and actual, and subject to great inequalities. Furthermore, in-
dividual human powers can accumulate into relatively stable informal
allegiances and social groupings, endowed with their own power, even
without any formal union. These private power blocs may sometimes be
appealing, but more likely they will be oligarchic and objectionable. The
new conception of potentia sits uncomfortably with the juridical theory
of absolute state potestas, because in the face of competition from private
informal powers in the political domain, the state may not have potentia
commensurate to its potestas: call this mismatch ‘the political problem’.
The political problem can be solved only by looking beneath the juridical
16 Potentia

order of potestas to consider the concrete determinants of a stable collec-

tive power potentia of the populace.
In the light of Hobbes’s changing understanding of potentia, it becomes
easy to see why Tuck’s preferred plebiscitary model of sleeping sovereignty
only features in Hobbes’s earlier text, De Cive, and is dropped in Leviathan.
First, sovereignty separate from government is likely to have very little power
potentia. The real seat of power potentia is the dense circuits of allegiance and
deference that structure the quotidian functioning of the society. A sovereign
standing separate from this structure but occasionally rising up to issue a
ruling can make only a minor impact on the everyday production of effects
in society, even if its ruling is respected; but even worse, such a sovereign
gravely risks encountering the political problem, as it may find that much of
the society has stronger allegiance to the government. A prudent sovereign
might skirt this difficulty by accepting its lack of power and never issuing any
controversial rulings, but the likelihood of such a strategy underscores the
superficiality of focussing political analysis on the juridical holder of sover-
eignty. Second, the claim of plebiscitary voting to give radical expression to
the popular voice is weak: for without addressing the private powers in so-
ciety, a vote tends to relay those unequal background conditions.
What might solve the political problem? I characterize Hobbes’s pro-
posal as repressive egalitarianism: the common good is achieved by trying
to improve the political and moral judgement of the sovereign, and at the
same time protecting the sovereign from the distorting pressure of formal
and informal power blocs within society. In the face of private power, the
appropriate response is to crush it, to break collective formations within the
populace in favour of a fragmented equality of all subjects. Hobbes argues
that governance will better promote the common good when it takes a less
participatory form; he worries that democracy may undermine common
good and lead to division. But if there must be popular political participa-
tion, if there must be a democratic assembly as sovereign, then it is especially
important to repress informal powers that might seek to capture the demo-
cratic process. I characterize Hobbes’s democratic repressive egalitarianism
as a certain minimal expression of popular power: it is a durable institutional
form that strives to eliminate unequal influence.
In the second half of the book, Chapters 6 through 9, I turn to Spinoza.
Spinoza’s concept of power potentia is central to his philosophical system,
yet it remains elusive and difficult to characterize. In his magnum opus, the
Ethics, the power potentia of any thing is linked to its essence and virtue; in
 Introduction 17

particular for humans, potentia is linked to ethics. At the same time, potentia
appears to relate to a more ordinary meaning of power as efficacy or cau-
sality. This combination of normative and descriptive elements is apparently
similar to that of scholastic natural science. But applied to human affairs, the
combination yields implausible results. The power of the multitude is sup-
posed both to tend towards virtue and also to be efficacious, but surely there
are cases where efficacy does not align with virtue. What of the sorry history
of human oppression and injustice? The scholastics can readily accommodate
human deviancy from the good by appeal to the disordering interventions of
sinful free will, but this avenue is not open to Spinoza because he denies free
will. Interpreters—​whether radical democrats, or equally the more main-
stream interpreters whom I will label ‘constitutionalists’—​tend to square this
circle by echoing Seneca’s dictum that tyrants never last long. They presume
that unappealing political regimes will be transient, and claim that democ-
racy is the inner truth of every successful regime.
Rather than defending the alleged rapprochement of efficacy and ethics
in Spinoza’s conception of power, to the contrary I explore their divergence.
In the face of the democratic complacency of standard interpretations of
Spinoza, I press Spinoza’s philosophy for a response to three Hobbesian
worries: first, the problem of the multitude’s inner oligarchy; second, the
problem of nonideal endurance; and third, the problem of democracy’s per-
verse effects. Determining Spinoza’s response demands a systematic recon-
struction of his concept of power. In fact, I argue that Spinoza has two clearly
distinct senses of potentia. On the one hand, there is the power to produce
effects (potentia operandi); on the other hand there is the power of acting
(potentia agendi): the difference is between an individual producing effects
in general, versus an individual producing effects that can be understood
through the individual’s own nature. Individuals can have a high degree of
potentia operandi despite a low degree of potentia agendi: as, for example,
a state under colonial rule, or an irascible individual whose partner calms
the other’s outbursts. I argue that it is only by appreciating the two senses of
power and their interplay that a proper understanding of Spinoza’s politics
can be reached, but the plain textual distinction between the two senses has
been obscured by the division of labour between Spinoza’s texts. For in the
Ethics, oriented towards individual self-​cultivation, the primary focus is po-
tentia agendi; whereas in the political texts, the foundational frame of right
is linked to primarily to potentia operandi, and only secondarily to potentia
agendi. Building on this distinction, I offer a systematic reconstruction of
18 Potentia

Spinoza’s politics that acknowledges its deep antinomianism. An individual’s

right and a state’s right are coextensive with their potentia operandi, which
is their power of producing effects of whatever sort, for better or for worse.
Granted, only in those cases where they act from their own proper power
(potentia agendi) alone are they in control of their own right (sui juris). This
consideration of being sui juris (both the state itself being sui juris, and indi-
viduals within the state being sui juris) constitutes the ethical element of
Spinoza’s political philosophy, and it is undeniably important. But my anal-
ysis emphasizes that the ethical element is only one component of a larger
analysis of political power.
This reconstruction of Spinoza’s politics enables me to argue that Spinoza
can and must accept my three Hobbesian problems. I argue that Spinoza
accepts the first Hobbesian problem, the problem of the multitude’s inner
oligarchy. Potentia operandi is very similar to the late Hobbesian potentia;
thus, the Spinozist multitude tends to feature Hobbesian oligarchic informal
power blocs. I paint radical democratic Spinozists as neo-​scholastics: for
they understand the multitude’s active power as a normatively appealing
disposition that tends increasingly to express itself through history. But for
Spinoza unlike the scholastics, all power is fully actualized, and a multitude
has precisely the degree of power that it expresses at any given time. If a mul-
titude is not horizontal and equal, then it lacks the power to be so. Nor even
does the existence of egalitarian and inclusive social movements establish the
underlying goodness of the multitude. I argue that an entity’s action is de-
termined by its own active power alone (it is sui juris) when it maintains it-
self homeostatically. Thus, a multitude’s power sui juris cannot be established
by appeal to behaviour shaped by its opposition to the state. A multitude
sui juris must have established the forms of self-​regulation to maintain it-
self over time, and this will mean establishing an institutional structure. The
multitude sui juris amounts to a Hobbesian state that has solved the political
problem: a state that has established a configuration of individual potentiae
that can hold itself together over time.
Next, I argue that Spinoza accepts the second Hobbesian problem: the
problem of nonideal endurance. Allegedly Spinoza shows that the only du-
rable independent states (the only states that have solved the Hobbesian
political problem) are those that have good institutions, fitting with the in-
tuitive desiderata of a normatively appealing democracy. Radical and con-
stitutionalist interpretations alike insist that, for Spinoza as for Seneca,
tyrannies never last long: great political power presupposes a deep ethical
 Introduction 19

structure to the political order. To the contrary, I argue that a state can be
durable in non-​democratic ways, whether due to the stabilizing pressure of
external forces, or due to well-​crafted internal structures of dependency: the
challenge for politics is not only for a state to achieve durability and address
the Hobbesian political problem, but to do so in a way that more robustly
expresses popular power.
In Chapter 9, I draw together the various argumentative threads of the
book to propose a neo-​Spinozist criterion of popular power. First, as to
power: I propose that a collectivity expresses its power to the degree it is
sui juris, or in other words, to the degree it homeostatically maintains itself
and produces characteristic effects. Effects that either are produced sporad-
ically or erratically or are produced durably but only due to pressure from
an external force (for instance, under the tutelage of a colonial power) at-
test less to the collective’s own power. Next, as to popularity: I propose that
a collectivity’s power counts as popular if it effectively self-​regulates itself in
accord with a fundamental principle of equality and participation. A collec-
tivity producing hierarchized dependency amongst its members counts to
that extent as less popular. What regime might meet this two-​part criterion
of popular power? I argue that Spinoza takes very seriously the problem of
democracy’s perverse effects (the third Hobbesian problem); but whereas the
Hobbesian solution is repressive egalitarianism, I characterize Spinoza’s solu-
tion as civic strengthening. Hobbes views all collective organization as a force
of oligarchy and therefore seeks to individualize the multitude and fragment
its collectivities as much as possible. By contrast, Spinoza seeks to enhance
the positive potentiality of human collective action, encouraging sociable
and civic collective forms, and diminishing the passions that entrench prob-
lematic oligarchies. Once the use of egalitarian organizational mechanisms
such as sortition breaks the perverse incentives for oligarchic consolidation,
the possibility emerges for formal and informal counterpowers to be wel-
comed as a beneficial part of a political system’s self-​regulation.

1.5. Outcome

From a detailed study of the historical texts of Hobbes and Spinoza, this
book renders contemporary lessons for a theory of popular power. First, a
thesis on popularity: the multitude is not a locus of ontological purity or po-
litical authenticity. For neither Hobbes nor Spinoza is there any underlying
20 Potentia

disposition of human collectivities towards goodness, just waiting for the

chance to express itself. To the contrary, the potentia of a human multitude
is deeply normatively ambivalent. Hierarchy and domination are not merely
external impositions of the state, but are emergent within the body politic;
the challenge of politics is to bring these internal dynamics to heel. Second,
a thesis on power: power is the production of effects, and power in human
societies operates through a complex and continuously generated relational
structure throughout the social body. The power governing a particular po-
litical community must be assessed at the level of this structure, within which
particular expressions of popular feeling (in votes or social movements) are
merely partial mechanisms.
Combining these theses, I have established a criterion of popular
power: a political system expresses popular power to the extent that it
manifests an institutional structure robustly generating equality and par-
ticipation. Many formally democratic orders fall far short against this
criterion. But the solution is not to fetishize the tragic and ephemeral
popular upswell of plebiscitary votes or of social movements. The radical
democratic celebration of plebiscites or social movements as the quintes-
sential expression of popular power has the perverse consequence that a
society that achieves substantive democratic equality through excellent
institutional structure and well-​conceived ongoing functions of repre-
sentation will count as less expressive of popular power than one that is
effectively an oligarchy but which occasionally hears the voice of people
in plebiscites or mass uprisings of public outrage. Rather, the solution to
the deficiency of popular power in formally democratic states should be
to investigate and construct the organizational forms that better meet my
Spinozist criterion.
This approach does not rule out popular plebiscites or unruly social
movements. We need not follow the Hobbesian path of viewing any centre
of collective power distinct from the holder of sovereignty as an oligar-
chic threat. But this approach does decentre those erstwhile paradigmatic
forms of popular power. It is not the bare presence of social movements
and plebiscites that establishes the state’s popular credentials: the evidence
of real popular power lies in how plebiscites or social movements may con-
tribute positively to the popular state’s durable maintenance of equality and
participation amongst its citizens. I sketch a defence of the plausibility of
Spinoza’s model of popular power through ‘civic strengthening’: like Hobbes,
 Introduction 21

constraining bad oligarchic collective power; but unlike Hobbes, taking on

the project of cultivating collective power’s good and helpful forms.

1.6. Note to Readers

In writing this book, I have tried to hold myself to standards of philological

and philosophical rigour with respect to my interpretations of Hobbes and
Spinoza’s texts, and with respect to my analysis of the concept of potentia.
However, in common with Tuck and Negri, I draw on historical texts out of a
robust sense of their relevance to contemporary politics. Readers interested
primarily in contemporary democratic theory (and less in the philological
and genealogical background) might find they can still follow the overall
argument of the book even if they skip the following sections: Chapter 2,
Sections 2.2–​3 and 2.5; Chapter 3, Sections 3.2–​4; Chapter 7, Sections 7.2–​3.
As for readers hoping for a more detailed account of the historical
context—​both material and intellectual—​in which Hobbes and Spinoza
were writing, I encourage them to consult the fairly comprehensive extant
literature on that topic;27 my own research does not pretend to contribute
to those kind of investigations. My arguments do propose some periodi-
zation of Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s texts, and I do not deny that broader con-
sideration of historical context would further illuminate the shifts in their
views. Certainly, how could it not: both England and the Dutch Republic ex-
perienced immense political turmoil during the very time that Hobbes and

27 For a general history of the period, see, for instance, Robert Buchholz and Newton Key, Early

Modern England, 1485–​1714: A Narrative History, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009);
J. L. Price, The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). For
an intellectual history of the period, see, for instance, Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought
in the English Revolution (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954); Johann P. Sommerville, Thomas
Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1992); A. P. Martinich,
Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting
of Leviathan; Seventeenth-​Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas
Hobbes (Cambridge: University Press, 1962); Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy
and the Making of Modernity, 1650–​1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Eco O. G. Haitsma
Mulier, The Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican Thought in the Seventeenth Century, translated by
Gerard T. Moran (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1980); Susan James, Spinoza on Philosophy,
Religion and Politics: The ‘Theologico-​Political Treatise’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012);
Lucien Mugnier-​Pollet, La philosophie politique de Spinoza (Paris: Vrin, 1976), 13–​80, 175–​213;
Nadler, Spinoza; Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of
the Secular Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 1–​51, 215–​240; Raia Prokhovnik,
Spinoza and Republicanism (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
22 Potentia

Spinoza were composing their texts. However, the relation between Hobbes
and Spinoza’s texts and their own historical experiences have been amply
discussed by other authors.28 My project is different: I seek to take advantage
of variations of the underlying conceptualization of power manifested in the
various stages of Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s writings as a testing ground for un-
derstanding the logic of popular power.

28 For instance, Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 1–​ 39; Lewis
Samuel Feuer, Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958); Étienne Balibar,
Spinoza and Politics, translated by Peter Snowdon (New York: Verso, 1998); Perez Zagorin, Rebels and
Rulers, 1500–​1660, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 130–​186.
 PART I
HOBBE S
 2
Relational Power

2.1. Introduction

The fundamental question for this book is how to understand popular power
in politics. Through the book, I will develop and defend a new conception
of popular power, grounded in a new interpretation of the philosophies of
Hobbes and Spinoza, according to which a political system expresses popular
power to the extent that it manifests an institutional structure robustly gen-
erating equality and participation. The stakes of this new conception of pop-
ular power can be appreciated by contrast with the alternative conceptions
put forward by radical democrats, which (I will argue) are unsustainable in
the face of a proper consideration of the structure and dynamics of human
collective life. In the first half of the book, I focus on Hobbes.
What even is Hobbes’s understanding of popular power? Tuck locates a
radical democratic proposal in Hobbes’s second political tract, De Cive: pop-
ular power finds its exemplary expression in a political order with a demo-
cratic ‘sleeping sovereign’ that awakes to express its will through occasional
mass plebiscites. Hobbes himself no longer mentions this proposal in his
later tract Leviathan; for Tuck, this omission is of no significance, a mere
matter of diplomatic prudence.1 But to the contrary, I will argue that the
omission reflects a foundational conceptual revision between Hobbes’s early
and late science of politics: a change to the conception of power. I will argue
that viewing the sleeping democratic sovereign as a vehicle of popular power
is possible only on the basis of Hobbes’s early and entirely inadequate anal-
ysis of power. Hobbes’s later relational and actual analysis of power is far
superior to the early neo-​scholastic view; compared to Hobbes’s erstwhile
breezy juridicism, this later view of power demands more subtle attention to
organizational forms and interpersonal structures.

1 Hobbes planned to present Leviathan to the King of Scots; Tuck speculates that Hobbes wished to

avoid being needlessly inflammatory by making too obvious his advocacy for democracy. Tuck, The
Sleeping Sovereign, 104–​105.

Potentia. Sandra Leonie Field, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197533864.001.0001
26 Hobbes

The changed analysis of power has not been noticed because interpret-
ations of Hobbes’s political philosophy nearly universally focus on his
theories of authorized power (potestas) and right (ius); whereas the crit-
ical developments fall under the heading not of power as potestas, but of
power as potentia. In the first half of this book, I focus on Hobbes’s contri-
bution to the conceptualization of potentia, its deep systematic importance
for understanding Hobbes’s political philosophy, and its broader polit-
ical ramifications. In the second half of this book, I offer a parallel analysis
of Spinoza’s conception of potentia, arguing that it lies closer to the late
Hobbesian view than is normally appreciated. For both thinkers, I will show
that popular power worthy of the name is not an underlying force waiting to
express itself, but rather it is an achievement, the outcome of patient and ar-
duous institutional development.
My discussion of Hobbes spans four chapters, treating individual potentia,
the early account of composition of potentiae, the late account of compo-
sition of potentiae, and the political implications of potentia, respectively.
The present chapter, Chapter 2, establishes a distinction between Hobbes’s
early and late conceptions of individual potentia: a power initially under-
stood as an internal faculty comes to be reconceived as irreducibly relational.
Chapters 3 and 4 draw out the ramifications of these respective conceptions
of individual power for modelling social and political dynamics: finding
that the relational conception of power casts suspicion on any idea of spon-
taneous prepolitical human equality. To the contrary, it raises the problem
of informal competitive oligarchy. Chapter 5 interprets Hobbes’s hostility to
popular political agency as a drive to crush oligarchic informal powers, and
characterizes his preferred model of popular power as repressive egalitari-
anism. Through these investigations, I will show that a democratic sleeping
sovereign cannot be the exemplar of popular power: for it is revealed as nei-
ther particularly powerful nor meaningfully popular.
In this present chapter, I argue that human potentia changes across
Hobbes’s oeuvre from an essential to a relational property. Early and late,
Hobbes’s theory of potentia is intended to explain actual human behaviour.
In Hobbes’s early texts, individual power is conceived as capacities or fac-
ulties possessed by and internal to the individual; any social ramifications
of these capacities or faculties are conceived as secondary. In Hobbes’s later
texts, individual power is relational and inessential, emergent from the rich
texture of human social interaction; as a corollary, it is not possible to analyse
power in abstraction from the concrete net of human relations in which it is
 Relational Power 27

manifested. This amounts to a shift from understanding power as an inner,

stable, more or less equal property with (admittedly minimal) moral char-
acter, to understanding power as neither inner, nor stable, nor equal, and (as
will become clear in Chapter 4) as fundamentally lacking any moral char-
acter whatsoever. In this chapter and the next, I situate Hobbes’s changing
theory of human power alongside his broader negotiation with a scholastic
conceptual inheritance. The changing conception has implications for pol-
itics: for whereas on the early science of potentia, actual human behaviour
and power are expected to conform largely to the juridical demands of nat-
ural law,2 on the later view conformity becomes elusive, as will become clear
when human collective action is considered in Chapters 3 and 4.
In my argument, I periodize Hobbes’s texts, counting The Elements of Law
(1640), De Cive (1642), the Anti-​White (1643), and the contested Short Tract
(1630) as early; and Leviathan (English [1651] and Latin [1668] editions), De
Corpore (1655), and De Homine (1658) as late. I draw on both the Latin and
the English. Close correlations of the structure and content of large swathes
of the texts make it possible to determine with confidence when an English
discussion of power does indeed map onto potentia and not potestas. In par-
ticular, the explicit discussion of human power in Leviathan’s Chapter 10 is
available both in English and in a direct Latin translation by Hobbes’s own
hand, and throughout the chapter power is systematically translated as po-
tentia. Furthermore, this discussion is a clearly recognizable descendant of
the early Elements of Law, Part I Chapter 8.3 I rely primarily on the English-​
language discussion of power in The Elements of Law to reconstruct Hobbes’s
early view of individual human potentia,4 because unfortunately there is no
corresponding passage in the early Latin text De Cive.5 De Cive’s contribution
to the conceptualization of potentia will come to the fore in the context of po-
litical collectivities, as I will lay out in Chapter 3.

2 Both in the state of nature and in the well-​constituted commonwealth, but not in the poorly con-

stituted commonwealth, as I will show in Chapter 3.

3 The two passages stand in the same place in the text, after the discussion of the passions and

before the establishment of the commonwealth; the internal sequences of the analyses of power are
very similar (starting with natural power, then instrumental powers, then honour); many of the same
examples are used.
4 I also corroborate this interpretation with the briefer Latin discussion of human power in

Anti-​White.
5 In the face of political strife, Hobbes put aside the first two sections of his Elementa Philosophica

to work on the more directly political De Cive; the passage corresponding to the discussion of power/​
potentia in The Elements of Law I.8 and Leviathan, Chapter 10, eventually appeared in De Homine,
but it was completed so late as to count as a late work by my periodization.
28 Hobbes

In my argument, I refer to an early and a late theory of human potentia,

and the question has been raised, how strongly do I wish to assert a sharp dis-
tinction (rather than just a gradual evolution) between these theories. I am
willing to grant that the chronological distinction between the theories may
not be perfect: in particular, there are elements of both theories in De Cive.6
However, granting some chronological messiness in Hobbes’s transition
from one view to the other in no way impugns the bright conceptual distinc-
tion between the views, as I will now endeavour to show.7

2.2. Human Power as Faculties in Hobbes’s Early Writings

In this section, I argue that Hobbes’s early political text The Elements of Law
conceives individual human power (corresponding to the Latin potentia)
as a collection of faculties possessed by the individual. I acknowledge that
Hobbes discusses (what I will call) secondary powers, and (what I will call)
the positionality of power, both of which apparently challenge the concep-
tion of power as faculties. But in both cases, I demonstrate that the core de-
fining conception of power remains human faculties. This will stand in sharp
contrast to the relational view of power/​potentia, to be developed in subse-
quent sections.8
The discussion in The Elements of Law provides prima facie support for
glossing individual human power as faculties. A human individual’s power
is ‘the faculties of body and mind . . . that is to say, of the body, nutritive, gen-
erative, and motive; and of the mind, knowledge’ (EL I.8.4). This connection
is reiterated through the text, establishing an equivalence between human
power, faculties, and human nature itself.

Man’s nature is the sum of his natural faculties and powers, as the faculties
of nutrition, motion, generation, sense, reason, etc. For these powers we do
unanimously call natural, and are contained in the definition of man, under
these words, animal and rational. (EL I.1.4. See also EL I.14.1; DC 1.1)

6 See footnotes 8 and 56.

7 The bright conceptual distinction applies to the philosophical analysis of power, both individual
and collective: the topic of this chapter and of Chapter 3, Section 3.2 and Chapter 4, Section 4.2. I ac-
cept that the change is gradual regarding more loosely political questions, for instance regarding the
importance of the teaching of duties (Chapter 5, Section 5.2).
8 While this general characterization holds true of De Cive’s discussion of power, there are some

emergent hints of the later view, most notably in De Cive’s theology (DC 15.13).
 Relational Power 29

Nonetheless, Hobbes also provides a suggestion for a more expansive con-

ception of power, extending beyond faculties also to encompass what I will call
secondary powers:

such farther powers, as by them [the faculties of body and mind] are acquired
(viz.) riches, place of authority, friendship or favour, and good fortune; which
last is really nothing else but the favour of God Almighty. (EL I.8.4)

The more expansive conception of power includes all manner of other contex-
tual and social considerations contributing to a person’s capacity to achieve their
ends. This revised conception has often been accepted as definitive; after all, it
appears to align nicely with the view expressed in Leviathan (L 10.1–​2).9 I claim,
to the contrary, that Hobbes’s early analysis of power always privileges natural
faculties, conceiving power as the causal potentiality proper and internal to an
individual. Even if Hobbes recognizes secondary powers to be crucially impor-
tant in human life, they are powers only in a derivative sense, as the conduits for
or indicators of faculties. I demonstrate this claim by considering Hobbes’s ac-
counts of equality, honour, and glory.
First, consider equality. If secondary powers are part of an individual’s power in
the proper sense, then they must factor into the assessment of an individual’s power.
However, to the contrary, when arguing that people are more or less equal in power,
Hobbes does not see it necessary to demonstrate that people’s secondary powers,
such as the assistance and favour they receive, are equal. Rather, the equality of
power is established merely by considering equality in faculties: strength, wit, and
knowledge. Correspondingly, the true measure of any inequality of power that does
exist is determined not through comparison of secondary powers, but through the
clash of bodily strength (EL I.14.1–​5; DC 1.3–​4, 1.6).
Second, consider honour. Honour is the internal conception of the supe-
riority of another person’s power.10 The signs11 by which power or its excess

9 C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 35–​46; James H. Read, ‘Thomas Hobbes: Power in the State of
Nature, Power in Civil Society’, Polity 23, no. 4 (1991): 505–​506; Richard Tuck, ‘Introduction’, in On
the Citizen, edited by Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), xxi; M. M. Goldsmith, Hobbes’s Science of Politics (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1966), 66–​71.
10 This superiority is initially characterized with respect to the power of the beholder, but Hobbes later

generalizes it to mean superiority with respect to the relevant comparison class. For instance, a powerful
individual can honour a subordinate by praising this person above other subordinates (EL I.8.6).
11 A sign is a thing that a person has experienced as regularly occurring antecedent or consequent

to something else, which the person conjectures will occur in this combination again in the future
(EL I.4.9–​10).
30 Hobbes

above that of others can be recognized are called honourable. They include
not only the direct effects of a power, but also effects at several causal steps
away from that power, by which its existence is indirectly inferred. For in-
stance, ‘general reputation amongst those of the other sex’ is honourable
as a sign directly consequent of ‘power generative’; boldness is honourable
via a more indirect signification: it is ‘a sign consequent of opinion of our
own strength: and that opinion a sign of the strength itself ’ (EL I.8.5). If sec-
ondary powers are powers in the proper sense, then their superiority should
merit honour, even without reference to faculties. However, to the contrary,
whenever Hobbes proposes superiority of secondary powers to be honour-
able, he takes care to trace the chain of signification back to an individual’s
possession of a faculty. Riches are honourable, not because they themselves
are power, but ‘as signs of the power that acquired them’; authority is honour-
able, not because it itself is a power, but ‘because a sign of strength, wisdom,
favour or riches by which it is attained’ (EL I.8.5). Hobbes does not discuss
friendship per se, but he does analyse some attributes thereof, again reducing
them back to faculties: persuasiveness is honourable, as a sign of knowledge;
‘general reputation amongst those of the other sex’ is honourable, as a sign of
bodily vigour (EL I.8.5).
Third, consider glory. If secondary powers are powers in the proper sense,
then it is not false to glory in them. Glory,

or internal gloriation or triumph of the mind, is that passion which

proceedeth from the imagination or conception of our own power, above
the power of him that contendeth with us. (EL I.9.1)

A person has reason to glory when their feeling of superiority of power

is grounded in reality, whereas false or vain glory are the feelings without
the real power. However, Hobbes directly denies that association with others
gives rise to justifiable glory. ‘[N]‌or does association with others increase
one’s reason for glorying in oneself, since a man is worth as much as he can
do without relying on anyone else’ (DC 1.2).12 Similarly, Hobbes insists that
reliance on fame to achieve glory indicates a lack of power (EL I.9.20). In
both cases, the secondary power (association, or the deference and assistance
of those who recognize one’s fame) is not by itself reason for glory; in other

12 The Anti-​White goes so far as to deny that friends even count as a secondary power, because real

power (presumably, formidable faculties) inspires hate and fear, not love (AW 38.8).
 Relational Power 31

words, it is not a power in the proper sense.13 Rather, proper glory is tied to
awareness of one’s own superior faculties. In sum, while glory itself is intrin-
sically relational insofar as it is defined by comparison of powers, the power
that it compares is clearly non-​relational.
Thus, despite the initial presentation of secondary powers as powers in
their own right, they are incorporated into the analysis only insofar as they are
reduced back to natural faculties:14 they are mere conduits for or indicators
of the only things properly called powers, which are natural faculties.
I turn now to the question of positionality. The text provides some sugges-
tion that power should not be conceived as faculty, but instead as a differen-
tial of faculties. Indeed, often Hobbes is interpreted as offering a ‘zero-​sum’
conception of power.15 In what I call the ‘positionality claim’, Hobbes asserts
that power is intrinsically positional.

And because the power of one man resisteth and hindereth the effects of the
power of another: power simply is no more, but the excess of the power of
one above that of another. For equal powers oppose, destroy one another;
and such their opposition is called contention. (EL I.8.4)16

The analytical part of this positionality claim is reiterated and relied upon
constantly throughout Hobbes’s early texts. Capacities are only effective in
their excess over one another; if you and I race to grab an apple, but I am
faster, then I have the effective capacity to grab the apple. Your capacity, be-
cause comparatively inferior, is entirely ineffective. Hobbes elaborates this

13 In the Anti-​White, Hobbes insists we feel our power from our own deeds (AW 38.7) and from

our own faculties: we feel glory in civil powers and honours because they are evidence of our superior
mental powers, and we envy others who rise in wealth and honours because it is evidence of their su-
perior mental power (AW 28.7). He makes only two very brief mentions of potentiae not reducible to
our own faculties or deeds, or in other words, where the power of others itself constitutes one’s own
power rather than merely indicating one’s own prior underlying power: kings and victors in battle
(AW 38.8, 38.17). However, in Chapter 3, I will show that these kinds of cases fit neatly into Hobbes’s
early juridical conception of collective power.
14 There are also other corroborations in the text. First, the definition of secondary powers—​’such

farther powers, as by them are acquired’ (EL I.8.4)—​already indicates that for something to be a sec-
ondary power, it must have a connection to faculties. Similarly, in the Anti-​White, Hobbes claims
honours and riches count as part of power because they are its consequents: ‘partes esse potentiae,
potentiam enim honores & divitiae sequuuntur’ (AW 38.8). Second, Hobbes says that power is known
by the actions that it produces; he does not countenance that it might be known directly, as would be
the case if secondary powers such as riches and friends were themselves truly powers in their own
right (EL I.8.5).
15 Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 35; Thomas A. Spragens, The Politics of

Motion: The World of Thomas Hobbes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), 190–​191.
16 See also AW 38.7.
32 Hobbes

point in an extended reflection on the analogy between human life and a race
(EL I.9.21). Indeed, his definitions of glory, honour, and the honourable all
involve comparison of power.
However, even if the positionality claim is indisputably analytically
central, there still remains a terminological question. The positionality
claim proposes a new use of the word ‘power’. Power is no longer an
individual’s capacity (whether their faculties or also their secondary
powers), but rather the excess of the person’s capacity over the capacity
of relevant others: for instance, it is the superiority of my strength that
is a power, not the strength itself. The terminological question asks,
in these early texts, is the term ‘power’ used equivocally for both these
meanings, or is it reserved for one or the other? In fact, the use of the
term ‘power’ to mean non-​comparative capacity is clearly dominant in
the text. To start, Hobbes frequently characterizes human power as fac-
ulties, not as the comparative excess of faculties (EL I.1.4, I.8.4, I.14.1).
Furthermore, glory and honour are defined in terms of the comparative
excess of power; if power already meant this comparative excess, Hobbes
would need instead to define glory and honour directly in terms of power
(EL I.8.5, I.9.1). Similarly, if power were already comparative, Hobbes
should not speak of a situation of equal forces as a situation in which
there is equal power, but rather as a situation in which there is no power
at all (EL I.14.3).
In this section, I have established Hobbes’s early conception of human
powers: power is conceived as faculties, and as such it is internal and
non-​relational. I fully grant that relationality enters secondarily into
the analysis of human affairs. Relationality is indispensable to under-
standing both the psychology of glory and the outcome of clashing
powers. Nonetheless, relationality is not built into the concept of power
itself.

2.3. Hobbes’s Early Debt to Scholasticism

In his discussion of power, Hobbes was not taking an everyday term and
giving it for the first time a technical meaning. To the contrary, the concept
of power/​potentia was a centrepiece of scholastic metaphysics. In this tra-
dition, scientific understanding of each thing consists in discerning its po-
tentia, which is at the same time its nature. Although potentia is now often
 Relational Power 33

translated as potentiality, in Hobbes’s time it was translated as power. In his

mature writings, Hobbes polemically opposed scholasticism. But Hobbes’s
Oxford education followed a standard scholastic curriculum, and secondary
literature has meticulously documented the debt of his natural philosophy
to this scholastic education.17 This excellent secondary literature nonethe-
less has its limits. It is concerned with the history of philosophy of natural
science; accordingly, its interest in human potentia extends only to narrow
questions of optics and perception. In this section, I extend the scholastic
framing of Hobbes’s early philosophy beyond the science of natural objects
to consider human action. I start by presenting a stylized sketch of the
scholastic conception of potentia, in particular as it is found in Aquinas.18
I then situate Hobbes’s early conception of human power/​potentia against
this background, arguing that Hobbes’s scholastic inheritance explains his
peculiar insistence in The Elements of Law on conceiving of human power
as inner faculties. However, due to Hobbes’s denial of free will, I show that
his conception of human power maps not onto the scholastic science of free
human moral action, but onto the scholastic science of natural bodies: iden-
tifying a stable inner disposition that enables a simultaneously normative
and descriptive understanding of the body in question. This frame will be
important for understanding Hobbes’s early conception of political power as
potestas, as I will discuss in Chapter 3, Section 3.3.
The scholastic tradition of philosophy synthesizes Aristotle’s physics and
metaphysics together with Christian theology. It was the dominant tradition
in Europe for several centuries following Aquinas’s magisterial works.19 But it
was noisily superseded in the ‘scientific revolution’, displaced by the modern

17 Cees Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian Setting of Thomas

Hobbes’ Natural Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 1–​16; Frithiof Brandt, Thomas Hobbes’s Mechanical
Conception of Nature (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, 1928), 9–​85.
18 My presentation largely follows Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism, who frames

Hobbes’s arguments with great specificity within his late scholastic intellectual context. In my
own discussion, I do not pretend to provide an account of Hobbes’s actual proximate philosoph-
ical influences, which include—​in addition to scholasticism—​also Averroism, humanism, and ep-
icureanism. Readers interested in these topics can consult, in addition to Leijenhorst’s book, his
article ‘Sense and Nonsense about Sense: Hobbes and the Aristotelians on Sense Perception and
Imagination’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’, edited by Patricia Springborg
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 82–​108; as well as Gianni Paganini, ‘Hobbes’s
Critique of the Doctrine of Essences and Its Sources’, in Springborg, Cambridge Companion
to Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’, 337–​357; J. Prins, ‘Hobbes and the School of Padua: Two Incompatible
Approaches of Science’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 72, no. 1 (1990): 26–​47; Gordon Hull,
‘Hobbes’s Radical Nominalism’, Epoché 11 (2006): 201–​223; and Simon Friedle, ‘Thomas Hobbes and
the Reception of Early-​Modern Epicureanism’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2012).
19 Centrally, St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica: Complete English Edition in Five Volumes,

translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics, 1981).
34 Hobbes

science and mechanical philosophy of the likes of Galileo and Descartes.20

Scholastic philosophy advances a hylomorphic metaphysics, so named for
its focus on matter (Greek hyle) and form (Greek morphē). Undifferentiated
inert matter is divided into natural bodies by substantial forms. This met-
aphysics characterizes the world in terms of a natural order. Des Chene
provides a concise overview:

The phenomena it [scholasticism] studies are in large part the regularities of

everyday life: fire heats, water left alone cools, animals reproduce according
to kind, excess is painful to the senses. There are phenomena that lie outside
that sphere—​miracles, monsters, the fortuitous. But the scientific study of
change relies in the first instance on their regular effects. We know nature
first of all not when it is frustrated, but when it succeeds.
The task of natural philosophy is to understand that order, which
Aristotelianism founded on the natural necessity of the progression
from what is potentially so to what is actually so. That necessity was con-
ceived not as the instantiation of natural law but as that of tendencies to
ends. Natural things are divided into kinds according to those tendencies,
or, to use an Aristotelian term, their active potentiae. Behind the set of
potentiae belonging to each individual lies a substantial form, that at once
individuates it, unites its powers, and determines its destiny.21

Forms are intrinsic principles of motion of natural bodies, including not

only movement from one place to another, but also other kinds of natural
change. In Aquinas’s words, ‘[U]‌pon the form follows an inclination to the
end, or to an action, or something of the sort; for everything, in so far as it is
in act, acts and tends towards that which is in accordance with its form’.22 For
instance, the stone’s substantial form explains why it falls to the ground, but
equally the acorn’s substantial form explains why it grows to be an oak tree.
When natural change occurs, this is conceived as a potentiality being actual-
ized, or a power being put in act. When the change is transitive, for instance,
a fire burning wood, then two potentialities are involved: both the fire’s

20 For an overview, see Steven Nadler, ‘Doctrines of Explanation in Late Scholasticism and in the

Mechanical Philosophy’, in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-​Century Philosophy, edited by

Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 513–​522.
21 Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Philosophy

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 17. See also Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of
Aristotelianism, 138.
22 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I Q5A5.
 Relational Power 35

active potentiality to burn and the wood’s passive potentiality to be burned.23

A thing’s potentia characterizes its natural behaviour; consequently, a thing’s
potentia can be identified with its nature.
A substance operates, or is at work, insofar as its potentiality is being actu-
alized. But identifying a potentiality is not sufficient to determine that some-
thing will in fact occur: for the natural motion of a natural body might be
blocked or countered. In this case, the natural body undergoes unnatural, or
‘violent’, motion. A stone may naturally fall down, but it could also be thrown
upwards; a seedling might be deformed by disease. Aquinas is emphatic that
there is no formal cause for unnatural behaviour: ‘Now it is manifest that a
cause which hinders the action of a cause so ordered to its effect as to pro-
duce it in the majority of cases, clashes with this cause by accident: and the
clashing of these two causes, inasmuch as it is accidental, has no cause’.24
Correspondingly there is no separate science studying it; the aberrant behav-
iour is understood not in itself but in its deficiency compared to the natural
tendency.25
In his study of the relation between Hobbes and Aristotle, Spragens
characterizes Hobbes’s philosophy as having wholly eliminated scholastic in-
nate powers, including innate powers of human beings.26 But he supports
his claim by appeal only to Hobbes’s later works; I will show that attention
to Hobbes’s early writings provides a rather different picture. For as I have
argued, Hobbes’s early works display a certain conception of human power
as internal faculties; I now connect this conception of human power with
Hobbes’s scholastic intellectual context and training.
On the side of natural philosophy, by the early 1640s, Hobbes had moved a
long way from scholasticism. To be sure, his much earlier Short Tract (1630)
still bears the mark of his Oxford scholastic education.27 It sketches out a
metaphysics of agents with power to move, and patients with power to be
moved (ST Ip3–​4). Agents and patients are both substances, each with their
respective powers ‘inherent’ in them. These inherent powers can then either
be ‘in act’ or not, according to whether the agent is working or not (ST Ic1,
Ic6–​7). The authorship of the Short Tract remains controversial;28 but even
23 Ibid., I Q25A1. Later scholastics complicate this distinction (Des Chene, Physiologia, 46–​51).
24 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I Q115A6.
25 Ibid., I-​II Q6A1, II-​II Q95A5.
26 Spragens, The Politics of Motion, 89–​90, 102.
27 Brandt, Thomas Hobbes’s Mechanical Conception, 9–​46, 55–​73; Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation

of Aristotelianism, 140–​145, 172–​179.

28 Leijenhorst provides an overview, concluding that ‘after more than a century of debate, Hobbes’

authorship of the Short Tract is now beyond doubt’ (The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism, 13).
36 Hobbes

if the text does provide insight into Hobbes’s position in 1630, certainly over
the subsequent years, the scholasticism of the conception of power of nat-
ural objects is substantially abandoned. During 1634 to 1636, and again from
1640 onwards, Hobbes was deeply immersed in the Parisian philosophical
circle centred on Marin Mersenne. By the early 1640s, Hobbes’s natural phi-
losophy was already swept up in this circle’s self-​conscious intellectual shift
away from scholastic hylomorphic metaphysics.29
I will discuss Hobbes’s mature natural philosophy in more detail in Section
2.5, drawing attention in particular to its rejection of three features of a scho-
lastic analysis of power: rejecting (i) any strong distinction between power
and act; (ii) any conception of power as something internal to the body whose
power it is; and (iii) any normative grain to a body’s power. For now, the crit-
ical point is that these changes had not percolated through to Hobbes’s treat-
ment of humans and politics during the same period.30 For in both his early
political texts, the Elements of Law (1640) and De Cive (1642), Hobbes seeks
to understand human nature through its powers (EL I.1.1, I.1.4; DC 1.1), and
I claim his analysis retains these three critical features of the scholastic ap-
proach to power. As demonstrated in Section 2.2, the powers of an individual
human are characterized as causal capacities originating in their nature con-
ceived as a collection of faculties. To be sure, the powers are not taken as
brute givens; rather, Hobbes attempts to provide an account of their genesis
from motions of lesser bodies (EL 1–​8).31 But the key point is that the powers
are conceived as distinguishing an internal, proper, and relatively stable
human nature, which explains human acts; and that that nature is taken as
the only proper object of science.32 These inherent powers may well generate
secondary powers, but secondary powers do not independently contribute to

29 Brandt, Thomas Hobbes’s Mechanical Conception, 143–​165. Brandt dates the decisive break in

Hobbes’s natural science at 1641, which is just after the composition of The Elements of Law (ibid.,
99); Tuck and Brandt both argue that the late De Corpore (1655), which clearly takes a step away from
the scholastic frame, was already partly drafted in the early 1640s; indeed, its views have strong sim-
ilarities to those expressed in the 1643 Anti-​White. Brandt, Thomas Hobbes’s Mechanical Conception,
171–​175; Tuck, ‘Introduction’, xi–​xii.
30 The conceptual discontinuity in Hobbes’s early works between power in natural objects and

power in human beings is particularly stark in his Anti-​White, which combines the new mechanical
natural science with the early view of human power.
31 This admittedly represents a certain departure from scholasticism, and may reflect Hobbes’s en-

counter with neo-​Epicureanism. I thank Stephen Nadler for this suggestion; for a fuller discussion of
Hobbes’s Epicurean influences, see Friedle, ‘Thomas Hobbes’. By contrast, at the time of the very early
Short Tract, he conceives of agents as qualitatively distinct substances (ST Ip15).
32 To be sure, De Cive also characterizes humans in terms of their duties as citizens (DC Pref.10), as

I will discuss in Chapter 3. For now, I focus on the characterization of human nature as such (DC 1.1).
 Relational Power 37

the human individual’s causality properly understood, especially not when

they emerge without or out of proportion to their true power.
What of the third critical feature of the scholastic approach to power,
regarding its normative grain? Here an ambiguity needs to be dispelled.
Hobbes’s analysis of human power seeks to explain actual human behaviour,
not a lofty standard of behaviour from which humans regularly fall short;
whereas the scholastic treatment human action is strongly moralized. But
this does not eliminate the normative character of Hobbes’s analysis: for
I claim that Hobbes’s descriptive treatment of human power corresponds to
the scholastic science of natural bodies (not the scholastic practical science
of human action). Scholastic natural science retains some residual normative
grain, through the distinction between natural and (rare but still possible)
degenerate motion.
My earlier sketch of Aquinas’s hylomophism focussed on the metaphysics
of natural bodies of the sort that interest natural scientists. But natural bodies
exhibit just one of three possible ways that a thing’s potentia can relate to
its observable conduct.33 First, heavenly bodies operate perfectly in accord
with their nature. Heavenly bodies such as stars actualize their potentiae in
circular motion, a form of motion with no contrary tendency; and they are
incorruptible: so their motion is never violent.34 Second, natural ‘elemental’
bodies such as animals, plants, and stones do have contrary tendencies,
which can be brought about by an external ‘violent cause’: the stone’s ten-
dency down can find its contrary in upwards motion, or the seedling can rot
instead of grow. But potentia still illuminates what in in fact occurs: for nat-
ural bodies operate in accord with their nature for the most part.35 Third and
finally, humans are distinct from the rest of nature insofar as they possess free
will. This free will allows them to choose to behave in a manner that diverges
widely and systematically from their true good nature, even without the in-
tervention of violent external causes. Humans can and should use reason
to direct themselves to morality,36 but equally they can and frequently do
choose to sin and to indulge in vicious habits instead.37

33 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.II Q95A5. This sketch draws on the discussion in Alexandre

Matheron, ‘Spinoza et la décomposition de la politique thomiste: Machiavélisme et utopie’, in Études

sur Spinoza et les philosophies de l’âge classique (Paris: ENS Éditions, 2011), 82–​87.
34 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I Q66A2.
35 Ibid., I Q103A5, I Q115A6, I-​II Q6A4.
36 Ibid., I-​II Q1A2–​3.
37 Ibid., I Q83A1, I-​II Q6A4.
38 Hobbes

Science in relation to the first two cases explains what in fact occurs, either
perfectly (in the case of heavenly phenomena) or for the most part (natural el-
emental phenomena). By contrast, the sciences of human beings do not even
purport to do this. The science of human nature becomes a practical science of
how humans ought to behave.38 Natural law establishes moral ends of human
action, and prescribes to humans all acts of virtue.39 Actual human behaviour is
scientifically considered only in relation to the moral norm that it may or may
not meet.40 There is no science of degeneracy per se; for evil and imperfection
are a deprivation of being.41
In contrast to Aquinas’s single unified normative science of human beings,
when Hobbes poses a natural law in addition to his account of human power,
he appears to offer a dual-​track analysis. On the one hand, the science of human
potentia laid out in Section 2.2 concerns actual tendencies of behaviour, like
Aquinas’s science of natural bodies; on the other hand, his natural law appears
to offer a strongly normative science, corresponding to Aquinas’s practical
science of human action. For Hobbesian natural law delineates a standard
of virtuous human behaviour. It is demanding, even though it is reduced to
reason’s dictates for pursuing self-​preservation (EL I.15.1; DC 2.1). This is be-
cause effectively serving one’s preservation requires significant constraint and
foresight (EL I.15–​16, I.17.14; DC 2–​3). For instance, natural law requires that
revenge consider future good and not past evil (EL I.6.10; DC 3.11); and that
no one should insult another (EL I.16.11; DC 3.12). Either people may fail to
reason correctly because they are too easily satisfied with platitudes, or be-
cause they make careless and imprecise use of words (EL I.5.11–​13); or their
reasoning may fail to be sufficiently motivating, overwhelmed by passions or
pursuit of glory (EL I.15.1; DC 1.1) or their ‘inordinate desire for an imme-
diate good’ (DC 3.27).
But this apparent analogy between Hobbes’s natural law and Aquinas’s prac-
tical science quickly vanishes: at every point in his early texts, Hobbes takes
pains to qualify or discount the natural law so that normative standards on

38 Aquinas divides knowledge into speculative knowledge, oriented towards truth, and practical

knowledge, oriented towards action, or more precisely towards ‘operation’ (actualizing the potentia
of a thing) (ibid., I Q14A16).
39 Ibid., I-​II Q94A2-​A3.
40 Ibid., I-​II Q7A2.
41 Ibid., I Q5A5. Spragens claims that the ‘Aristotelian-​Scholastic cosmos’ is ‘homogeneous in its

basic pattern of action’ across humans, plants, animals, stones; and identifies this as a structural sim-
ilarity to Hobbes’s system (The Politics of Motion, 167–​168). But Spragens’s textual focus on Aristotle
leads him to miss the fundamental scholastic distinction between humans and the rest of nature.
 Relational Power 39

action42 only remain where they will be met for the most part. The applica-
bility of natural law’s more demanding precepts in the state of nature (and, as
we will see in Chapter 3, in the well-​ordered commonwealth) is constrained
to be compatible with the actual ordinary tendencies of human power. In the
state of nature, people generally do everything they can to preserve their lives
according to their own judgement, at whatever cost to their fellow humans
and regardless of its conflict with traditional morality and with many of
Hobbes’s own specific laws of nature. But inter arma silent leges (EL I.19.2;
DC 5.2):43 when there is no clear prospect of peace, reason itself directs self-​
defence, and rules that none of the other laws of nature apply (EL I.14.14).
Correspondingly, Hobbes claims that in the state of nature, what people in
fact generally do is simultaneously done from right reason (EL I.14.6–​10; DC
Ep.10, 1.15). Beyond merely permitting this antisocial conduct, reason’s law
of nature commands that, in the absence of security, people should be formi-
dable and hostile to one another (EL I.17.15).
This collapse of Hobbes’s practical science as a lofty moral standard
is easily explicable. Aquinas’s fundamental separation of humans from
the rest of the natural world relies on their free will, either to put to work
their moral potentia or not. By contrast, Hobbes resolutely denies free
will. Already in the Short Tract, he argues that if a free agent is defined
as ‘that, which, all things requisite to worke, being putt, may worke, or
not worke’, then there is no such thing: the definition is contradictory
(ST Ic11).44 Human action is understood as the operation of potentia
directed by a drive for self-​preservation, without the mediation of free
will (EL I.14.6; DC Ep.10, Pref.10, 1.7). To maintain a scholastic practical
science demanding virtue, while at the same time posing a deterministic
account of the causes of non-​virtuous behaviour, would be to egregiously
violate the principle of ‘ought implies can’.45 His apparently dual science

42 This striking feature of Hobbes’s theory only applies to action. I grant that there are also laws of

nature applying to conscience, and in that domain perhaps there are likely to be divergences—​see
Hobbes’s discussion of natural laws in foro interno (EL I.17.10; DC 3.17).
43 ‘Laws are silent among arms’ (DC 5.2).
44 The argument is repeated in LN 277–​278. Leijenhorst provides an overview of the argument, in-

cluding its continuities and ruptures with late scholastic thinkers. Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of
Aristotelianism, 173–​186.
45 I grant that in Liberty and Necessity, Hobbes asserts that practices such as blame and punishment

of noxious actions are coherent even in the absence of any metaphysical free will. However, observe
his primary argument in defence of his view: Hobbes defends practices of blame and punishment be-
cause they will be efficacious in reducing noxious actions in society (sometimes through reforming
the malefactor, but more significantly by shaping the deliberations and conduct of others who witness
the malefactor’s suffering) (LN 248–​255). This argument rests on a weak version of ‘ought implies
40 Hobbes

collapses back into a single science of humans as natural bodies; his nor-
mative standards are flattened onto what actually tends to occur. Human
potentia generates appropriate behaviour for the most part, just as with
any other elemental body. Without the possibility of differentiating
humans from the rest of nature in terms of their free will, Hobbes instead
differentiates them in terms of their linguistic capacity (EL I.5.4).46 But
this is a much less profound distinction: it amounts to simply attributing
a different collection of particular powers to humans than to animals, not
to a metaphysical difference in how those powers operate.
The resultant Hobbesian human science has a structure similar to the
scholastic science of natural bodies. Human power is simultaneously
descriptive and normative. It is descriptive insofar as it explains human
behaviour for the most part, even the conflictual behaviour of the state of
nature. It is also normative, defining proper behaviour and distinguishing
it from degenerate behaviour. But truly degenerate behaviour is a very
marginal phenomenon. Far from accounting the hostile and antisocial
behaviour that is observed in the state of nature as irrational and a per-
version of human faculties, to the contrary, Hobbes is able to account it as
the proper outcome of those faculties. Degeneracy is limited to antisocial
conduct not even conceived as self-​preserving, such as cruelty and drunk-
enness (EL I.19.2; DC 1.10, 3.25).47 Human self-​preserving behaviour is
driven by ‘a real necessity of nature as powerful as that by which a stone
falls downwards’ (DC 1.7). Just like Aquinas’s stone falling to earth, which
might occasionally be thrust upwards, ordinary human behaviour follows
properly from its own nature, except for occasional bouts of drunkenness
and cruelty.

can’. Certainly, in any particular case of wrongdoing, the malefactor did the noxious action, there-
fore they could not have avoided doing the noxious action. But they are held blameworthy because
it is possible that society could avoid those noxious actions for the most part. Conversely, if certain
actions cannot be avoided for the most part, regardless of practices of blame and punishment, then
the coherence of those practices is in question. I thank Arash Abizadeh for pressing me on this point.

46 An extended discussion is found in Philip Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind,

and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

47 A similar structure is evident in Hobbes’s characterization of basic human motivation. Johnston

demonstrates that Hobbes universally attributes to humans a fear of death as the greatest of evils;
but at the same time, he recognizes that some humans do not feel this way. Johnston argues that the
discrepancy does not show a failing of the science; rather, the science poses a standard to which re-
ality ought to conform. David Johnston, The Rhetoric of ‘Leviathan’: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics
of Cultural Transformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 50–​54. My suggestion
is that such an approach to a science of human behaviour parallels scholastic accounts of natural
bodies.
 Relational Power 41

2.4. Relational Human Power in Hobbes’s Later Writings

In this section, I turn to Hobbes’s later texts, and I argue that there is a striking
change in how power/​potentia is conceived. Rather than locating individual
human power in the faculties internal to the individual, I argue, Leviathan
offers a new analysis by which human power is externally constituted in
relations with other humans. My argument rests primarily on Leviathan,
Chapter 10 (both English and Latin editions), which is a recognizable de-
scendent of the discussion of human power in The Elements of Law (EL I.8).
The very close similarity of the two passages48 makes the small changes
I identify more significant.
I start by showing that in Leviathan, secondary powers are now included as
genuine powers in their own right; their status as genuine powers is not under-
stood through a connection with natural faculties. This outcome is not actively
argued for in the literature on Hobbes’s politics because it is generally taken
for granted:49 but against the sharply contrasting view that I have established
for The Elements of Law and the Anti-​White, it is useful to demonstrate it spe-
cifically.50 Where The Elements of Law defined power as faculties (EL I.8.4),
Leviathan opens with a definition of power that enshrines a privilege to effects:

The power [Potentia] of a Man (to take it Universally,) is his present means,
to obtain some future apparent Good. (L 132–​133, 10.1)

Secondary powers also find a new definition, newly supplementing the back-
ward relation to faculties from The Elements of Law (EL I.8.4) with a for-
ward relation to effects. They are now called ‘Instrumentall’ powers, and are

48 As established in footnote 3. By the time of the very late De Homine, the structure of the text has

shifted, leaving only a vestigial discussion of individual power. De Homine, Chapter 11, is clearly the
relevant passage: its discussion of pulchrum/​pulchritudo is a truncated version of the other texts’ dis-
cussion of honour/​honorare/​honourability/​honorabilis. Pulchritudo is the quality in an object that is
an indication of future good (DH 11.5), but what is a means to a future good but power (L 132–​133,
10.1). However, De Homine’s discussion does not provide any direct analysis of potentia. Its purpose
is to characterize pleasure and displeasure; and it considers power incidentally only in relation to this
purpose (DH 11.6, 11.13).
49 See footnote 9; see also Christian Lazzeri, Droit, pouvoir et liberté: Spinoza critique de Hobbes

(Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998), 66–​77, 118–​121; Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral
and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 93–​94.
50 Complementary accounts of the textual shift are provided by Ross Rudolph, ‘Conflict, Egoism

and Power in Hobbes’, History of Political Thought 7, no. 1 (1986): 73–​88; F. S. McNeilly, The Anatomy
of Leviathan (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968), 137–​147; D. J. C. Carmichael,
‘C. B. Macpherson’s ‘Hobbes’: A Critique’, in Thomas Hobbes: Critical Assessments, edited by Preston
King, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1993), 361, 368–​369.
42 Hobbes

defined as those ‘which acquired by these [natural powers], or by fortune, are

means and Instruments to acquire more’ (L 132–​133, 10.2; emphasis added).
Because the criterion for being counted as a power points forward to effects,
not back to origins, any causal genesis for a power is acceptable: secondary
powers are explicitly included in the general definition of power in equal
standing with natural faculties (L 132–​133, 10.1).
Macpherson draws liberally on examples from The Elements of Law to il-
lustrate Leviathan’s conception of power,51 but this is unsustainable: Hobbes’s
changed explanations of examples systematically reflect the new definitions’
refusal to privilege faculties and the shift of focus to effects. Something is
honourable if it is a sign of power. In early and late texts alike, nobility or
good birth is certainly honourable, but in The Elements of Law, it is by re-
flection as a sign of power of ancestors (EL I.8.5), whereas in Leviathan it is
a sign that one may easily obtain aid (L 140–​141, 10.45). Riches were pre-
viously honourable ‘as signs of the power that acquired them’ (EL I.8.5);52
now ‘Riches joyned with liberality, is Power [Potentia]; because it procureth
friends, and servants: Without liberality, not so; because in this case they de-
fend not; but expose men to Envy, as a Prey’ (L 132–​133, 10.4).
It is not controversial that in Leviathan, power includes secondary powers
in good standing. But I argue now that the new conception of power is not
simply an enlargement of the scope of the previous conception to include
additional discrete examples of power: rather, the addition of these examples
displaces and transforms the (formerly) core cases. Specifically, first I dem-
onstrate that the (previously degenerate) case of secondary powers that
arise in the absence of grounding faculty powers (or out of proportion to
the grounding faculty powers) becomes the exemplary case of human power.
And second, I show that the resultant conception of power is deeply rela-
tional and resists abstraction from social context.53

51 Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 39.

52 In the Anti-​White, Hobbes counts others’ hostility as a secondary power because it is a con-
sequence of one’s power (AW 38.8). This sharply illustrates the early understanding of secondary
powers as signs of faculties: here, a consequence of faculty power counts as secondary power, even
though it presumably may reduce efficacy.
53 Complementary characterizations of Leviathan’s conception of power can be found in Rudolph,

‘Conflict, Egoism and Power’, 80–​88; Ross Rudolph, ‘The Microfoundations of Hobbes’s Political
Theory’, Hobbes Studies 4, no. 1 (1991): 50–​51; and Samantha Frost, Lessons from a Materialist
Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008),
7–​11, 144–​145, 150–​156. Kavka’s rational choice reconstruction picks up on some of these themes.
However, it is explicitly committed to (and attributes to Hobbes) a ‘descriptive’ account of human
conduct as the conduct of an ideally rational individual, not as the conduct of actual individuals as
per my reading of Hobbes’s potentia. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, xiii, 19–​20.
 Relational Power 43

Consider secondary powers arising without or out of proportion to un-

derlying faculties. The new definition of power no longer renders such
secondary powers degenerate; and I argue that Hobbes embraces this con-
sequence. Early and late, Hobbes recognizes that secondary powers can out-
strip faculties. Whereas this is an afterthought and an aberration to the core
analysis in The Elements of Law, I argue that Leviathan systematically brings
this phenomenon to the fore.
In The Elements of Law, secondary powers are ‘acquired’ through the nat-
ural faculties (EL I.8.4); but how exactly? It is easy to reconstruct the mech-
anism: honour bridges from faculties to secondary powers through the
mediation of people’s subjective conceptions. Honour is the internal con-
ception of the superiority of another person’s power, and it gives rise to cer-
tain characteristic external actions (EL I.8.6). If I think someone else is more
powerful than I, I will tend to defer to, obey, and be polite to that person. For
this reason, deference, obedience, and politeness are all signs of honour. But
these signs of honour from others simultaneously contribute to the honoured
individual’s capacity to achieve her ends. They constitute secondary power
(favour and perhaps friendship) for the honoured individual.
In the initial presentation, the mechanism appears straightforwardly re-
liable. It is not difficult to know someone’s power and therefore to honour
it correctly: we simply need to attend to ‘such actions, gesture, countenance
and speech, as usually such powers produce’ (EL I.8.5). But in his discussion
of false glory in the following chapter, Hobbes indirectly addresses the possi-
bility of the mechanism malfunctioning, of people misidentifying power and
misdirecting their honour. It is possible to feel glory ‘not from the conscience
of our own actions, but from fame and trust of others, whereby one may think
well of himself, and yet be deceived’ (EL I.9.1).54 Insofar as people revere and
trust an individual, they honour them. Their deference is no less real even
in cases where it has faulty grounds. Nonetheless, Hobbes treats this mal-
function as an aberration that has no implications for the analysis of power.
He counts glory from misplaced deference as false glory, or in other words,
as not indicative of real power. Such deference grounded in misdirected
honour and not linked to faculties can be counted as secondary power only
in a degenerate sense, and falls outside the scope of scientific analysis of the
individual’s power. In any case, Hobbes suggests that this degenerate power

54 See also AW 38.7.

44 Hobbes

will be unreliable: aspiration grounded in false glory ‘procureth ill-​success’

(EL I.9.1).55
In Leviathan, near the start of the discussion of power, there is a new
topic without parallel in The Elements of Law: reputation, or in other words,
others’ conception of one’s power, considered without regard to its accuracy.
Reputation is power ‘because it draweth with it the adhaerence of those that
need protection’ (L 132–​133, 10.5).56 Hobbes’s explicit treatment of reputa-
tion makes clear the role of subjective conception as such in generating sec-
ondary power. Hobbes doubly insists that secondary power disconnected
from faculties is genuine power:

[W]hat quality soever maketh a man beloved, or feared of many; or the

reputation of such quality, is Power [Potentia]. (L 134–​135, 10.7; emphasis
added)57

First, the ‘what quality soever’ underscores the point that the content of the
reputation generating secondary power need not even be a reputation of su-
perior natural faculties. Second, the contrast between the ‘quality’ of the first
phrase and the ‘reputation of a quality’ in the second underscores the point
that reputation remains a power even when it is contrasted with fact.
These two dimensions of disconnection are reinforced in the discussion
of honour and honourability. Honour is still the dominant mechanism for
generating secondary power: secondary powers of friendship, obedience, al-
legiance, and assistance are all also analysed as forms of honour (L 136–​139,
10.17–​36). But first, a new definition of honour eliminates the priority for
natural faculties in generating secondary power. Honour is redefined as the
manifestation of the value that we set on one another’s power, where value is
‘not absolute; but a thing dependant on the need and judgment of another’
(L 134–​137, 10.16–​17). Indeed, the examples of honour all emphasize the
honouring individuals’ belief in the honoured individual’s capacity to help or
harm them, without reference to faculties (L 134–​137, 10.16, 19, 20, 21, 22,
24, 26). Second, Hobbes indicates that the honour can be merited even when

55 Similarly, in the Anti-​White Hobbes grants that honour can mismatch with faculty power, but

there is no hint that such misplaced honour itself could constitute power (AW 38.18).
56 This is also foreshadowed in De Cive’s theology (DC 15.13), although not in its discussion of

human power.
57 See also L 132–​135, 10.5–​6, 8, 10.
 Relational Power 45

there is no prior underlying capacity or property of any sort that that honour
recognizes, through a circle of compounding perceptions:

Honourable is whatsoever possession, action, or quality, is an argument

and signe of Power [Potentiae].
And therefore To be Honoured, loved, or feared of many, is Honourable;
as arguments of Power [Potentiae]. (L 140–​141, 10.37–​38)

Being honoured by many people is itself honourable, without regard to the

basis for that honour; and being honoured constitutes power.58
Hobbes thus removes the distinction between proper and degenerate
honour, and between proper and degenerate secondary power. Even if the
honourer values something other than faculties, and even if they are mis-
taken to think that the thing they value is truly present, their behaviour is still
honour and still constitutes power. Thus, on the late view, power arises from
a reverberation of appearances and reputations in a network of social rela-
tions: insofar as the power so generated has effects, it has full status as power.
In Chapters 4 and 5, I will delve into the implications of this analysis of power
for politics, but for now, a simplified model of the commonwealth provides an
image of the generation of power through a complex interplay of perceptions
without a grounding in natural faculties. As Hobbes remarks in Behemoth,
‘[T]‌he Power of the mighty has no foundation but in the opinion and beleefe
of the people’ (B 128). In what sense does a sovereign ruler installed by the
agreement of the people (a sovereign by institution) have the effective ability
or power (potentia) to enforce covenants (L 262–​263, 17.15)? The sovereign
by institution does not possess overwhelmingly superior force as a natural
person. However, when soldiers, guards, judges, executioners, and subjects
in general play their commanded roles in wielding the metaphorical sword
of justice and do not thwart its operation, anyone seeking to disobey will be
punished. But why do the soldiers, guards, judges, and executioners do their
part even though the sovereign does not personally have a sword sufficiently
mighty to compel them? They do so because each of them believes that every
other subject will uphold the command of the sovereign, including wielding

58 Strauss also recognizes that honour shifts from being independently grounded in The Elements

of Law to being subordinated to its power effects in Leviathan. But he interprets this as Hobbes’s
attempt to hide the humanistic moral basis of his thought. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of
Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, translated by Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1963), 115 n. 2, 169. On my reading, there is no such subterfuge, but rather a substantive change of
analysis.
46 Hobbes

its sword as commanded. This network of belief and compliance is a real

power for the sovereign, no less than the direct superior force of a conqueror
(L 260–​263, 17.13).59
In light of this analysis, I propose characterizing Hobbes’s later concep-
tion of power as relational. For power is conceived through its effects, and
the central generator of human effectiveness turns out to be secondary
powers, and in particular, formations of human deference, assistance,
obedience, and allegiance: or in other words, social relations with other
human beings. I now elaborate just how significant a change this is: on the
new conception, any attempt to talk of individual power non-​relationally,
apart from the concrete net of human relations, is an abstraction, often a
pernicious one.
Already The Elements of Law recognizes some kind of relationality of
power insofar as it stresses what I called the ‘positionality’ of power. In
that text, a person’s power itself is not relational because this power prop-
erly speaking is the person’s natural faculties. Nonetheless, there is a sense
of positionality involved in power analysis insofar as their causal effec-
tiveness lies in the superiority of their faculties in relation to others. Two
competitors race for an apple; if I am the slower runner, then I do not
get the apple (EL I.8.4, I.9.21). Power’s effectiveness is relational insofar
as it is generated by the differential objective quality of competitor’s facul-
ties. Is Leviathan’s power relational just insofar as it extends the analysis
of positionality, already used in the earlier text for faculties, to include
secondary powers? To the contrary, I argue that the inclusion of secondary
powers transforms the relationality at stake, as becomes clear in the dis-
cussion of eminence.
It is common to equate Leviathan’s concept of eminence to the early
‘positionality’ of power.60 After all, to say that natural faculties are power
only insofar as they are eminent (L 132–​133, 10.2) is to say that they are
superior in relation to others. But this misses a crucial change: eminence
pinpoints the relative superiority of one person’s power over that of others,
not (as with positionality) in terms of objective difference of faculties, but
in terms of its prominence or conspicuousness in the eyes of others. This

59 Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, 254–​264.

60 Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 35–​36; Spragens, The Politics of
Motion, 191, 200–​201; C. B. Macpherson, ‘Introduction’, in Leviathan, edited by C. B. Macpherson
(London: Penguin, 1985), 34–​35; Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 26; Lazzeri, Droit, pouvoir et liberté, 74 n. 1.
 Relational Power 47

eminence has two dimensions. First, the faculty needs to be perceived as

superior. For example, Hobbes considers science to be a small power, be-
cause even though taken by itself it enormously improves a person’s ca-
pacity to manipulate the world around her to her ends, it is not recognized
as a power: ‘The Sciences, are small Power [Potentia est; sed parva], be-
cause not eminent; and therefore, not acknowledged in any man’ (L 134–​
135, 10.14). It is little use to the scientist to have a capacity to manipulate
nature if the people among whom the scientist lives and works thwarts
their activities.61 Second, that superiority needs to be considered signif-
icant in the given situation. ‘A learned and uncorrupt Judge’, superior in
wisdom, is valuable in peace but not in war (L 134–​135, 10.16). Examples
could be multiplied: for instance, a slave may have recognized superi-
ority of bodily strength, but this particular superiority does not consti-
tute a power in stable slaveholding society because of the other aspects
of the social domain. If we return to my earlier example of a race through
the lens of Leviathan’s analysis, we see that the example has background
assumptions. Speed alone will be the criterion of success only when the
race is a well-​regulated competition in which the rules are respected.
Outside of this special case, my slowness may not prevent me from gaining
the apple, for perhaps I have a greater band of friends or supporters willing
to help me and obstruct my competitor; or perhaps I have sufficient riches
to buy the apple.
The requirement for eminence forces the analysis of power to be deeply and in-
extricably bound to the human social context in which the power occurs.62 In The
Elements of Law, natural faculties are powers intrinsically and non-​relationally,
regardless of how they may subsequently be put into relation. But in Leviathan,
these faculties or capacities become power only through the mediation of re-
lational secondary powers; and this mediation is non-​ trivial. Macpherson

61 Is this a pointed criticism of Bacon’s view of scientific knowledge as power? Knowledge may be

power, but it is insignificant in the context of human existence in society.

62 Hindess, attributing to Leviathan an analysis of power as a zero-​sum conflict between fixed

capacities (similar to the view I outlined in Sections 2.2 and 2.3 for The Elements of Law), complains
that such an analysis fails to take into account the role of context in determining outcomes, and the
corresponding indeterminacy of human conflict (Hindess, Discourses of Power, 26–​32). But on my
reading, Hobbes’s appreciation of context and indeterminacy is the signal contribution of Leviathan’s
discussion. Baumgold’s thesis, that Hobbes is not an abstract individualist but rather is concerned
with roles within a political structure, differs from my claim but does not conflict with it. For
Baumgold primarily offers a juridical consideration of roles (for instance, the right to refuse military
service). Deborah Baumgold, Hobbes’s Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 10–​15, 31–​35.
48 Hobbes

complains that Hobbes ‘neglects human power to transform nature.63 But this
is no accidental neglect: it is a challenging positive feature of Hobbes’s analysis
of power. Hobbes places front and centre the observation that exercising any ca-
pacity in a world populated by other people relies on their conduct, perhaps their
aid but at minimum their non-​interference. Relationality in Leviathan is a ques-
tion of human relations: how humans are disposed to one another and behave
towards one another, which frequently is unmoored from objective comparison
of the faculties of the parties to the relationship. The depth of the relationality of
power is also corroborated in Leviathan’s analysis of secondary powers. To re-
turn to Leviathan’s account of riches, riches do not count as powers simply be-
cause they can be exchanged for specific goods: for Hobbes states that riches are
only a power when combined with liberality (L 132–​133, 10.4). Liberality makes
no difference to the capacity to carry out direct exchanges, but it does make a
difference for allegiance. People desiring to advance or protect their own general
power will give the possessor of riches their allegiance insofar as they hope to re-
ceive whatever unspecified assistance they may require from those riches in the
future. Liberality gives rise to this hope; illiberality quashes it (L 132–​133, 10.4).
In result, the behaviour and causal efficacy to be explained have changed. It
is always possible to restrict one’s analysis to consider faculties, capacities, or
even secondary powers themselves in artificial isolation and to abstract away
from this looser social terrain that shapes their effects: one can always con-
sider the scientist apart from the mob, the race competitors apart from their
supporters, the money apart from the hopeful clients. This was the procedure
of The Elements of Law. In that text’s analysis of power, it was meaningful to
ask about human power with respect to specific narrow targets in abstraction
from a larger social context. But if the phenomenon to be explained under
the rubric of power is human effectiveness, and if, as Leviathan’s account
proposes, allegiance is the central determinant of this effectiveness, then
such abstraction vitiates the analysis of power. On this new account, power is
neither natural faculties nor any other attribute that could be neatly accom-
modated as a possession of the individual: human power lies fundamentally
in relations, and the focus of the analysis of power is generalized efficacy un-
derstood through an individual’s position in a complex social field. In con-
trast to The Elements of Law, Leviathan finds an individual’s human nature
and power to lie outside of her or him, both physically and conceptually, in
her or his potentially shifting and relational social context.

63 Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 37.

 Relational Power 49

2.5. Hobbes’s Departure from Scholasticism

I have argued that Hobbes changed his conceptualization of individual human

power potentia between his early and later political works. In this section I sit-
uate Hobbes’s later conception of individual human power within his broader
move away from scholastic science. Frost argues that Hobbes’s interrelational
and interdependent conception of human power is generated by his insistence
on treating humans as natural bodies, rather than as something possessing free
will and thereby liberated from nature.64 But this connection between a natural-
istic view of humans and a relational view of power does not necessarily hold: it
all depends on how the natural bodies are conceived. In Hobbes’s early view,
humans are very much natural bodies lacking free will, but their power is not
relational. The relational conception of power presupposes the evacuation of
the remnant scholastic metaphysics of innate powers. In order to understand
human power and its socially embedded character, the key contrast is not to
Cartesianism (as Frost would have it), but to scholasticism.
While the very early (and contested) Short Tract offers a metaphysics re-
taining certain scholastic elements, from the 1640s onwards, Hobbes’s nat-
ural science is systematically mechanized.65 During the years 1640–​1651,
Hobbes lived in France, and associated with the Mersenne circle. Descartes
and others in the circle aspired to a mechanical understanding of nature,
striving to reduce the study of nature to mechanical interactions and effi-
cient causes, without scholastic formal or final causes.66 Hobbes enthusias-
tically involved himself in this project,67 praising their efforts (DCo Ep)68
and expressing an increasingly polemical hostility towards scholasticism. He
describes ‘school divinity’ (scholastica, scholasticism) as having one healthy
foot (scripture) but the other foot rotten: the ‘many foolish and false [ideas]
out of the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle’ (DCo Ep).69

64 Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker, 1–​13.

65 My subsequent presentation focusses on the late De Corpore, but a very similar concep-
tual scheme for natural science is evident in the early Anti-​White, albeit with slight differences of
terminology.
66 Des Chene, Physiologia, 17, 53.
67 Brandt, Thomas Hobbes’s Mechanical Conception, 129–​166.
68 Thomas Hobbes, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, edited by William

Molesworth, Vol. 1 (London: John Bohn, 1839), ix. The Epistle to De Corpore is not subdivided into
sections, nor is it even paginated in the Latin.
69 Ibid., x. Hobbes closes the book with a polemical spray against scholastic philosophy: ‘For as

those that say anything may be moved or produced by itself, by species, by its own power [potentia],
by substantial forms, by incorporeal substances, by instinct, by anti-​peristasis, by antipathy, sympathy,
occult quality, and other empty words of schoolmen, their saying so is to no purpose’ (DCo 30.15).
50 Hobbes

Recent scholarship has established that Descartes’s and Hobbes’s revolu-

tionary self-​conception rests on a caricature of scholasticism: scholasticism
was an internally diverse tradition, and in particular, late scholastic thinkers
were already strengthening their conception of matter and reducing their re-
liance on form. The new philosophy and science can be understood as an
extension of existing trends rather than a new start ex nihilo.70 Nonetheless,
for the purposes of my argument, it is not important whether Hobbes was
truly revolutionary compared to his contemporaries or not. Rather, my focus
is, first, to establish the specific manner in which Hobbes’s mature natural
science repudiates the traditional scholastic conception of power, resulting
in a new notion of power as not inherent and internal but relational and con-
textual, and as lacking in any normative grain; and, second, to establish the
parallels between this anti-​hylomorphic natural science and Hobbes’s late
conceptualization of human power.
If this argument is persuasive, it raises the question of why the mature
mechanistic rethinking of the power of natural bodies—​already developed in
the early 1640s and therefore contemporaneous with Hobbes’s early political
writings, according to my periodization—​was not immediately also applied
to human power, but instead only with delay in the late political writings
(1650s onwards). I can only speculate that the profound traditional division
between the practical and speculative sciences constituted a barrier; despite
their radical innovations in natural science, other proponents of the new sci-
ence certainly were careful to maintain a sharp break between natural objects
and human beings.71 But Hobbes’s greater interest in politics may have forced
him to transgress this line. In Chapters 3 and 4, discussing human collective
formations, I will argue that Hobbes’s early neo-​scholastic account of human
power is poorly equipped to grasp certain social phenomena; surely it was
the turbulent political events of the 1640s that provided impetus to try out
new forms of thought.
Let me sketch the key antischolastic elements of Hobbes’s mature natural
science, focussing on the conceptions of form and power. While Hobbes
retains residually the concept of form, he radically changes its meaning. Far
from generating or explaining a body’s motion, form is now explained by
that motion, via new conceptions of body, accident, and name. He denies
that there is such thing as entirely undifferentiated matter. Rather, there are

70 Des Chene, Physiologia, 5, 81–​83; Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism, 1–​16, 139.
71 Most famously, Descartes: see discussion at Chapter 7, Section 7.2.
 Relational Power 51

bodies in motion (DCo 8.24). Each body has accidents, which are its motion
insofar as it works on our sense organs to generate our conception of it (DCo
8.2). We attribute names to bodies in accord with their effects on us, to mark
their similarities and to use for remembrance (DCo 2.4). The form or es-
sence is just those accidents for which we give a body its name (DCo 8.23).
So for instance, to say that human essence or form is rational is not to iden-
tify an inner rational principle that explains and generates human behaviour.
To the contrary, it is to say that humans strike us as similar insofar as they
are rational, and in light of this rationality we have classed them together
under the name ‘human’. This redefinition deflates the concept of form. The
form is no longer the cause of a thing, but a cause of our knowledge of the
thing: when I know a thing is rational, I know I am dealing with a human
(DCo 10.7).72 Form no longer explains phenomena, but rather it needs itself
to be explained—​what generates the rationality that these humans observ-
ably share?—​and a focus of Hobbes’s science is to understand the generation
of these forms (DCo 1.2).73
Turning now to power: again, the scholastic vocabulary is retained with
a radically new meaning.74 Far from identifying an internal property meta-
physically distinct from the motions that it produces, power becomes just a
set of motions in the agent. Hobbes lays out the new conception in parallel
with an account of causation. The ‘entire cause’ of an effect is the sum total
of accidents in the bodies of an agent (or agents) and a patient that bring
the effect about. The scholastic efficient cause is redefined to become the
accidents in the agent, and material cause becomes the accidents in the pa-
tient (DCo 9.3–​5). But all these accidents themselves are nothing but mo-
tion (DCo 8.2). Power is then just another name for this same thing, with
the only difference that we tend to use causation to refer to the past and
power to refer to the future. Entire cause corresponds to ‘plenary power’
(potentia integra vel plena); act corresponds to effect; the agent’s power cor-
responds to the efficient cause; and the patient’s power corresponds to the
material cause (DCo 10.1).
In the scholastic frame, motion is the result of power, or in other words, it
is an act; it is not itself power. Hobbes emphatically rejects this distinction.
Power and act are distinguished only by the frame of analysis.

72 See also AW 27.1–​2, 28.5.

73 Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism, 164.
74 Ibid., 203–​217; Spragens, The Politics of Motion, 53–​74. A parallel account is found at AW 27.3–​4.
52 Hobbes

[P]‌ower is not a certain accident, which differs from all acts, but is, indeed,
an act, namely, motion, which is therefore called power, because another
act shall be produced by it afterwards. For example, if of three bodies the
first put forward the second, and this the third, the motion of the second,
in respect of the first which produceth it, is the act of the second body; but
in respect of the third, it is the active power of the same second body. (DCo
10.6)75

Power is not separate from the act, but is just the prior temporal moment in a
necessary chain of events. Any power can itself be conceived as act in relation
to an earlier power. To conceive something as a power is simply to focus one’s
attention on its forward role in causation, rather than its status as the out-
come of previous causation. For instance, a white billiard ball has power with
respect to the act of hitting the red ball, even if that power itself is merely the
act with respect to the prior power of the cue stick.
What of the active power of an agent? Surely any conception of power
needs to identify a dispositional property of an agent, something (positively)
that can be said of it outside the moment of acting, and (negatively) which
distinguishes its proper actions from its motions merely driven by the power
of others?
On the positive point, Hobbes allows attributing power to an agent outside
the moment of acting, but with sharp caveats that prohibit giving an abstract,
decontextualized account of the power. Power is not properly predicated of
a body in isolation, but of the total combination of bodies whose accidents
combine to bring a particular act about: in other words, the plenary power.
Hobbes is quite explicit that strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an
agent’s power, except in the context of plenary power.

[P]‌ower, active and passive, are parts only of plenary and entire power; nor,
except they be joined, can any act proceed from them; and therefore these
powers . . . are but conditional, namely, the agent has power, if it be applied
to a patient; and the patient has power, if it be applied to an agent; otherwise
neither of them have power, nor can the accidents, which are in them sever-
ally be properly called powers. (DCo 10.3)76

75See also AW 34.3.

76See also AW 35.2–​5, 34.7. Correspondingly, Hobbes’s mature science centres not on bodies’
powers, but on the causes or generations of bodies (DCo 6.10, 6.13).
 Relational Power 53

When there is plenary power for an act, the agent clearly has active power.
Outside of the moment of an act, we can still attribute active power to the
agent if the act is possible (DCo 10.4). But Hobbes’s notion of possibility still
ties power closely to what actually occurs. Nothing is truly contingent: every-
thing is the result of necessary causes. Possibility does not mean contingency,
but, rather, it means that the act is not impossible: at some point of time there
will be plenary power to produce it (AW 37.5). In our ignorance of the future,
we loosely attribute active power to an agent for an act when there may (for
all we know) be plenary power for the act in the future; and this is harmless
enough (DCo 10.5; AW 35.6–​10). However, if plenary power is in doubt—​for
instance, if there is reason to think that the act would require coordination
with multiple other agents, and if there is reason to think that that coordina-
tion of multiple agents is unlikely itself to be produced—​then active power
cannot be attributed to the agent.77
But on the negative point, Hobbes is less compromising. Hobbes explic-
itly rejects the scholastic distinction between natural and violent motion: he
remarks sharply that philosophers tend to classify some motions as natural,
others as violent, simply in proportion to how clearly or unclearly they per-
ceive their causes. On Hobbes’s view, by contrast, every movement of a body
is natural to that body, and flows from its own power (AW 6.6).
This new conception of powers in natural science corresponds point by
point to the deeply relational reconceptualization of human power that I have
laboured to establish in Section 2.4.78 First, just as power in Hobbes’s natural
science is not metaphysically distinct from acts, so too in Leviathan there
is no fundamental distinction between human power and what it produces.
Honour is produced by power, but that honour sometimes itself serves as
a power. Second, just as the agent’s active power in natural science cannot
properly be abstracted from the plenary power to a specific act of which
it is a component, so too in Leviathan, to consider an individual’s power
apart from the social context is a misleading abstraction.79 In other words,

77 As he explains in the course of criticizing his opponent’s view: ‘We may say . . . that an axe can

cut because there is nothing in the axe that stops it from cutting. Yet there may well be, in the nature
of things, causes that make it impossible for the axe—​or anything else—​ever to be picked up, and as a
result the axe cannot cut’ (AW 37.11).
78 See also Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker, 135–​140, 143.
79 Other aspects of Hobbes’s science of man display similar conceptual shifts: for instance, moving

from understanding passions as drives to understanding them as contextually determined (Rudolph,

‘Conflict, Egoism and Power’, 34–​52); for instance, moving from taking reason to be an innate ca-
pacity clouded by sophistry to seeing reason as an achievement that counters naturally emergent
superstition (Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan, 106–​113).
54 Hobbes

an individual’s power is not purely an internal property of that individual.

Accounting for the plenary power necessary for the success of an individual’s
projects requires ensuring that people in a society cooperate with and do
not obstruct the individual’s efforts, and ensuring this cooperation is a non-​
trivial task. Third, any residual normativity is evacuated from the analysis of
power. Whenever effects are produced, there is power, with no distinction
between proper and degenerate cases. As will become clear in Chapters 3 and
4, on this late analysis (and contrary to his earlier analysis), power will di-
verge from natural law, even within a well-​constituted commonwealth.
Hindess complains that, when Leviathan characterizes power as deeply
heterogeneous in its causes and its effects, it precludes anything meaningful
being said about power in general. To the extent that Hobbes goes on to com-
bine and compare powers, Hindess argues that Hobbes must implicitly be
relying upon a prior notion of power unifying those heterogeneous causes, as
‘underlying capacity or essence of effectiveness’.80 But this is precisely the at-
titude that Hobbes’s later mechanistic philosophy seeks to displace. His new
account of power resolutely refuses inner causal principles: a particular thing
or person displays de facto regularities in causes and effects, and this is that
thing’s or that person’s power, without appeal to any underlying substrate.
On this new account, individual power is not essential, stable, and equal, but
rather is relational, shifting, and unequal; the change unsettles the juridical
simplicity of Hobbes’s early civil science, as I will now show.

80 Hindess, Discourses of Power, 25.

 3
Juridical Politics

3.1. Introduction

It is not for its own sake that I have focussed on the minutiae of the evolu-
tion of Hobbes’s treatment of human power/​potentia, but in service of the
book’s larger goal: namely, developing a coherent account of popular power.
In Chapter 2, I laid out Hobbes’s account of individual human power po-
tentia; now I turn to consider what power human collectivities might hold.
The most obvious answer lies in Hobbes’s account of the sovereign state (or,
in more Hobbesian language, of the commonwealth civitas), which possesses
power as authority potestas. The vexed and contentious question will be
whether popular power must be understood as state potestas: or to the con-
trary, is there such a thing as the people apart from the commonwealth, and if
so, how to characterize this collectivity, what might its properties and capaci-
ties be? If a political ontology is an account of the kinds of entities that exist in
the political domain, then this question boils down to a question of political
ontology. Together, Chapters 3 and 4 provide Hobbes’s answer, through an
investigation of collective potentia.
Many readers of Hobbes (whether his orthodox interpreters, or his
Spinozist critics) have claimed that Hobbes is unable to conceive collective
human power apart from its mediation by sovereignty.1 The political valence
attached to this observation about Hobbes’s political ontology is variable. On
the side of the American public law tradition, the valence is positive: because
the power of the people can be fully expressed by the decisions of a certain
authorized body, radical plebiscitary democracy is possible (where the body
holding authority is the citizenry taken as a whole, making decisions via

1 Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 93; Macpherson, ‘Introduction’,

55–​56; Michael Oakeshott, ‘Introduction to Leviathan’, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays
(Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991), 280–​283; Read, ‘Thomas Hobbes’, 514; Warren Montag, Bodies,
Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries (New York: Verso, 1999), 90–​103; Baumgold,
Hobbes’s Political Theory, 14, 36–​55; Annabel Brett, ‘ “The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-​
wealth”: Thomas Hobbes and Late Renaissance Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics’, Hobbes Studies
23 (2010): 99; Lee, Popular Sovereignty, 309–​319.

Potentia. Sandra Leonie Field, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197533864.001.0001
56 Hobbes

plebiscitary votes). This appealing possibility finds its canonical presentation

in the Hobbesian idea of a ‘sleeping sovereign’ as holder of ultimate authority
and power potestas. But on the side of the European post-​Marxist tradition,
the valence is negative: this very same absence of any conception of collective
power distinct from the sovereign state is taken to be a fundamental defi-
ciency of Hobbes’s view. Relying heavily on Macpherson’s interpretation of
Hobbes as an individualistic thinker, many Spinozists dismiss Hobbes’s phi-
losophy as fundamentally unable to understand emergent collective action
and, correspondingly, unable to provide insight into popular power.
It is certainly true that throughout his writings, Hobbes expresses a persis-
tent and polemical hostility towards the people separate from the common-
wealth, what he often calls the multitude (multitudo). Nonetheless, beneath
the superficial continuity of his polemic, this chapter and the next argue,
he presents two quite distinct political ontologies. Chapter 3 establishes
Hobbes’s early view, whereby (in line with the common interpretive view)
popular power must indeed be understood as juridically constituted potestas.
In particular, I show that the early texts have difficulty even conceiving
the possibility of collective power apart from the commonwealth. By con-
trast, in Chapter 4, I show that the later texts can conceive collective power
apart from the state, but they cast it in a deeply unflattering light. I do so
by establishing and developing a little-​noticed new element in Hobbes’s later
writings: his new theory of informal oligarchic power blocs. To sum up the
shift in Hobbes’s view, an ontology of fragmented equality is discarded in
favour of an ontology of spontaneously emerging oligarchic groups. Just as
in Chapter 2, I will insist that there is a perfectly sharp conceptual distinction
between the early and late views, even if the textual transition between the
two conceptual schemes is less clear. My analytical focus on potentia will re-
veal the limits to the exegesis of both democratic proponents and democratic
detractors of Hobbes. On the one hand, it reveals one fundamental reason
why, in Hobbes’s later texts, Tuck’s sleeping sovereign no longer features as
a possible mode of expression of popular power: such a sovereign simply is
not powerful in the relevant sense. But on the other hand, it poses a sharp
challenge to anti-​Hobbesian champions of the multitude. For in his later
texts, Hobbes proves to be perfectly capable of analysing non-​state collective
power, but he shows that such power hardly necessarily merits being called
popular.
In this chapter I lay out the structure of Hobbes’s early political ontology
in terms of a distinction between informal and formal human collectivities,
 Juridical Politics 57

or in other words, between associations and unions, the key example of the
latter being the commonwealth; and I connect this ontology to Hobbes’s
residual scholasticism. On the early political ontology, individual human
power potentia is conceived as an essential property, and more or less equal.
These human individuals may certainly combine into informal collectiv-
ities based on horizontal agreement to direct their individual powers to a
common end. But conceptually, informal political associations lack power of
any sort, having neither potentia nor potestas; and practically, they are fragile.
By contrast, if the human individuals combine instead into a formal union,
then conceptually they have power as both potentia and potestas, where po-
tentia becomes just another name for collective potestas; and practically, they
are robust.
In this chapter, I also lay out what I call the political problem: that the al-
legiance to which a state is entitled by right might not in practice be forth-
coming. The political problem might arise if insubordinate groups within
the commonwealth dilute or fragment the sovereign’s supreme command of
subjects’ allegiance. I argue that the problem is marginal in Hobbes’s early
texts and readily solved, due to Hobbes’s early confidence in the fragility of
associations. The result is a neat picture of juridical politics: so long as the
political order has the correct juridical structure of potestas, Hobbes’s early
science of politics envisions the possibility of a democratic sleeping sover-
eign retaining full power. Unfortunately, as I will argue in Chapters 4 and 5,
Hobbes’s revisions to his conception and analysis of collective power reveal
that a democratic sleeping sovereign is likely to be neither popular nor pow-
erful; but the emergent new conception of non-​state collective power hardly
offers a more appealing alternative.

3.2. Formal and Informal Political Collectivities

in Hobbes’s Early Writings

Hobbes’s political ontology, early and late, is framed by a distinction be-

tween two possible modes of combination of individual human powers,
a distinction between (what I will call) informal and formal collec-
tivities. In this section, I argue that informal associations are both
conceptually and practically marginal in Hobbes’s early politics; and cor-
respondingly, I characterize Hobbes’s early political ontology as an on-
tology of fragmented equality.
58 Hobbes

In Hobbes’s early political works, he characterizes the distinction between

informal and formal collectivities as follows. On the one hand, informal col-
lectivities: if a number of individuals, each retaining their own distinct will,
nonetheless coordinate to act toward a shared end, then this concourse of
their wills is called concord, consent, or consensio, forming an association,
or societas. Their wills are temporarily aligned but remain distinct (EL I.12.7,
I.19.4; DC 5.3–​5). On the other hand, formal collectivities: if a number of
individuals combine their separate wills to form a single collective will, then
this is called a union, unio (EL I.12.8, I.19.6; DC 5.6–​7).
Consider first associations, or informal collectivities. I will show that in
Hobbes’s early view, humans forming concrete relations and coordinating
behaviour together does not constitute collective power. For informal col-
lectivities are not true entities endowed with a proper power in their own
right—​in Latin, they have neither potestas nor potentia—​and consequently
they fall outside of the purview of scientifically studiable phenomena.
Hobbes uses the word multitude/​multitudo (crowd) to refer to a number of
people, lacking (or considered without regard to) the structure of a formal
union; a ‘heap’ of people (EL II.2.11; DC 6.1). Sometimes a multitude forms
an association, when it is coordinated towards a single end. But Hobbes is
quite explicit that there is a problem with conceiving such an informal collec-
tivity as a proper entity: for such a collectivity is a mere aggregation, and not
really a single thing at all. A multitude can only be said to perform a single act
under very specific conditions:

[N]‌or can any action done in a multitude of people met together, be attrib-
uted to the multitude, or truly called the action of the multitude, unless
every man's hand, and every man's will . . . have concurred thereto. (EL
II.1.2)

And even in the moment of performing an act, the multitude still has no
single will (EL I.12.7). In De Cive, Hobbes is even more ontologically un-
compromising: even when all persons in the multitude concur in action,
‘one must not attribute to it [the multitude] a single action of any kind’, but
rather, so many actions as there are separate wills (DC 6.1). Human beings
cannot have group agency insofar as their collectivities remain informal, and
it is never appropriate to attribute power (whether potentia or potestas) to
an association as such. A fortiori, unified agency certainly cannot be attrib-
uted to a multitude when there are divergent wills within it. Nothing licences
 Juridical Politics 59

attributing the view of a majority of members of the multitude to the entire

group: the view can only be attributed to the persons who actually hold it
(EL II.1.2; DC 6.1). If the members of the multitude do agree to be bound by
the majority decision, then they cease to be an association and they consti-
tute themselves as a formal union. If they do not so agree, then each member
retains their own individual right; they remain in a condition of war against
all the others, regardless of ad hoc cooperation (DC 7.4).
The conceptual difficulty concerning informal groups is matched by a de-
nial of their practical political significance: any informal collectivity is tran-
sient and unstable. To be sure, associations play an important theoretical role
in the genesis of the commonwealth. Although the state of nature is at first
characterized as a domain of isolated individuals, very quickly Hobbes ima-
gines the formation of protective associations, as indeed is recommended by
reason (EL I.14.14, I.19.3–​4; DC 1.13, 1.15, 5.1–​4). But these protective asso-
ciations are important only to be superseded: informal human associations
are not sufficiently durable and robust to break the isolated equality of the
state of nature. Animal multitudes endure and flourish because animals’ fac-
ulties are different from those of humans. It is ‘the work of God by the way of
nature’ that animals find themselves in concord, with cooperative rather than
dissociative passions (EL I.19.5; DC 5.5). By contrast, for humans, endowed
with reason, speech, conceptions of right and wrong, and the corresponding
capacity to be inflamed by comparisons and contentious words, their associ-
ations tend to dissolve after brief periods of cooperation. Although an asso-
ciation may be prompted by ‘the fear of a present invader, or by the hope of
a present conquest, or booty’, Hobbes claims that it only ‘endureth as long as
that action endureth’ (EL I.19.4; see also DC 5.4). Human associations organ-
ized around shared ends are destabilized by the other ends of their particular
individual members: by passions of resentment and envy, by competition for
scarce goods. Even focussing on ends that are shared, individuals disagree on
the most prudent way to proceed (EL I.19.4–​5; DC 5.4–​5). Correspondingly,
despite protective associations, I characterize Hobbes’s early political on-
tology as an ontology of fragmented equality: associations are profoundly
fragile, and when associations fall apart, individuals are returned to isolated
equality and general diffidence of one another (EL I.14.3).
In Hobbes’s early writings, a picture of associations as horizontal, delib-
erate coordination on shared ends is regularly and prominently reiterated.
Individuals come together for mutual aid with respect to a shared purpose
(EL I.14.14, I.19.3; DC 1.13–​14, 2.2, 5.3–​4). Hobbes’s account of the extreme
60 Hobbes

fragility of associations rests on this picture. But one might wonder, surely
there are other durable forms of association, notably hierarchical forms.
Hobbes himself recognizes that the picture of equality in the state of nature is
hopelessly stylized, posing the idea of humans popping up ‘like mushrooms’
(DC 8.1). In reality, there are always human groupings: it is more realistic
to imagine a state of nature inhabited by families with children and masters
with slaves (EL II.3–​4; DC 8–​9). But on Hobbes’s analysis, in all these cases,
there is sufficient inequality that they no longer count as mere associations,
but dominions, which are a species of juridical union. By natural law, when
greatly unequal powers face one another, the weaker power can be taken to
have submitted its will to the stronger: in the biblical phrasing, do not kick
against the pricks (DC 15.7). The overwhelming superiority of force of the
parent over the child in a family grouping generates an implicit covenant
of submission from the child. A person becomes a slave because they find
themselves threatened with death by an assailant, and they choose submis-
sion to avoid death (EL I.14.13, II.3.2, II.4.3, II.4.10; DC 1.14, 9.3–​4). If the
domestic unit of father (or mother) with children and slaves grows larger,
then it becomes indistinguishable in its power from a monarchical polity, de-
spite its different historical origin (EL II.4.10; DC 9.9–​10).2 In the absence of
formal union, we are left with a binary choice between two possible modes of
interaction between individual wills: either horizontal concurrence on a spe-
cific shared goal; or conflict (EL I.12.7).3

2 Christov provides an extended discussion of both vertical dominions and horizontal associations

within Hobbes’s state of nature. Theodore Christov, Before Anarchy: Hobbes and His Critics in Modern
International Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 36–​102.
3 Could there be anything else? There is a curious suggestion at the opening of De Cive: individ-

uals may seek out the company and patronage of prestigious figures (DC 1.2). Surely the collectivity
consisting of a prominent individual with allies constitutes a different non-​horizontal form of com-
bination of wills: clients cooperate not because of sharing a goal with their patron, but in deference
to the patron’s goal, for hope of advancing their own particular purposes. But the suggestion is not
developed. Perhaps this is because, on Hobbes’s early analysis, such an association will not be any
more robust than horizontal association, and may well be less. The example is an instance of the
secondary power of allegiance. As discussed in Chapter 2, Section 2.2, secondary powers flow from
core faculties, and Hobbes is at pains to insist that there are not significant differences between indi-
viduals’ faculties: ‘[C]‌onsider how little odds there is of strength or knowledge between men of ma-
ture age’ (EL I.14.1; see also DC 1.3). Correspondingly, no one person merits more allegiance than
another, so there is no natural division of society into allegiance groups. And any other division into
allegiance groups would rely on the secondary power accruing degenerately, out of proportion to
the underlying faculty. This is expected to be unstable: receiving adulation and trust of others out of
proportion to what is merited by one’s underlying faculties generates ‘false glory’ (a false feeling of
power), and trying to act on the basis of such allegiance ‘procureth ill-​success’ (EL I.9.1). Thus, the
overwhelmingly dominant modelling of informal collectivities remains horizontal association on ex-
plicit shared ends.
 Juridical Politics 61

Now I turn to consider formal collectivities, or unions, of which the ex-

emplary case is the body politic or civitas (commonwealth). I will show
that in Hobbes’s early work, formal political collectivities (unions) do have
their own proper power, the sovereign’s power potestas, constituted through
transfer of the potentiae of subjects. Furthermore, I argue that the transfer
is understood juridically (in a sense that I will make precise subsequently).
A union’s potentia is simply defined as the juridically constructed potestas;
the distinction between potestas and potentia makes no difference, because
they are equivalent by construction. At a practical level, Hobbes anticipates
unions will be robust.
Unlike associations, unions can be studied scientifically, because they
are genuinely unified entities and not aggregates. A union is a single entity
because by definition it has a single will. But what does it mean for a col-
lectivity to have a single will, given that its human constituents remain physi-
cally distinct, with separate operation of their natural wills? The single will is
founded on agreement. In the case of domestic dominion, the slave or child
agrees to submit (or is taken to agree to submit) to the master or parent. This
can equally occur on a political scale. In a commonwealth by conquest, or
by what Hobbes calls natural power, an already mighty individual demands
that a multitude submit. But Hobbes’s own more canonical political case is a
commonwealth by design or institution, where there is a lateral agreement
among individuals of a multitude to establish a sovereign over them and
submit to it4 Either way, in a commonwealth subjects submit their multiple
wills to the will of a single entity designated as sovereign, who may be an in-
dividual human or a council. In The Elements of Law, submitting one’s will to
another is directly glossed as a promise to obey; in De Cive, it is a promise not
to resist, which indirectly generates an obligation to obey (EL I.19.6–​8; DC
5.6–​12, 6.13). Hobbes’s account of formal union has the counterintuitive cor-
ollary that all regimes are always already popular:

In every commonwealth the People [Populus] Reigns; for even in Monarchies

the People exercises power [imperat]; for the people wills through the will of
one man. But the citizens, i.e. the subjects, are a crowd [multitudo]. (DC
12.8; see also EL II.2.11, II.8.9; DC 6.1)

4 In both cases, agreement is motivated by individuals’ desire for enduring security, and their

fear of its disruption, and in both cases it generates the same obligation to submit; but in the former
they fear a conqueror’s sword, whereas in the latter, they feel threatened by each other (EL I.19.11;
DC 5.12).
62 Hobbes

For the will of each citizen is ‘comprehended in’ the will of the sovereign, and
the will of the sovereign is ‘taken for’ the will of the whole commonwealth
(DC 6.1, 6.14). A single will for a union is only constituted at all through cov-
enantal obligation: insofar as the word ‘people’/​populus refers to a coherent
entity with a single will, it must refer to the sovereign.5
The body politic or commonwealth possesses unity via the single will
of the sovereign; it can be characterized in terms of its own proper power,
which is the power of the sovereign. A number of equivalent terms are used
to refer to this power:

SOVEREIGN AUTHORITY (SUMMAM POTESTATEM) or

SOVEREIGN POWER (SUMMUM IMPERIUM) or
DOMINION (DOMINIUM). (DC 5.1)

I will primarily focus on potestas, which Hobbes himself renders not as ‘au-
thority’, but as ‘power’ (EL I.19.10).6 The sovereign’s power is nothing other
than the power/​potentia of its subjects: ‘[I]‌t consisteth in the power and the
strength that every of the members have transferred to him from themselves’
(EL I.19.10).7 There is an ambiguity in this formulation. Is its power consti-
tuted from its entitlement to the powers of its subjects (in which case, call it
a juridical power); or is it constituted from the powers of its subjects, which
it in fact succeeds in harnessing to its purposes (in which case, call it a con-
crete power)? To put it another way, does obedience constitute the sovereign’s
power (making the sovereign’s power concrete); or is obedience owed to the
sovereign in virtue of that power (making the sovereign’s power juridical)?
I argue that potestas is juridical and not concrete: sovereign potestas is the

5 Tuck has argued that in De Cive, the first formation of the people is always democratic, in which

the will is defined as the will of the popular majority; only after this can sovereignty be transferred
to a monarch (Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, 97–​99; see also Lee, Popular Sovereignty, 309–​319). But
Tuck’s conclusion is immediately called into question by the equivalence between unions by insti-
tution and unions by acquisition or natural dominion: for there is no necessary democratic step in
setting up dominion. Furthermore, even considering institution, there are textual suggestions that
direct appointment of a monarchical sovereign would be possible (DC 6.1).
6 For corroboration, see also L 262–​263, 17.4. Some terminological connections and distinctions

are obscured in the Cambridge translation of De Cive: first, translating potestas as authority rather
than power; second, translating imperium inconsistently, sometimes as power, sometimes as govern-
ment (Tuck, ‘Introduction’, xlii). Tuck himself comes to acknowledge the inadequacy of the edition’s
rendering of imperium (Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, 92 n. 26). However, given Hobbes’s equivalence
between imperium and potestas, instances of imperium in the text are also relevant to understanding
power/​potestas.
7 It ‘consists in the fact that each of the citizens has transferred all of his own force [vim] and power

[potentiam] to that man or Assembly’ (DC 5.11).

 Juridical Politics 63

power that a sovereign is entitled to from subjects, regardless whether it is

actually able to harness it or not. Returning to the crucial passages explaining
the generation of the commonwealth, the covenantal ground of potestas is
constantly reinforced. From the subjects’ side, potestas is constituted by the
transfer or laying down of subjects’ rights and the corresponding genera-
tion of obligations, and not by the fulfilment of those obligations; from the
sovereign’s side, potestas is a right of giving commands, and not the successful
implementation of commands (EL II.1.7; DC 5.8, 5.11, 6.13). Extending the
quotation provided in truncated form previously, sovereign power

consisteth in the power and the strength that every of the members have
transferred to him from themselves, by covenant. And because it is impos-
sible for any man really to transfer his own strength to another, or for that
other to receive it; it is to be understood: that to transfer a man's power and
strength, is no more but to lay by or relinquish his own right of resisting him
to whom he so transferreth it. (EL I.19.10; emphasis added)

If subjects fail to obey, they violate their obligations and do a wrong; if the
sovereign is ineffective, that is regrettable. But the subjects’ wrong does not in
any way invalidate the obligation; and the sovereign’s ineffectiveness does not
change the nature or extent of its power.8
Even though power itself is juridically defined, Hobbes expects that in a
well-​constituted commonwealth, juridical power leads subjects to actual
compliance.9 His own explanation is rather telegraphic:

[H]‌e that is to command may by use of all their means and strength, be able
by terror thereof, to frame the will of them all to unity and concord amongst
themselves. (EL I.19.7; emphasis added)10

But it is possible to expand the explanation to make it clearer. If at any point

(most of) a population complies with the sovereign’s command, they comply

8 Indeed, De Cive is even more strongly juridical than The Elements of Law. The Elements of Law

analyses the nature of the body politic, which so happens to be constituted by right and obligation
(EL II.1.1); by contrast De Cive takes the rights of the commonwealth and the duties of citizens as the
direct primary focus of analysis (DC Pref.9).
9 A well-​constituted, or ‘complete’, commonwealth is one that does properly asserts its rights (such

as the rights of making law, supreme judicature, nominating ministers), rather than mistakenly di-
viding up and handing over some of these rights. EL II.1.13; DC 6.12.
10 See also EL II.1.6; DC 5.8, 6.4.
64 Hobbes

with any commands of the sovereign to serve as police, guards, executioners,

and thereby they give force to the sovereign’s punitive capacity. This momen-
tary compliance becomes self-​sustaining: the punitive threat brings about the
submission of wills of would-​be resisters to the sovereign, and it strengthens
the submission of those already compliant. Moving forwards, the sovereign
stably receives obedience in proportion to entitlement. Some foolhardy souls
will still disobey even in the face of overwhelming punitive disincentive, and
need to be punished (EL II.1.10; DC 6.7). Nonetheless, for the most part ac-
tual disobedience is presumed not to be too disruptive; it will be a marginal
occurrence, not threatening the civil order.11
In The Elements of Law, the power of the sovereign is always juridical; and
in De Cive, the juridical character of potestas/​imperium is indisputable. But it
might be objected, surely in De Cive the Latin term potentia must be reserved for
the sovereign’s concrete power? Indeed, Silverthorne considers the potentia of
the sovereign in these texts as its actual effectiveness towards its ends, in contrast
to juridical potestas.12 Suppose that this is correct. Then we should expect the
sovereign’s potentia to be variable: for as established, subjects’ actual obedience
is imperfect. When a subject disobeys the sovereign, this should correspond-
ingly diminish the sovereign’s power. But in the text, following on from a discus-
sion of the possible shortcomings of subjects’ compliance, Hobbes insists that
the sovereign’s power is nonetheless constant.13

[G]‌overnment [imperium] is a capacity [potentia], administration of gov-

ernment [administratio gubernandi] is an act [actus]. Power [potentia] is
equal in every kind of commonwealth; what differs are the acts, i.e. the
motions and actions of the commonwealth. (DC 10.16)

Sovereign potentia is constant, and, moreover, it is directly identified with

sovereign power imperium (which already by definition is equal to potestas)
(DC 10.16).14

11 This reconstruction relies on a large number of persons forming a union. Despite the same jurid-

ical structure, smaller unions are likely to be less robust. For instance, a master may gain right over a
single slave through skilful manoeuvres in battle; but outside of the particular circumstances of that
battle, even if the slave by right should submit, there is little to compel the slave to do so (DC 8.3).
12 Michael Silverthorne, ‘Political Terms in the Latin of Thomas Hobbes’, International Journal of

the Classical Tradition 2, no. 4 (1996): 506–​507.

13 Except in extremis, when disobedience becomes so prevalent as to jeopardize the basic provi-

sion of security and thereby dissolve sovereignty (i.e., civil war) (EL II.8.1; DC 12.1).
14 There are further textual corroborations. First, potentia is linked to the juridical question of

right: ‘To rule men as they are, there must be power [Potentia] (which comprises both right [ius] and
 Juridical Politics 65

In sum, Hobbes’s early science of politics remains thoroughly juridical,

in the sense that it analyses sovereign power (potentia or potestas, without
distinction) as an entitlement to certain capacities. It does not have any ex-
plicit rubric under which to perform a separate analysis of actual effective
capacity: not for the commonwealth, and certainly not for any informal col-
lectivity. It lacks the tools or motivation to analyse informal collectivities
as such.

3.3. The Scholastic Context of Hobbes’s Early Science

of Politics

The persistent focus of Hobbes’s early writings on juridical power might

be puzzling to some contemporary eyes. For first, supposing that (against
Hobbes’s own expectation) an association should prove to be durable,
wouldn’t it be useful to characterize its de facto power? Second, surely the
non-​juridical concrete power of the sovereign (the actual variable harnessing
of subjects’ power) should be of at least equal concern to any analyst of pol-
itics as the juridical power, if for no other reason than to ensure the corre-
spondence between the two? I make Hobbes’s approach comprehensible by
contextualizing his methodology in relation to his scholastic intellectual
background, building on the analysis of Chapter 2, Section 2.3.15 Even if
Hobbes’s natural science already was taking its mature mechanistic form in
this period, I claim his science of politics remains heavily under the shadow
of a scholastic inheritance. Certainly, Hobbes does not endorse the scholastic
moralized natural teleology according to which humans are by nature po-
litical animals. But I will argue that Hobbes’s conception of human power
maintains a modified natural teleology centred on self-​preservation in the
case of individuals, and centred on juridical structure and obligations of obe-
dience in the case of collectivities. In this light, it becomes clear how, despite
its juridical focus, Hobbes’s science of politics is understood to provide a
guide to actual political functioning. Just like scholastic natural science, on
the one hand Hobbes’s science of politics is normative, establishing proper

strength [vires]) to compel’ (DC 16.15). Second, the sovereign’s summum imperium (sovereign au-
thority) is equivalent to its potentia absoluta (absolute power, DC 6.17).

15 A complementary explanation is Hobbes’s engagement with the Roman private law, as explored

at length in Lee, Popular Sovereignty.

66 Hobbes

inner powers for humans and polities; but on the other hand, it simultane-
ously ensures that the normative standard is for the most part met.
First, I argue that Hobbes’s focus on juridical power corresponds to the
scholastic preoccupation with identifying the proper powers of entities. As
sketched in Chapter 2, scholastic philosophers conceive the world in terms
of natural order. Science discerns the natural potentiae by which each thing
is inclined towards its own proper end; there is no science of the causes of
degeneracy as such. Even entities that are not natural bodies like a rock or an
animal, but which are composed or constructed, have an analogous struc-
ture. For instance, houses are not natural objects but constructed by humans.
Nonetheless, a house is properly understood in relation to its ‘universal
formal principles’.16 For another instance, while a political society does not
have its own potentia, its potestas will play an analogous explanatory role as
the proper end for politics.
The structure of potestas is specified in the course of Aquinas’s discussion
of natural laws. God ordains order for the world through his natural laws.17
The natural law for humans prescribes virtue in relation to their ends as enti-
ties (self-​preservation); as animals (reproduction); and most importantly as
rational beings (virtue properly speaking: knowledge of God and living in
society).18 Both the animal and rational ends of humans require society: for
satisfying animal needs for food and shelter requires common industry, and
learning the habits of virtue requires training from others who are already
virtuous. If it were not for human depravity, perhaps these desiderata could
be achieved through spontaneous association; but given human depravity,
there must be political society, in which laws are coercively enforced:

But since some are found to be depraved, and prone to vice, and not easily
amenable to words, it was necessary for such to be restrained from evil by
force and fear, in order that, at least, they might desist from evil-​doing, and
leave others in peace, and that they themselves, by being habituated in this
way, might be brought to do willingly what hitherto they did from fear, and
thus become virtuous.19

16 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-​I Q14A16.

17 Ibid., I-​II Q94-​Q95.
18 Ibid., I-​II Q94A2-​A3.
19 Ibid., I-​II Q95A1.
 Juridical Politics 67

Coercive law is enacted and enforced by the power potestas of the prince.
But the potestas of the prince is not an indiscriminate power for the prince to
rule however he pleases. Rather, it is tightly bound to the natural law, which
orders humans towards virtue in society with others.20 A prince must frame
his laws towards the common good, not private benefit; and the laws must
provide the outer form of virtue within which subjects’ inner disposition
towards virtue can grow.21 Law is only truly law insofar as it takes this form,
and the prince’s potestas only extends as far as true law. Pseudo-​laws that de-
viate from this moral standard ‘are acts of violence rather than laws’: tyranny
cannot be understood in terms of its own positive causes, but in terms of its
corruption from genuine potestas. Nor does the corrupted potestas need to
be obeyed: its corruption vitiates its function.22 Thus just as potentia in the
science of natural bodies prescribes a norm of naturalness against which de-
generacy can be measured, the power potestas of the prince is a power in a
normatively laden sense.
As I established in Chapter 2, the method of Hobbes’s early analysis of in-
dividual human action is to identify characteristic inherent powers, distinct
from and prior to the acts that they generate: to that extent, it echoes the
scholastic focus on potentiae. Understanding Hobbes’s early science as com-
mitted to identifying proper internal characteristics of a thing also makes
sense of the strongly juridical focus of his analysis of human collectivities.
First, there can be no science of mere ad hoc aggregates, to which there is no
inherent principle; there can only be a science of proper things, either nat-
ural things or constructed things. This requirement excludes associations but
includes unions, because they are unified by the principle of their construc-
tion. Furthermore, having identified the object of study, inquiry focusses on
the entity’s inner causal principle and order of its operation, and not on its
accidental divergences from this order. Thus, when it comes to attributing
potestas or potentia to a political union, Hobbes characterizes it according
to the principle of its construction: according to its entitlement to subjects’
obedience. For to characterize it instead in terms of its mere de facto capacity
to garner obedience would be to fail to grasp the inner principle of union
as such.

20 Ibid., I-​II Q95A2.

21 Ibid., I-​II Q96A1, Q96A3.
22 Ibid., I-​II Q95A4, Q96A4.
68 Hobbes

The preoccupation with, first, identifying proper entities for science and,
second, identifying their proper characteristics is reflected in Hobbes’s
sketch of the domain of his science of politics. Hobbes constantly analogizes
between the natural human individual and the state. The Elements of Law is
divided into two parts: the study of persons natural; and the study of persons
civil, or in other words of bodies politic (EL II.1.1; DC 5.9). Commentators
have puzzled over the relation between the two parts of Hobbes’s science: how
can a descriptive science ground an account of rights and duties?23 But there
is an easy answer when we restrict the question to Hobbes’s early writings: for
in fact, both parts of the science display the mingling of descriptive and nor-
mative concerns that is characteristic of a science of proper powers of bodies.
Just as a natural person (a human individual) has proper powers conceived as
faculties, Hobbes attributes faculties to the sovereign. These faculties are the
faculties of the sovereign conceived in its fictional unity: ‘For the body pol-
itic, as it is a fictitious body, so are the faculties and will thereof fictitious also’
(EL II.2.4). This fictional unity in turn is constituted by a covenant obliging
subjects to fully transfer their powers (their faculties), whether they in fact
deliver on their obligation or not.24
Thus, Hobbes’s early methodology and conceptual frame militates strongly
in favour of his political philosophy focussing on formally constituted enti-
ties, and on studying their juridical entitled power. But there is a difference
between Hobbes and the scholastics in how they conceive this proper power
of the commonwealth: Hobbes is confident that (in a well-​constituted com-
monwealth) the juridical account of politics corresponds to what in fact
occurs for the most part, without appeal to free moral choice. I argue that
Hobbes’s confidence regarding sovereign potestas is analogous to scholastic
natural philosophy’s confidence that (for entities lacking free will) the proper
power of an entity should generate behaviour for the most part.
Recall from Chapter 2, Aquinas draws a significant distinction between
humans and all other natural elemental bodies, due to human free will.

23 John W. N. Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance of

Philosophical Theories (London: Hutchinson, 1965); M. M. Goldsmith, Hobbes’s Science of Politics

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 228–​242; Tom Sorell, Hobbes (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1986), 7–​21; Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes’s Science of Politics and His Theory of Science’, in
Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 146–​155.
24 Sorell argues that in De Cive, the science of the commonwealth is a science of duties (Hobbes,

7–​31, especially 19); but Malcolm shows that equally often it is characterized as a science of the com-
monwealth as a body (Malcolm, ‘Hobbes’s Science of Politics’, 149). The scholastic frame shows how
these can be conceived as equivalent. See Brett for the scholastic genealogy of this feature of Hobbes’s
politics (Brett, ‘Matter, Forme, and Power’, 72–​102.)
 Juridical Politics 69

Humans’ degeneracy with respect to their proper end is both more preva-
lent and differently explained than is the degeneracy of natural bodies. First,
natural bodies are infrequently degenerate. The correctly identified potentia
of a natural body must illuminate and explain its conduct for the most part,
setting aside some marginal cases such as disease or other disruption. By
contrast, human nature constitutes a moral standard that humans frequently
violate, through their voluntary turning away from goodness. Second, the
degeneracy of the malformed plant or diseased animal arises innocently
from the intervention of a violent external cause. But failings in human con-
duct cannot be blamed on external causes: they are morally culpable failings
through the misuse of free will.
This moralized view of human order and degeneracy is reflected in
Aquinas’s politics. Politics is a human activity, for which natural laws set a
moral standard, as outlined earlier. But there is no claim that this standard
is generally met; and imperfections against this standard are understood
not as sicknesses of the political body inflicted by an external cause, but
as human vice, both of rulers and ruled. ‘[T]‌he good of the state cannot
flourish, unless the citizens be virtuous, at least those whose business it is to
govern’.25 In particular, the prince’s potestas may degenerate to illegitimate
pseudo-​potestas if he is not virtuous. One might object that it is untenable
to explain political malfunctions entirely in terms of freely chosen indi-
vidual vice, without any role for structural factors. Indeed, when Aquinas
considers the extreme case of a vicious tyrant who directly privileges him-
self over the community, he proposes some institutional measures to lessen
the impact of a tyrant’s vice on the population: he endorses a mixed form of
government, in which potestas is not solely held by the king but shared with
an aristocratic tier of judges and governors and tempered by some element
of popular input.26 Nonetheless, to the extent a political society falls short
of realizing the proper moral end of politics, the failure is not explained by
insufficient institutional creativity. Regardless of the institutional media-
tion, failings ultimately boil down to vice: the goodness even of the mixed
polity relies on virtue from each tier of its structure, which itself relies on
free moral choice.27 There is no particular remedy to political degeneracy
except to recommend more virtue.

25 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-​II Q92A1.

26 Ibid., I-​II Q105A1.
27 Ibid.
70 Hobbes

In sum, for Aquinas, reason and moral law inscribe lofty standards within
the potestas of the prince and the potentia of subjects, standards that could be
met if they would all spontaneously deploy their free will to choose virtue,
but which in practice are often not met. I argued in Chapter 2 that in his
early texts, Hobbes understands humans as natural bodies lacking free will,
offering a reductive model of human nature and power as faculties guided by
self-​preservation. Within this model, natural law, as reason’s dictates for how
to pursue self-​preservation, in principle ranges widely from the tendencies
of human behaviour because of imperfections of human reason. But such
variance is quickly eliminated by qualifying and modifying natural law’s ap-
plicability. Hobbes consistently seeks to show that in fact human behaviour
conforms for the most part to its proper normative standard. It is possible
to violate this normative standard, but such violation should be a marginal
occurrence.28 Now let me extend Chapter 2’s analysis to human behaviour
within the commonwealth. I claim that for Hobbes’s early texts, the analysis
of power, whether potentia or potestas, provides a simultaneously normative
and descriptive account of human behaviour, at least in a well-​constituted
commonwealth.
In Chapter 2, I showed that in the state of nature, the divergence of the acts
of human potentia from the demands of natural law is nullified because of the
reduced applicability of the laws of nature. In the absence of personal secu-
rity and of an agreed authority, the law of nature only prohibits marginal and
obviously pointless behaviour such as drunkenness and cruelty.
In the commonwealth, there is security, so in principle all the specific and
demanding laws of nature should apply. Nonetheless, if the commonwealth
is well constituted, divergence between these laws and actual behaviour is
again mostly eliminated. Consider first subjects within the commonwealth.
Hobbes argues that once in the commonwealth, each person tends to follow
the civil laws because of the sovereign’s punitive incentive: the ‘terror’ of the
sovereign will ‘frame the will of them all’ to submit to the sovereign’s will
(EL I.19.7; DC 5.8).29 This amounts to following natural law, because natural
law supports displacing its own more specific dictates by the civil law.30 The

28 This claim only concerns external conduct; I grant that natural law also prescribes internal

attitudes (EL I.17.10; DC 3.17). There remains a possibility of wide divergence from the natural law in
foro interno.
29 In The Elements of Law, Hobbes presumes that humans fear violent death more than punish-

ment in the afterlife; the possibility of motivation by otherworldly fear starts to emerge in De Cive.
Compare EL II.8.5 with DC 12.2.
30 See detailed discussion in Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, His Theory of

Obligation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 146–​176.

 Juridical Politics 71

first law of nature is to seek peace (EL I.15.1; DC 2.2), and only by defer-
ring to an authorized interpreter of the natural law (the sovereign) can peace
be achieved (EL II.1.10, II.7.11; DC 6.8–​9, 6.16). Furthermore, a valid con-
tract establishes sovereign power, and ‘natural law commands that all civil
laws be observed in virtue of the natural law which forbids the violation of
agreements’ (DC 14.10). Despite imperfections of individual rationality, the
threat of punishment brings rationally recommended behaviour and likely
behaviour into alignment, both with respect to the natural law to defer to the
sovereign, and also with respect to other more specific natural laws, when-
ever the sovereign has enacted them into civil legislation.
In principle there can be conduct that is regulated only by natural law, and
not by civil law, for instance, giving alms (EL II.10.5). But Hobbes’s general
strategy is to minimize the scope of natural laws outside of civil authority.
Because of humans’ self-​serving inability to reason fairly about blameworthi-
ness and desert, Hobbes endorses the civil laws encoding and thereby super-
seding the natural law in matters of external conduct, and he does not display
any concern about sovereign overreach (EL II.10.8; DC 14.17). Even when
civil law commands an action prima facie against natural law (for instance,
civil laws stipulating that pilfering does not count as theft under certain
circumstances), Hobbes argues that natural law upholds civil law’s ruling
(DC 16.10). Only inner conscience remains entirely beyond civil regulation
(DC 14.17).
Finally, Hobbes grants that for certain kinds of commands, there cannot
be any punitive incentive sufficient to enforce them. People are unlikely to
comply with commands that offend against profound values, for instance, a
command to kill their own parents. But in dealing with these cases, Hobbes
again seeks to minimize the extent to which natural law and the actually ex-
pected behaviour of subjects diverge: he argues that natural law simultane-
ously supports the sovereign’s right to command and the subject’s refusal to
comply (DC 6.13).31
Consider now the sovereign itself: the person (or assembly) holding sov-
ereignty in a commonwealth. Aquinas’s prince’s potestas was tightly tied to
virtuous rule for the common good; to the extent the prince governed des-
potically for their own self-​interest, they lacked potestas. By contrast, for
Hobbes potestas is fully held for the most part, so long as the commonwealth

31 See extended discussion in Susanne Sreedhar, Hobbes on Self-​Defence: Defying the Leviathan

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

72 Hobbes

is properly constituted. In a properly constituted commonwealth, the sover-

eign holds various essential rights, including rights of punishment, and the
right of defining laws (EL II.1, DC 6). I already established that subjects obey
the sovereign for the most part due to the sovereign’s punitive threat. In re-
sult, the sovereign’s potestas has full efficacy. It also has full status as potestas;
for Hobbes eliminates the category of despotic rule, by refusing the distinc-
tion between the common good and the ruler’s interest (EL II.5.1–​2; DC 7.2).
Rulers for their part seek to preserve and enrich themselves, and the best way
to do this is by tending to the safety of the people (EL II.5.1, II.9.1; DC 13.2,
13.4). Furthermore, Hobbes argues that the duty placed by natural law on the
sovereign is nothing other than ruling for the safety of the people (EL II.9.1;
DC 13.2).
Without any distinction between virtuous and despotic rule on the basis
of which to deny potestas, Hobbes insists that the sovereign holds full potestas
regardless of the way it rules, so long as it is not conquered or usurped (EL
II.2.15; DC 7.3). But one might worry, even if the sovereign’s duty is in line
with its self-​interest, this still does not show that the dutiful behaviour occurs
for the most part. Hobbes gives detailed policy prescriptions for ruling for
the safety of the people (EL II.9.3–​9; DC 6.6–​17), which are hardly likely to
be met by most sovereigns. For a sovereign (who has no greater likelihood
of perfect long-​term rationality than subjects) faces no immediate external
constraint (punitive or otherwise) shaping its will. Nonetheless, Hobbes
also suggests a weaker standard of conduct for a sovereign: basic rule for the
people’s security, which may neglect to fully implement best rational prac-
tice, but which is not wicked (DC 6.13). He is at pains to insist that achieving
this weaker standard will occur for the most part. Regarding the possibility
of wicked rule that preys directly on the people rather than protecting them,
Hobbes asserts that ‘there is no reason why [the sovereign] would want to
spoil his citizens, since that is not to his advantage’ (DC 6.13). That is, di-
rect wickedness is so contrary even to immediate self-​interest that it will be a
marginal occurrence.
In sum, Hobbes’s focus on juridically constituted unions, and on their
juridically entitled powers, can be understood as a natural consequence of
his methodological approach, whereby he seeks to identify proper (defini-
tional and normative) powers that are nonetheless efficacious. Specifically,
even though the power/​potestas of the body politic identifies a juridical en-
titlement to subjects’ obedience that could in principle fail to be fulfilled,
fulfilment should be successful for the most part, without requiring moral
 Juridical Politics 73

effort of subjects. And for the most part, the sovereign performs its role ade-
quately. Although the conceptual frame of Hobbes’s early science of politics
is juridical, it is intended simultaneously to supply a model of actual political
functioning.

3.4. Sovereign Robustness in Hobbes’s Early Writings

The sovereign possesses the authority to speak the people’s will, and no one
else does. Hobbes’s insistence on the priority of formal collectivities allows
him to deny any popular political agency apart from the agency mediated
and expressed by the sovereign; a fortiori, he is able to deny the legitimacy of
any popular critique or censure of sovereign power.

[T]‌hey say the people rebelleth, or the people demandeth, when it is no

more than a dissolved multitude, of which though any one man may be
said to demand or have right to something, yet the heap, or multitude,
cannot be said to demand or have right to any thing. (EL II.2.11; see also
DC 6.1)

When a multitude speaks, it lacks the juridical structure to even possess a

single will: it is just an aggregate of many people with separate wills.
This sketch of Hobbes’s view of popular agency remains juridical. But it is
unsatisfying. For one might wonder, under some conditions couldn’t there
be a de facto voice of the people? If there were a robust collectivity of subjects
distinct from the formal union headed by the sovereign, couldn’t it mean-
ingfully be understood to speak the people’s will? Nor is this question ille-
gitimate, notwithstanding Hobbes’s uncompromising rhetoric. Hobbes relies
on the juridical potestas of the sovereign having real consequences, most
pointedly, a capacity to deliver peace and security, through its effective mas-
tery of its subjects, as established in Section 3.3. And these real consequences
rely on there being no robust insubordinate collectivities below the sover-
eign: for a de facto mass popular political subject, emboldened to insubordi-
nation by its collective strength, can threaten the neat convergence between
the sovereign’s potestas and the actual obedience that it is able to garner. Call
the gap between the sovereign’s entitled obedience and actual obedience ‘the
political problem’: if there is such a thing as usurpatory popular agency, then
this problem is pressing.
74 Hobbes

In this section, I reconstruct the early Hobbesian response, showing

that there is no such de facto mass popular political subject in a well-​
constituted commonwealth. The corollary of Hobbes’s early social ontology
of fragmented equality is the robustness of sovereign power.
As argued in the previous sections, the well-​constituted sovereign’s power
is generally robust, due to its punitive incentive effectively conforming the
wills of subjects. Nonetheless, sometimes it degenerates. Degeneracy is not
understood through failure of the sovereign’s or subjects’ virtue, but rather
through the political analogue of ill health. The body politic is naturally
healthy, but it can face demise either through violent death (foreign invasion)
or ‘sickness and distemper’ (sedition) (EL II.8.1). The critical factor in an out-
break of the disease of sedition is insubordinate groups. Hobbes assesses se-
ditious disruption as a marginal possibility rather than a dominant reality for
a properly constituted commonwealth, and I will show that this assessment
rests on his ontology of fragmented equality.
There are three things required to dispose subjects to sedition: discontent,
pretence of right, and hope of success. If any one of these three is lacking, re-
bellion will not occur (EL II.8.1; DC 12.1).32 I will focus on the third, which
De Cive foregrounds as the Achilles heel of rebellion:

For men can be as steeped as may be in opinions inimical to peace and civil
government; they can be hurt and exasperated by injuries and insults from
those in authority; but if they have little or no hope of winning, no sedition
will follow; individuals will hide their feelings and put up with a bad situa-
tion rather than risk a worse. (DC 12.11)

Hobbes clearly identifies collective strength as the fundamental ground of

hope of success: for an individual taken alone could never hope to prevail
against the sovereign. Within the body politic, there are four possible kinds
of collectivities that might provide that strength: subordinate groups (associ-
ations or unions); and insubordinate groups (associations or illicit unions).
Neither kind of subordinate group is any use, because by definition they re-
spect the authority of the sovereign and are tolerated by it (EL I.19.9; DC
5.10). Sedition requires insubordinate groups: whether informal associations
or illicit unions. Let me consider these in turn.

32 Elsewhere, Hobbes asserts that bad doctrine or discontent at oppressive rule causes sedition (EL

II.8.4–​10, II.9.5–​8, II.12.1, II.13.9–​10; DC Pref.5–​8). However, these must be read as contributing
rather than sufficient causes.
 Juridical Politics 75

First, informal association. Hobbes relies on his fragmented political on-

tology to rule out the relevance of informal association. A discontented mul-
titude can have seditious discontent and a pretence of right

when the commands seem hurtful to the people; and they think, every one
of them, that the opinion and the sense of the people is the same with the
opinion of himself, and those that consent with him; calling by the name of
the people, any multitude of his own faction. (EL II.8.4)

But for Hobbes, it lacks hope of success. As I argued earlier, association is

conceived as a deliberate, horizontal form of cooperation for shared ends.
But Hobbes shows that in the state of nature, the diversity of individual
human ends, combined with various antisocial passions, means such asso-
ciations are prone to uncoordination, infighting, and dissolution. There is
nothing to protect insubordinate associations within a commonwealth from
these same sources of ineffectiveness and fragility.
Hope of success requires an illicit union:33 rebels need to unify in order to
be directed to a single action. Furthermore, Hobbes asserts that any union
would need to be established deliberately by a seditious multitude mutually
agreeing upon a leader to submit to and unify under (EL II.8.12; DC 12.11).
In principle, unions could form either by lateral consent or by natural in-
equality, but within civil society no unions are naturally generated by in-
equality: for adult men are all more or less equal (EL I.14.2; DC 1.3). Nor
is consent easy to achieve. In the state of nature, one of the main pressures
to form a union by lateral consent is fear of one another: but in the com-
monwealth this fear is already under control. Hobbes suggests that seditious
unions arise only under the spell of the extraordinary oratory of ambitious
men. He emphasizes the specific premeditated directed effort that such men
would have to make in order to carry off their plans.

But those who want to turn that [seditious] disposition into action devote
the whole thrust of their effort first to uniting the disaffected as a faction
and a conspiracy; and then to getting the leading role in the faction them-
selves. (DC 13.13)

33 Illicit unions merit being called unions insofar as they are collectivities in which members

submit to a single will. But they differ from licit unions insofar as there is no genuine obligation with
this submission (DC 13.13); genuine obligation is lacking because they are inconsistent with subjects’
prior obligation to submit to the sovereign (DC 2.17, 6.20, 12.11).
76 Hobbes

This makes seditious unions easy for the sovereign to contain. To prevent se-
dition it is sufficient simply to undercut the formation of unions by targeting
their would-​be leaders: without them, the unions cannot form and the ac-
tion cannot proceed. Hobbes belittles these leaders’ claim to good judg-
ment, points out their low odds of success (EL II.8.12–​15; DC 12.10–​13), and
recommends to the sovereign that it should deploy harsh punitive measures
specifically for the ambitious (EL II.9.7; DC 13.12).
The polemical force of this analysis is clear. I mentioned at this section’s
outset that the multitude is not a single thing, not a person, and can exer-
cise no legitimate constraint on the sovereign: speaking in the name of ‘the
people’ to criticize the sovereign is always an illicit rhetorical claim. But more
importantly, Hobbes’s analysis shows that there is also no practical constraint
because associations are inherently weak. They can only become powerful if
they cease being a multitude and structure themselves as a union, consciously
deciding to join together and act by a single will under a leader (EL II.8.1,
II.8.11; DC 12.11, 13.13). The multitude is only politically salient insofar as it
ceases to be a multitude; and because such a transformation requires brazen
deliberation and coordination, it can readily be prevented.
Sedition and rebellion are primarily analysed as strategic behaviours
undertaken with the ultimate purpose of prevailing over the opposing party,
causing war and conflict along the way. But Hobbes does consider a different,
less strategic, source of war: doctrinal disagreement (on religion, science, or
policy). In De Cive, Hobbes portrays prickly human beings who fight to de-
fend their pride, without specific reference to hope of success (DC 1.5, 6.11).
Nonetheless, Hobbes views this source of war as also readily containable.

One cannot prevent such disagreements from occurring. However, by the

use of sovereign power they can be kept from interfering with the public
peace. (DC 6.11)

In a well-​ordered commonwealth, the sovereign retains the right to deter-

mine doctrine. Most quarrelling can be tolerated, so long as the sovereign
prohibits doctrine with seditious content.
One might wonder, is this resolution satisfactory? Or does the case of doc-
trinal quarrelling point to a larger problem for Hobbes’s analysis: the possi-
bility that subordinate unions might become insubordinate? An entity such
as a church is structured as a subordinate union. As such, it does not face the
organizational hurdle normally facing seditious union. It is ready to spring
 Juridical Politics 77

into action: all that is required is that its previously submissive leadership
be inspired with seditious passions. And such inspiration may arise in re-
sponse to the sovereign prohibiting its earnestly believed doctrine. Hobbes’s
lengthy theological discussions can be understood as an effort to head off this
kind of problem with churches (EL I.18, II.6–​7; DC Chs 4, 11, 15–​18). But
beyond religion, Hobbes’s early works display a general optimism that the
proper juridical specification of sovereignty concretely guarantees peace. In
later work, as we will see, the robustness of the sovereign’s peace is threatened
not only by insubordinate churches, but also, more pervasively, by the emer-
gent power dynamics of the multitude itself.
 4
The Political Problem

4.1. Introduction

What is the power of the people for Hobbes? In Chapter 3, I sketched his
view in the early texts. I argued that Hobbes offers a political ontology of
fragmented equality. There is no such thing as human collective power out-
side of formal juridical union; and in particular, there is no power of the
people apart from the commonwealth. Popular power is conceived as an au-
thority potestas, and is exclusively expressed by the sovereign state. Outside
the state, there are only the powers of individuals. This broadly accords with
the standard interpretation of Hobbes.1 However, this is far from the most in-
teresting contribution that Hobbes offers to the conceptualization of popular
power. Now in the present chapter, I argue that Hobbes’s later writings de-
velop a new account of non-​juridical collective power as potentia. The emer-
gence of a theory non-​juridical collective power grounds a new approach to
the question of popular power; in particular, it raises the troubling possibility
that the phenomena commonly taken to be manifestations of popular power
may in fact be neither deeply powerful nor meaningfully popular.
It is certainly true that throughout his writings, Hobbes expresses a persis-
tent and polemical hostility towards the people separate from the common-
wealth, what he often calls the multitude (multitudo). Nonetheless, I argue
that the grounds of this hostility differs between his early and late works. In
Chapter 3, I established that the early texts have difficulty even conceiving
the possibility of collective power apart from the commonwealth, due to
their political ontology of fragmented equality; and they have no framework
to analyse any divergence of the efficacy of a commonwealth from its jurid-
ical entitlement. By contrast, now I show that the later texts can conceive col-
lective power apart from the state, through a natural extension of the new
relational conception of individual human potentia established in Chapter 2.
To characterize the shift between the early and late texts, an ontology of

1 See Chapter 3, footnote 1.

Potentia. Sandra Leonie Field, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197533864.001.0001
 The Political Problem 79

fragmented equality is discarded in favour of an ontology of spontaneously

emerging oligarchic groups. In result, Hobbes’s later texts can conceive a di-
vergence between the commonwealth’s juridical authority and its concrete
efficacy; the theory reveals Tuck’s ‘sleeping sovereign’ to be strikingly lacking
in power in the politically relevant sense, thereby explaining why it no longer
features as a possible mode of expression of popular power in the later texts.
The later political ontology builds on the relational conception of power
laid out in Chapter 2. If individual human power potentia is always already
relational and unequal, then practically, there is a possibility of more robust
informal collectivities, because groups need not be founded on explicit hor-
izontal agreement on shared ends, but may be hierarchical entities emergent
from the interaction of individual purposes that are diverse and cross-​
cutting, as I will show. Conceptually, the de-​essentialized conception of indi-
vidual power opens the possibility to attribute potentia to any group, whether
formal union or informal association; and the potentia of a collectivity is no
longer equivalent to its potestas. I connect this change of political ontology
to Hobbes’s gradual shift away from scholasticism, building on the analysis
from Chapter 2.
Hobbes hopes his juridical civil science might reliably generate actual po-
litical outcomes. But recall the political problem: that the allegiance to which
a state is entitled by right might not in practice be forthcoming. The political
problem might arise if insubordinate groups within the commonwealth di-
lute or fragment the sovereign’s supreme command of subjects’ allegiance.
In Chapter 3, I argued that the problem is marginal in Hobbes’s early texts
and readily solved, due to Hobbes’s early confidence in the fragility of asso-
ciations. However, because of the changed political ontology, the political
problem becomes significant in the later texts. On the later political ontology,
associations within the commonwealth beneath the sovereign may have their
own power potentia, and may de facto express the agency of some part of the
population, generating a gap between the concrete power potentia and the
juridical entitlement potestas of the sovereign. Indeed, such associations con-
stantly tend to arise: as a result, sovereign security faces a persistent insurgent
threat. But lest present-​day readers celebrate the emergence of an autono-
mous popular political agent capable of exerting a normatively reassuring re-
straint on absolute state power, Hobbes’s analysis casts suspicion on any idea
of prepolitical human equality. Non-​state collective power comes without
any guarantee of an egalitarian internal structure, and it may well be un-
appealingly oligarchic. In result, Hobbes faces a pressing political problem,
80 Hobbes

which non-​state mass political agency inflames rather than resolves. In

Chapter 5, I will lay out Hobbes’s response to the problem.

4.2. Formal and Informal Political Collectivities

in Hobbes’s Later Writings

In this section I consider Hobbes’s later texts, and I argue that there is a
striking change in his political ontology, compared to his earlier political
writings. The distinction between association and union (in my terms, in-
formal and formal collectivities) as two possible modes of combination of
human powers persists (L 132–​133, 10.3). But now informal collectivities
have a significant practical presence. I claim that Leviathan lays out a new
model of association that lies between a momentary association motivated
by specific goals and a formal union for the sake of permanent security. These
associations are oriented toward mid-​range goals and they come about in a
new and less intentional fashion, which correspondingly endows them with
the possibility of durability and political salience, even if not the supreme
security of a permanent union.2 In result, the fragmented human equality
of the early texts’ analysis is displaced by a new ontology of spontaneously
emerging oligarchic groups. Furthermore, these informal collectivities can
be attributed a power potentia of their own. I argue that their potentia is
understood non-​juridically, and that the possibility of a non-​juridical con-
ception of collective power corresponds to the late texts’ de-​essentialized,
relational grasp of individual human power, established in Chapter 2. The
new conception of potentia also has implications for unions. Unions are still
conceived first of all in terms of juridically constructed potestas, but it is si-
multaneously possible to attribute to them a non-​juridical potentia that may
or may not correspond to their entitled potestas.3
To understand the formation of associations, it is first necessary to under-
stand the motivations driving human action. In Hobbes’s early view, individ-
uals have no desire for power potentia as such. The lack of desire for power

2 Similar themes are pursued in Charles D. Tarlton, ‘The Creation and Maintenance of

Government: A Neglected Dimension of Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Political Studies 26, no. 3 (1978): 307–​
327; Carmichael, ‘C. B. Macpherson’s “Hobbes” ’, 359–​379; Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker,
131–​172. Tarlton and Frost draw only on Leviathan, whereas Carmichael also shows these themes to
be new in Leviathan compared to earlier texts.
3 In this light, Silverthorne errs in using De Cive to understand Leviathan’s Latin. Silverthorne,

‘Political Terms’, 499–​509.

 The Political Problem 81

can be understood in light of the conception of individual human power as

faculties, established in Chapter 2, Section 2.2. Each person’s own faculties are
more or less fixed, beyond a limited possibility of self-​cultivation. In the early
texts, humans are instead driven by desire for glory4 (mental pleasure: the
feeling of power, primarily from receiving honour) or advantages (sensual
pleasure: including satisfying bodily needs) (EL I.7.9; DC 1.2).5 At the outset
of De Cive, Hobbes charts four ways in which these motivations can gen-
erate collectivities, finding three paths unstable or fruitless, before leading
into an argument in favour of the fourth, the juridical formation of the com-
monwealth (DC 1.2). First is the pursuit of glory. Glory is an antisocial pas-
sion and offers only an unstable basis for association, because ‘glorying, like
honour, is nothing if everybody has it’ (DC 1.2; see also EL I.14.3–​4, 1.4).
One way to achieve the feeling of glory is to receive the honour and deference
of others; but this feeling of glory is rightful only if one’s underlying power
potentia is exceptional compared to everyone else. For most people, glory
is actually vainglory or false glory, and associations built around a leader
lacking genuinely exceptional faculties are anticipated to be degenerate and
unstable (EL I.9.1). Second is the pursuit of advantages by means of domi-
nation.6 Dominating others for the sake of advantages is effective in theory
but is fruitless in practice. Given the approximate equality of power potentia,
the pursuit of domination leads back into war amongst humans who will not
defer to one another (DC 1.2).7 Third is the pursuit of advantages by forming
a cooperative association. As argued in Chapter 3, the model case of an asso-
ciation in the early texts is an aggregation of individual humans, who com-
bine together in an accord (consensio) with specific shared ends in mind, for
however long those ends continue to motivate each member. Such an ag-
gregation is horizontal in the sense that all members’ wills are on an equal
plane: all have the same goal, in virtue of which they come together, and none

4 Indeed, Hobbes’s discussion of power is explicitly in service of explaining glory (EL I.8.3, I.9.1).
5 The desire for a secondary power such as riches straddles this divide: for riches provide both
mental pleasure (glory) and sensual pleasure (direct means to acquire advantages). In passing,
Hobbes does acknowledge the desire for riches (EL I.7.7). But he does not see it offering any basis
for association, perhaps because (as argued in Chapter 2) secondary powers out of proportion to fac-
ulty powers are regarded as degenerate and unstable; and in any case, the desire for riches does not
effectively secure advantages, because riches vanish if the other causes of conflict are not addressed
(EL I.14.12). The distinctive new move in Leviathan will be to give central place to the desire for sec-
ondary powers such as riches, as I will show.
6 Dominium is a form of imperium, which is in turn equivalent to potestas (DC 5.11, 9.1–​2). I em-

phasize that desire for dominion or domination is not a desire for power potentia: achieving do-
minion makes no difference for a person’s potentia, which is an inner capacity.
7 The same problem applies to domination motivated by desire of glory (EL I.14.3).
82 Hobbes

defers to any other (EL I.12.7, I.19.4; DC 1.14, 5.4). Individual wills exist in
fragmentary independence of one another, and this independence is wholly
undiminished by association. Whether because the shared ends that ground
the association are superseded or because of other differences or passions,
associations are fragile and tend to collapse.
In the face of the failures of the other three strategies, in his early texts
Hobbes concludes that the pursuit of pleasures, whether glory or advantage,
does not spontaneously produce durable human collectivities. Thus, the
fourth and final strategy: individuals seeking advantage limit the spontaneity
of their wills, submitting to the domination of a sovereign to form a union. In
the commonwealth, the relation between wills is vertical: all particular wills
are fully subordinated to the will of the sovereign, not for the sake of any spe-
cific short-​term end, but for the permanent end of security. Unions are antic-
ipated to be robust, because the juridical union of wills is made effective by
the sovereign’s punitive incentive (EL I.19.6–​7; DC 5.6–​8).
In Leviathan, by contrast, Hobbes directly asserts what has no parallel in
the earlier texts: a desire for power potentia itself.

[I]‌n the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a
perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power [Potentiam unam post
aliam], that ceaseth onely in Death. (L 150–​151, 11.2)8

This desire to increase power itself is possible because, as established in

Chapter 2, Section 2.4, power potentia in Leviathan is not limited to facul-
ties, but is relational: it is pre-​eminently constituted from social allegiance
and support, which (in sharp contrast to faculties) can certainly be increased.
Furthermore, this desire is dominant. To be sure, specific pleasures and
goods are also desired, but Hobbes is very clear that these specific desires will
generally be submerged by the more general and abstract desire for power
itself. Each individual has a restless desire of power after power because ‘he
cannot assure the power [Potentia] and means to live well, which he hath
present, without the acquisition of more’ (L 150–​151, 11.2). As a corollary,
the model of human motivation focuses on the desire for power and not for
specific advantages.
I now show how for Hobbes, the individual pursuit of relational power
generates associations of a different structure and greater durability than

8 The discussion of power is no longer instrumental to the analysis of glory; contrast footnote 4.
 The Political Problem 83

in the early texts’ associations for specific advantages; I show how this later
analysis generates a new social ontology with a prominent place for non-​
juridical collective formations. In establishing the existence of a new associa-
tional social ontology in Hobbes’s later writings, I push against the opposing
view, that Hobbes envisages a fragmented social ontology in Leviathan just
as in the earlier texts, a view that is directly expressed in the secondary lit-
erature and apparently supported by key textual passages. In the history
of Hobbes scholarship, Macpherson famously characterizes Hobbes as a
possessive individualist; he accuses Hobbes of holding an untenably frag-
mentary vision of society, and of focussing on centrifugal forces at the ex-
pense of centripetal ones.9 For Macpherson, this vision is generated by the
very same features that I claim lead to associational forms: the modelling of
individuals as power seekers pursuing relational power. And indeed, textu-
ally, Leviathan’s direct characterization of the state of nature in Chapter 13
maintains the earlier texts’ picture of fragmentation. There are equal indi-
viduals, forming only momentary and fragile associations in relation to spe-
cific and transitory shared goals; often they attempt (futilely) to dominate
one another, resulting in a fragmenting diffidence between them (L 190–​191,
13.3–​4). This leads to Hobbes’s infamous claim that life in the state of nature
lacks society (societas)10 and is ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’ (L
192–​193, 13.9; emphasis added).
However, I will argue that attention to Leviathan’s Chapter 10 reveals a
different social ontology, in light of which the image of the state of nature
appears in Leviathan as a vestigial remnant from an earlier theoretical
frame.11 It is critical to see that the relationality involved in Leviathan’s power
9 Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 93; Macpherson, ‘Introduction’, 55–​56.

It is commonplace to attribute to Hobbes a fragmented social ontology: see references at Chapter 3,

footnote 1.
10 In both early and late texts, Hobbes rhetorically denies the existence of any associations at all in

the state of nature; yet then in his discussion of the emergence of the commonwealth out of the state
of nature, there is an important role for cooperative associations for defence (EL I.19.3–​4; DC 5.4; L
256–​257, 17.3–​4). A more precise claim would be that the state of nature features no lasting or du-
rable association.
11 Whereas other commentators may come to a misunderstanding of Leviathan’s new social on-

tology by their excessive focus on the description of the state of nature and insufficient attention to
Chapter 10, Macpherson pays great attention to this chapter. In Macpherson’s case, the error arises
from modelling power relations as purely vertical, all on the model of domination: when each indi-
vidual is seeking power, that just means that they are seeking full control over others. If this were the
case, certainly, the result would be individualizing conflict and fragmentation. But as I now seek to
show, the lesson of Chapter 10 is that power relations are not (in general) total vertical relations of
domination. Christov attempts a criticism of Macpherson’s view of fragmentation by drawing atten-
tion to the sheer proliferation of human groupings in the Hobbesian state of nature, and he insists
on the persistent threat of degeneration of the commonwealth into war because of these groups. In
general terms, this is congruent to my analysis. But Christov’s account focusses almost exclusively on
84 Hobbes

is not (contra Macpherson) the essentially conflictual relationality of the

early texts’ zero-​sum analysis, but rather the emergent relationality of layered
dependencies generated by many individuals’ simultaneous efforts to nego-
tiate a complex social web of assistance and hindrance.
To see how the new conception of power potentia and, correspond-
ingly, the desire for power potentia itself as a new fundamental motivation
of human action generate a different social ontology, recall what it means
to pursue this new power. As outlined in Chapter 2, Section 2.4, to say that
each individual human seeks power amounts to saying that each seeks to
placate and propitiate those whom they speculate could harm or assist their
own ends. Individuals seek to ally themselves in such a way as to advance
and protect their ability to live securely and pursue their more specific ends.
Their own power is constituted in part by their success in this endeavour, but
also in part by other actors in turn seeking to placate and propitiate them.
However, this behaviour has an effect that is not directly intended either by
those honouring or those honoured: it constitutes patronage networks, se-
curity blocs, gangs of followers, and allegiance groups. In other words, the
desire for power leads to the spontaneous formation of associations, super-
seding the rough equality of individuals with the inequality of more or less
mighty groupings (L 132–​141, 10.5–​9, 10.20, 10.38, 10.45). For instance,
recall that riches are a power insofar as they garner allegiance (L 132–​133,
10.4). When multiple individuals offer their allegiance to the possessor of
riches, an association is constituted. These associations are emergent social
formations that are unintentional and spontaneous in the sense that they
are the result of individuals each pursuing their own status and relationship
within a social domain; they are not the result of a shared equal intention to
combine forces to secure a particular advantage collectively, nor do they rely
on a mutual agreement or shared goal of the members. The rich person may
garner clients whether or not they cultivate them; the poor person may be-
come a client without sharing substantive goals with the patron.
As I argued in Chapter 2, Sections 2.4 and 2.5, Hobbes’s later conception
of power refuses abstraction from social context. To say that an individual
has power to do something is to say they will be able to achieve the desired

covenantal groups (as is to be expected, given his primary focus on De Cive): either vertical relations
of domination between unequals (parents over children, victors over the vanquished) or horizontal
voluntary associations (Christov, Before Anarchy, 15–​16, 35, 58–​63, 71–​102). I argued in Chapter 3
that such groups are not sufficient to threaten the sovereign’s power; the real threat arises with the
new form of association introduced in Leviathan, which is spontaneous rather than covenantal, and
neither perfectly horizontal nor perfectly vertical, as I will now show.
 The Political Problem 85

outcome given the actual social context in which they find themselves. In re-
sult, the desire for power binds individuals to particular social contexts, and
is potentially capable of motivating a commitment to maintaining an associ-
ation over an extended period of time. Consider the factors that destabilize
association that is founded on explicit agreement on specific goals: notably
envy and disagreement. These do not arise so acutely in spontaneous associ-
ations of allegiance and patronage. If I envy my partner in a cooperative en-
terprise and covet their goods, it may be impossible to continue cooperating;
by contrast if I envy the wealth and covet the goods of my patron, I am likely
nonetheless to continue to be their client in hope of receiving some benefit (L
136–​137, 10.19, 10.23). If I disagree with my patron’s decisions but still hope
to be favoured by my patron, then I have a strong reason to put my disagree-
ment aside (L 136–​139, 10.28, 10.30).
Beyond merely being stable, the spontaneously compounding of powers
in associations builds upon itself.

For the nature of Power [Potentiae], is in this point, like to Fame, increasing
as it proceeds; or like the motion of heavy bodies, which the further they go,
make still the more hast. (L 132–​133, 10.2)

As discussed in Chapter 2, Section 2.4, power compounds itself through

honour. Allegiance is not only a power in itself, but is also a sign of power. As
a sign of power, it attracts honour, very likely in the form of more allegiance.
X has a lot of friends, so I want to be her friend; Y has henchmen, so I do not
want to annoy her; I heard that people plan to back Z, so I back Z too: in all
cases the reputation of holding many people’s allegiance leads to ever more
people placating and propitiating, or, in other words, to a bigger and more
solid social grouping (L 140–​141, 10.38).
The resultant relation between wills in these associations is neither per-
fectly horizontal nor perfectly vertical, instead displaying multiple layered
dependencies of will that fall short of total submission.12 It is not hori-
zontal: each individual displays variable degrees of de facto deference to
various others. Associations are often stabilized by oligarchic relations of de-
pendence: the result is a deeply uneven texture of social life.13 At the same
12 Insofar as this associational power is the exemplary form of human power, it undermines the

commonly made distinction between power-​to and power-​over.

13 May has attempted a Hobbesian analysis of emergent collectivities. However, taking his

starting point in the juridical theory of authorization, he models a horizontal association of

equals with a small number of leaders; he does not recognize the asymmetrical and hierarchical
86 Hobbes

time, it is not strict vertical subordination. For the wills remain formally
independent, and whatever de facto submission is in play may well be par-
tial and context-​sensitive. Thus even in clearly hierarchical relationships,
the stronger party is still dependent on subordinates. For instance, a patron
needs to take care not to be too miserly to retain the loyalty of clients against
competing patrons (L 132–​137, 10.4, 10.21).
In sum, Hobbes envisages an active social domain from which groupings
constantly emerge and persist apart from any process of covenant, and in
which inequalities are constantly generated. The earlier political ontology of
fragmented equality is replaced with a new political ontology of emergent
power blocs. This is reflected in a critical revision that Leviathan makes to the
argument of the earlier texts.14 Right at the start of the discussion of power
in The Elements of Law, Hobbes stresses the tendency of humans to isola-
tion and fragmentation. What I called the positionality claim pits individual
against individual, and the only salient possibility of human coalition is a
formal union via covenant, a topic deferred to later in the book (EL I.8.4). In
the corresponding point in the sequence of Leviathan’s argument,15 Hobbes
wholly excises the discussion of fragmentation and replaces it with a discus-
sion of aggregation that is without parallel in the earlier text. He asserts that
the greatest human power is ‘strengths united’, and makes explicit that this is
achieved not only by a formal union bound by a permanent covenant into a
single will, but also by compounds of powers ‘depending on the will of each
particular’: in other words, associations (L 132–​133, 10.3).16

texture of these collectivities. Larry May, Limiting Leviathan: Hobbes on Law and International Affairs
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 167–​173.

14 Indeed, even though I have generally characterized the state-​of-​nature discussion in Leviathan

as a vestige of the earlier theory of power, there is an interesting change in the detail, reflecting the
shift from a social ontology of fragmented equality to a social ontology of inequality. In The Elements
of Law and De Cive, humans are equal because their faculties are more or less equal and therefore
any can be killed by another, even the weakest. In Leviathan, humans are equal because any can be
killed, but the claim that the weakest individual is really able to kill the strongest is dropped, to be
replaced by the claim that the weakest may be able to kill the strongest through confederacy (EL
I.19.1–​2; DC 1.3; L 188–​189, 13.1). I interpret this change as a reflection of Hobbes’s new conception
of power: equal faculties tell nothing about power. In the early texts, the problem generating war is
that human faculties, or equivalently, human powers, are equal, leading to universal diffidence. But in
Leviathan, power is relational, not faculty based, so there is no initial equality of power; and as I will
argue in Chapter 5, it is only through active equalization of human power that war is overcome.
15 Immediately after defining power and listing primary and secondary powers.
16 To be sure, in the Latin edition there is a hierarchy: the greatest (maxima) power is the

formal union of wills; a federation where wills remain separate is said to be second in power
(proxima). Nonetheless, the point of the English edition still holds: an informal collectivity is a
considerable power.
 The Political Problem 87

I am not claiming that these associations are perfectly durable. The very
nature of their constitution carries a deep risk of instability: if my reason
for offering allegiance to a powerful individual or organization is my per-
ception their power and of the likelihood of benefiting from it, then should
that perception change, I will withdraw my allegiance. Worse, given that
my estimation of that power may be largely based on the evidence I see of
others’ opinions of that power, if ever I suspect that others are shifting their
allegiance, I will be quick to do the same. For Hobbes, rationally speaking,
humans should desire security to ‘last all the time of their life’, and this still
requires a formal commonwealth (L 258–​259, 17.5). But the fact that these
associations may sometimes be unstable does not prevent them from proving
quite durable under many circumstances.
I have established the mid-​range durability of associations in Hobbes’s
later texts, durability that had been denied in the early texts. But the larger
problem with associations in the early texts was that they were conceptually
elusive, due to their status as mere aggregations without formal unification.
They possessed no power themselves, neither potentia nor potestas. Now
I argue that Hobbes’s later texts are able to attribute power potentia to associ-
ations as such, and that this is a non-​juridical conception of power.17
Recall that in Hobbes’s late natural philosophy, the concept of power is
reconceived to evacuate any appeal to internal motive properties (Chapter 2,
Section 2.5). Power is plenary power: the sum total of all accidents in all
agents and patients that combine to produce a specific act. Any attempt to
characterize the power ‘of ’ an agent is parasitic on this primary definition.
First, strictly speaking the agent’s accidents only count as power insofar
as they combine with the accidents of other bodies to constitute a plenary
power that produces an act. And second, if we wish to speak more loosely
of the agent’s power with respect to a class of possible acts, the power can
only be attributed to the agent if it is likely (for all we know) that all the other
elements of the plenary power will be forthcoming for the relevant acts. This
conceptual frame makes it very easy to attribute power to an association as
such. Power can only be attributed to an individual human when the full so-
cial context necessary to the success of the person’s action is in place or ready
to hand. And within this full social context, the individuation of the agent

17 In her discussion of Hobbes’s engagement with scholasticism, Brett argues that for Hobbes, a

human collectivity without a sovereign has no form at all (Brett, ‘Matter, Forme, and Power’, 99).
But contra Brett, informal collectivities persist in Hobbes’s late civil science, because they do have
potentia.
88 Hobbes

holding power is flexible and not tied to the boundaries of natural bodies: in
Hobbes’s own discussion of individual human power, accidents in other
people count towards an individual’s power (for instance, another person’s
helpfulness). Insofar as individual human power is defined to include the so-
cial allegiance that supports the individual’s action, it is easy to slightly shift
terminology and attribute power to the structure of social allegiance itself;
or in other words, to association. Attributing power to an association does
not require the association to have some inner essence or proper nature,
whether inherently or by construction: rather, the power of a group of people
is just what they actually tend to be able to do together. Indeed, this specula-
tive consequence of the new doctrine of individual power finds direct textual
support. A single potentia is attributed to associations, despite their lack of
formal unity, even in the very moment that they are being contrasted with
unions (L 132–​133, 10.4).
I turn now to consider unions. Some commentators attentive to questions
of concrete power have puzzled over Hobbes’s characterization of sovereign
power. Frost contrasts two images of sovereign power that can be seen in
Leviathan: the ‘fable’ of power as domination linked to covenant, against a
‘materialist’ power grounded in human relations.18 Hindess for his part
complains that Hobbes’s argument ‘involves a confusion between the idea
of power as a capacity and the idea of power as a right: a confusion that is
endemic to modern political theory’.19 But the duality in Hobbes’s account
of sovereign power does not reflect any confusion: rather, he offers a two-​
track account of formal collectivities. Unions have both a juridical power
potestas generated by covenantal transfer of rights; and an analytically dis-
tinct concrete power, under the heading of potentia.20 In Leviathan, Hobbes
retains the image of the commonwealth as a deliberately created body with
covenantally established potestas as its defining characteristic:

18 Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker, 133–​135, 163.

19 Hindess, Discourses of Power, 15. Hindess’s capacity power corresponds to Frost’s materialist
power and my concrete power (potentia).
20 See also Read, ‘Thomas Hobbes’, 505–​525. Both Frost’s and Hindess’s analyses are perhaps ham-

pered by presuming a single unified use of the English term ‘power’, and not observing the systematic
Latin distinction potentia/​potestas. Kavka distinguishes between Hobbes’s ‘descriptive’ and ‘nor-
mative’ analyses, but this does not match my distinction exactly, because Kavka’s ‘descriptive’ anal-
ysis models ideally rational behaviour, not actual behaviour (Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political
Theory, xiii, 19–​20). Kavka actually complains that Hobbes fails to model human irrationality (438).
But on my reading this is exactly what Hobbes’s potentia offers; Kavka’s complaint is an artefact of his
own methodological strictures.
 The Political Problem 89

For by Art is created that great leviathan called a common-​wealth,

or state (in latine civitas) which is but an Artificiall Man . . . in which,
the Soveraignty [Is qui summam habet Potestatem] is the Artificall Soul, as
giving life and motion to the whole body. . . . the Pacts and Covenants, by
which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together and
united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in
the Creation. (L 16–​17, Intro.1)

There is a change of theoretical apparatus, but the fundamental character of

sovereign potestas is consistent with earlier texts. Hobbes offers a new theo-
retical account of the formation of a single will for the commonwealth, intro-
ducing the new technical terms ‘personation’ and ‘authorization’ (L 16).21
Rather than subjects simply covenanting to obey commands (EL I.19.7) or
not to resist commands (DC 5.7), now they make a more demanding cove-
nant: to acknowledge the actions of the sovereign as their own. They

appoint one Man, or Assembly of men, to beare their Person; and every
one to owne, and acknowledge himselfe to be the Author of whatsoever he
that so beareth their Person, shall Act, or cause to be Acted, in those things
which concerne the Common Peace and Safetie; and therein to submit
their Wills, every one to his Will, and their Judgements, to his Judgment. (L
260–​261, 17.13)

This constitutes sovereign power potestas:

And he that carryeth this Person is called soveraigne, and said to have
Soveraigne Power [Summam Potestatem].22 (L 262–​263, 17.14)

Despite its new mediation by ‘personation’ and ‘authorization’, potestas still

boils down to a juridical power.23 Frost attempts to reduce sovereign power
to a special kind of concrete power, claiming that ‘the authorization of the

21 Omar Astorga, ‘Hobbes’s Concept of Multitude’, Hobbes Studies 24 (2011): 5–​14.

22 In Hobbes’s Latin, summa potestas refers to both the person of the sovereign and the power that
the sovereign holds. Curiously, the equivalent term summum imperium, strongly preferred in De Cive
(see, for instance, throughout DC 6) is almost entirely absent from Leviathan. I speculate that this is
merely a rhetorical choice, as imperium perhaps has harsher overtones than potestas.
23 Skinner argues that the change is merely a polemical ploy to co-​opt the rhetoric of Hobbes’s

radical political opponents. Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes on Persons, Authors and Representatives’, in
Springborg, Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’, 161. For the origin of this conception of
authority in Roman private law, see Lee, Popular Sovereignty, 128–​129.
90 Hobbes

sovereign consists in obedience’.24 But to the contrary, obedience is owed in

virtue of the authorization; authorization means the sovereign is entitled to
subjects’ compliance. The sovereign is so entitled, not only because compli-
ance has been promised to it through covenant, but also more importantly
because natural law stipulates that such a covenant is needed for peace (L
198–​201, 14.4–​5). It is still very important to get the sovereign’s juridical
power correct: Hobbes places first in his list of causes of the dissolution of
the commonwealth the sovereign resting ‘content with lesse Power [potestas]
than to the Peace and defence of the Common-​wealth is necessarily required’ (L
498–​499, 29.3).
Nonetheless, this is no longer the only way to analyse the commonwealth.
In the early texts, there is explicitly only a juridical conception of a union’s
power, indicated indifferently by both potentia and potestas; there is no ex-
plicit rubric under which to analyse concrete power. In Leviathan, the new
conception of potentia now affords just such a rubric.25 Insofar as one in-
dividual obeys another’s command, she gives power potentia to the one she
obeys (L 136–​137, 10.20). This analysis can be applied to the person holding
sovereignty: they have potentia precisely insofar as they garner actual obe-
dience. And again, the analysis of individual relational power can readily
be extended to characterize the power of the collectivity as a whole. Just as
associations had their own potentia, according to their actual concrete ten-
dency to garner and deploy allegiance, so too the commonwealth’s potentia
can be characterized, independently of its potestas. Where De Cive asserts
that all commonwealths alike possess a stable potentia that is equated with
their imperium/​potestas, now the corresponding passage in Leviathan raises
the concern that despite its stable potestas, a commonwealth might suffer a
diminished potentia (DC 10.16; L 288–​289, 19.4).
The two registers of analysis of political power are certainly interrelated.
Hoekstra has shown that sufficient concrete power generates sovereign au-
thority (summa potestas); and that insufficient concrete power removes it.26
In other words, actual obedience can generate an entitlement to obedience,

24 Correspondingly, Frost reduces the rights of sovereign power to strategic practices to secure

sufficient concrete compliance (Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker, 156–​159, 165–​169). As will
become clear in Chapters 6 and 7, such a strategic view of political rights might be fairly attributed
to Spinoza, but I cannot grant it to Hobbes, who consistently gives his science of political rights and
duties pride of place in his writings, way ahead of his theory of concrete power, and who proudly
names this science as his most profound philosophical contribution.
25 See also Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker, 156–​159.
26 Kinch Hoekstra, ‘The n Turn in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy’, in Leviathan after 350 years, ed-

ited by Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 33–​73.
 The Political Problem 91

and actual disobedience can destroy the entitlement, even without con-
tract.27 But the two registers of analysis nonetheless remain analytically dis-
tinct. Even while the power potestas of the sovereign remains constant, there
can be fluctuations in concrete power potentia; Leviathan offers an account
of the dynamics of concrete power on their own terms. Concrete power is
no longer presumed to be a stable possession but is reconceived as a variable
and relationally constituted effective capacity. This transformed conception
of power illuminates the domain of lived politics below the neat categories of
the juridical sphere.

4.3. Hobbes’s Imperfect Departure from Scholasticism

Having established in Section 4.2 that Hobbes develops a new, non-​juridical

science of human collectivities, now in this section I briefly explain why he
does so, and also I account for why this theme has not generally been empha-
sized or even recognized.28 Indeed, the reader might view my claims with
scepticism, given that several eminent interpreters have directly denied that
there is such a science of concrete power.29 I ultimately find these interpret-
ations to be mistaken, but they are understandable. For the new view is not
laid out with deliberate clarity in Hobbes’s texts: I have had to reconstruct it
from textual fragments. In this section, I account for the new view’s merely
interstitial presence in Leviathan in terms of Hobbes’s ongoing negotia-
tion with his scholastic intellectual inheritance. I then characterize Tuck’s
favoured model of sleeping sovereignty as a vestige of a scholastic under-
standing of power that cannot be maintained in the face of the new non-​
juridical analysis.
I identify two causes of Hobbes’s doctrinal shifts on human collec-
tive power. First is the new science. As discussed in Chapter 2, Section 2.5,
Hobbes’s dissatisfaction with the adequacy of scholastic natural science was
cultivated and developed in the company of other new philosophers in the

27 This relation already held in the earlier texts, even though an explicit rubric to discuss concrete

collective power was lacking: see the discussion of union by natural inequality of power in Chapter 3,
Section 3.2.
28 Many commentators simply neglect the theme, attributing to Hobbes only a juridical science of

potestas and rights, for instance, Pettit, Made with Words, 115–​140; Spragens, The Politics of Motion,
151–​158; Tuck, Hobbes, 64–​76, 109; Skinner, ‘Hobbes on Persons’, 157–​180; Oakeshott, ‘Introduction
to Leviathan’, 260–​267; Brett, ‘Matter, Forme, and Power’, 99; Lee, Popular Sovereignty, 309–​319.
29 Goldsmith, Hobbes’s Science of Politics, 176; Hindess, Discourses of Power, 35–​ 39; Montag,
Bodies, Masses, Power, 90–​103; Sorell, Hobbes, 7–​21, especially 17.
92 Hobbes

Mersenne circle. By the 1640s, Hobbes had largely rejected the scholastic ap-
proach to natural philosophy, replacing it with a mechanistic treatment of
bodies in terms of their actual motions, without reference to any inner causal
principle or a proper power and form. In Chapter 2, I drew implications of
this shift in natural philosophy’s foundations for Hobbes’s study of indi-
vidual human power, identifying a change from an essential to a relational
understanding. In Chapter 3 and the present chapter, I drew implications
for human collectivities. In Chapter 3, I argued that certain features of
Hobbes’s early philosophy of human action are inherited from scholasticism,
preventing him from readily conceiving the power of associations as such, or
the concrete power of unions. This conceptual blind spot is met with prac-
tical confidence that associations for the most part will be weak and unstable;
and that unions will have concrete capacities in line with their juridical enti-
tlement. Then in this chapter’s Section 4.2, I showed that a ramification of the
new relational conception of individual power is the possibility of conceiving
the power of associations as such.
But in no way do I wish to suggest this constitutes a complete explana-
tion: in particular, it does not explain why Hobbes did not immediately carry
across the implications of his antischolastic natural science to the study of
human action and politics. Rather, the causal role of the new natural sci-
ence in changing his civil science must be contextualized within a larger
and more directly political explanation. Between Hobbes’s early and late po-
litical writings, England was shaken by tumultuous political events. Other
commentators have charted the impact of the shifting political context of
Hobbes’s various writings;30 my purpose in focussing on natural science is
not in any way to detract from such accounts, but to complement them by
articulating the precise conceptual shape that Hobbes’s changing politics
takes. Specifically, through the period of the English Civil War, long-​standing
political structures crumbled away, forcing into the open the weaknesses of
theorization of informal power and the unjustified confidence in the theori-
zation of formal power. Robust rebel groups emerged to challenge legitimate
sovereignty. Hobbes’s early model of individual faculty power combined into
juridical union has difficulty accounting for the durability of informal collec-
tive powers, and it cannot directly analyse the variable practical efficacy of
formal collective powers. Historical events forced sharper attention to these
phenomena, and the core achievement of Hobbes’s later model of relational

30 See Chapter 1, footnotes 27 and 28.

 The Political Problem 93

power and its ramification for analysing collectivities is a superior account of

these phenomena.
I have striven to demonstrate the textual presence of the concrete non-​
juridical conception of the power of collectivities in Section 4.2, and further
corroboration will be provided in the discussion of seditious associations in
Section 4.4.31 Nonetheless, I have to concede that it remains fragmentary in
the texts. The analysis of concrete power of collectivities always remains sub-
ordinated to the primary analysis of sovereign juridical power potestas. (By
contrast, the analysis of individual relational power is perfectly explicit and
prominent [L Ch 10].) I account for the merely interstitial presence of this
theme as a result of the prior frame of Hobbes’s philosophical system being
retained, even as it is populated by a fundamentally changed natural science.
In the Elements of Law, the primary division of Hobbes’s philosophical
system is between bodies natural and bodies political. In De Corpore Hobbes
restates the division as follows:

For two chief kinds of Bodies, and very different from one another, offer
themselves to those who search after their Generation & Properties; One
whereof being the work of Nature, is called a Naturall Body; the other is
called a Commonwealth, and is made by the wills and agreements of men.
And from these spring the two parts of Philosophy called Naturall and
Civill. (DCo 1.9)

Similarly, Leviathan makes a contrast between human bodies made by God

and civil bodies made by humans (L 16–​17, Intro.1). Commentators have
puzzled over the relation between these two parts.32 I have argued that in
the early texts, the relation is actually easy, because both parts are sciences
of bodies conceived as endowed with proper power (Chapter 3, Section 3.3).
But there appears to be a problematic gap in the later writings between a
mechanistic (and purely descriptive) understanding of natural bodies and a
juridical (and therefore normative) understanding of civil bodies.33

31 It is matched by a wider move away from an exclusively juridical treatment of human rela-

tions: for instance, Curley observes that there is a shift between early and late texts in the character-
ization of the state of nature. Whereas before rights were the cause of the state of war, in Leviathan
they become the result of that state of war. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: With Selected Variants from
the Latin edition of 1668, edited by Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 78 n. 9.
32 See Chapter 3, footnote 23.
33 Watkins’s solution, to demonstrate that civil science is prudential rather than properly moral

(Hobbes’s System of Ideas, 51–​53, 120), fails to address the larger question of why there shouldn’t be a
descriptive science of politics.
94 Hobbes

The gap arises because of the difference between the method of explaining
divine and human creation. Natural bodies are understood as God’s
creations, and the science of natural bodies needs to grasp principles ‘placed
in the things themselves by the Authour of nature’ (DCo 25.1). But what does
this entail methodologically? Despite the reference to divine authorship, nat-
ural bodies are conceived without reference to God’s intentions or purposes.
As shown in Chapter 2, Section 2.5, De Corpore radically redefines the form
or essence or principle of natural bodies, such that it is no longer an inner
generative force with normative direction: instead, it is a similarity in how
the body’s behaviour strikes us. By contrast, the artificial body of the com-
monwealth is a union conceived precisely in terms of intentions: in terms of
the purpose for which it is humanly instituted. It is a power for the sake of
‘Peace and Common Defence’ (L 262–​263, 17.13) and is understood in terms
of normative rights and obligations generated by that goal.34 From Hobbes’s
point of view, the latter science is more robust. Just as in geometry, in civil
science the objects of study are human made so we can know their principles
directly (DC Ep.5–​6; L Intro.16–​21; DCo 1.5).35
Despite this deep difference, Hobbes presents the two kinds of science as a
seamless whole. Malcolm argues that Hobbes’s eagerness and confidence to
propound a unified system of science prevented him from recognizing the
fundamental discontinuity between the two kinds of science.36 To this argu-
ment, I would add two observations. First, perhaps Hobbes’s eagerness and
confidence for a unified science was carried over from his earlier and more
scholastic sketch of a system of philosophy, in which (as I have argued in
Chapter 3) it made a certain amount of sense.37 Second, the striking side ef-
fect of this division of sciences is that the possibility of a science of human
collectivities as natural bodies is obscured. Indeed, the place in Hobbes’s var-
ious tables of science for considering political bodies is always characterized
in a normative way, in terms of rights and duties (L 130–​131, Ch 9; DCo 1.9).
Nonetheless, there is a nagging sense that the juridical account of human
collectivities is inadequate. On the new natural science, any body at all should

34 Malcolm, ‘Hobbes’s Science of Politics’, 149–​152.

35 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-​Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the
Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 149–​152.
36 Malcolm, ‘Hobbes’s Science of Politics’, 155. In a similar vein, Sorell advances an ‘autonomy

thesis’ regarding the status of civil science (Hobbes, 7–​28).

37 Relatedly, Strauss argues that the core of Hobbes’s philosophy predates his turn to ‘naturalism’

(Cartesian mechanistic natural science), insofar as it retains a priority for right. Strauss, Political
Philosophy of Hobbes, ix–​x, 169–​170.
 The Political Problem 95

be analysable mechanistically, regardless of whether it is a divine or human

creation, because the mechanistic science doesn’t depend on specifying the
inner purpose of the creator. Indeed, even though the commonwealth is
made by human intentions, its behaviour may or may not conform to that
intention. Even when a formal account of potestas is secured, the question of
the concrete conduct of human collectivities constantly presses, and Hobbes
casts about to find a conceptual frame within which to address it. Sometimes
he falls into a distinction between the sovereign qua sovereign versus sover-
eign as a natural individual. He differentiates amongst regimes that are equal
in potestas according to differences in the interests and motivations of the
natural person holding sovereignty. For instance, he accounts for the greater
failure rate of democracies compared to monarchies by arguing that the
monarchs’ personal interests align better with common prosperity than the
personal interests of members of an assembly (L 288–​289, 19.4). Similarly,
he analyses the sovereign’s behaviour in appeasing powerful subjects as its
behaviour qua natural individual; this is contrasted with its power as the
person of the commonwealth, by which it is entitled to obedience (L 496–​
497, 28.25; see also L 524–​525, 30.6). This frame is complementary to the
analysis I have advanced, but I preferred to reconstruct and draw together
textual fragments to construct an account of the power of associations as
such, as it provides a single framework in which to understand both informal
collectivities and the concrete power of formal collectivities. My account
proves powerful help in understanding the dynamics of sedition and polit-
ical disorder, as I will show in Section 4.4.
My account of Hobbes’s changing understanding of power illuminates
why the idea of the ‘sleeping sovereign’, recently promoted by Tuck, is prom-
inent in De Cive but largely absent in Leviathan. Tuck emphasizes Hobbes’s
distinction between sovereignty and government.38 This distinction allows
the possibility of a sleeping democratic sovereign: the people are not in-
volved in the day-​to-​day business of government, but they retain sovereignty
nonetheless, which they exercise through occasional plebiscitary expressions
of their will. Tuck may be correct that the distinction is a defining char-
acteristic of modern conceptions of democracy (or at least of modern
French and American conceptions of democracy),39 but on my analysis, it

38 Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, ix–​ x, 86–​106, drawing on DC 7.5–​17. See also Lee, Popular
Sovereignty, 309–​319.
39 Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, 249–​250; similarly, Lee, Popular Sovereignty, 309–​319.
96 Hobbes

simultaneously appears as a vestige of an earlier scholastic conceptual uni-

verse, whereby power can be thought as inner inherent potential.
Tuck draws almost exclusively on Hobbes’s early texts to establish the
distinction between sovereignty and government; he notes that it is not
so evident in Hobbes’s later writings, and he speculates that strategic or
polemical reasons are responsible for that omission.40 But there is a more
conceptual explanation: the distinction between sovereignty and govern-
ment is bound up with a particular conception of the sovereign’s potentia.
As I have argued, in De Cive it is not possible for sovereign potentia to
vary independently from sovereign potestas, because by construction, the
potestas/​imperium and potentia of the sovereign are equivalent. Potestas/​
imperium are dominant by far in De Cive; but it is striking that when po-
tentia is discussed, it is part of a distinction between power and act, potentia
and actus (DC 7.16–​17). Consider the crucial De Cive passage discussing
the ‘sleeping sovereign’, where the people remain sovereign even though
they delegate governance:

[T]‌he intervals between meetings of citizens may be compared to the times

when a Monarch is asleep; for the power is retained though there are no
acts of commanding [vtrobique enim actus imperandi cessant, potentia
retinetur]. (DC 7.16)41

In the scholastic frame, there can be a strong distinction between power and
act: power can be the inherent principle of a thing even if it is not put to work.
And it is this way of thinking about power that allows the distinction be-
tween sovereign and government. The potentia of the sovereign is defined by
its juridical structure, and so even if a sovereign should delegate the day-​to-​
day running of its commonwealth to a government, and even if the govern-
ment should thereby consolidate immense concrete capacity to ignore the
rightful sovereign, the sovereign still holds full potentia in light of its rightful
authority.42

40 Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, 104–​105.

41 Relatedly, earlier in the same passage, Hobbes argues that the sovereign people hold a ‘direct and
immediate power of action [in potentiâ proximâ & immediatâ est ad agendum]’ and are able actually
to give commands [possit actu imperare] even when they delegate governance (DC 7.16).
42 But cf. Hoekstra, who argues that already in the early texts, Hobbes displays a tendency to

privilege the de facto rather than the formal holder of sovereignty. Kinch Hoekstra, ‘A Lion in the
House: Hobbes and Democracy’, in Brett, Tully, and Hamilton-​Bleakley, Rethinking the Foundations,
200–​201.
 The Political Problem 97

But on the later analysis, the distinction breaks down. As I showed in

Chapter 2, Section 2.5, in Hobbes’s later natural science, power is not sepa-
rate from the act, but is just a prior temporal moment in a necessary chain of
effects; if the act does not follow, there cannot be said to be a power. Applied
to the commonwealth, I have argued that on Hobbes’s later conception, po-
tentia is not some inner property inherent in the juridical construction of
the commonwealth and equivalent to potestas, nor is it a mere ‘possibility’;43
rather, it is a concrete capacity linked to actual occurrences. A sovereign’s
potentia consists in its concrete harnessing of popular obedience, and faces
competition from the potentia of other entities vying for that obedience.
This concrete analysis of potentia is distinct from but has implications for
the juridical analysis of potestas. A sovereign is sovereign not only by having
potestas to rule, but also by having sufficient potentia to match that potestas;
should potentia fall below a certain level, then it undermines the sovereign’s
potestas. The sovereign’s potentia is not separate from exercise, as it was in the
early texts; power potentia is defined by its exercise, in actual events.
Let me now unpack the implications of this conceptual scheme for the
practice of delegated governance. Certainly, in principle a sovereign can
retain full potentia even as it delegates functions of governance. But on
Hobbes’s later view, this is not due to the inherent juridical structure of
sovereign power. Rather, potentia is retained only insofar as concrete alle-
giance is maintained. Consider first the case of a captive sovereign, which
Tuck takes to have a structure similar to the sleeping sovereign (L 346–​347,
21.25).44 One can imagine the people still feeling allegiance to a captive sov-
ereign, and expressing this through continued obedience to the sovereign’s
magistrates, even as the sovereign is in prison and unable to rule directly.
However, after a time, there is a risk that the allegiance de facto transfers to
the magistrates, and if at a much later date the sovereign ruler is freed and
wishes to exert their will against those magistrates, then the people might no
longer be willing to comply. Turning to the core case of the sleeping sover-
eign, on the new analysis, there is only popular sovereignty if the decision of
the popular assembly concretely garners obedience. And Hobbes expresses
grave concerns that any sovereign assembly delegating the exercise of its sov-
ereign power potestas will tend to provoke rebellion when it attempts to re-
claim that power (L 498–​501, 29.3): in other words, it will find that it has lost

43 Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, 94.

44 Ibid., 93–​94.
98 Hobbes

its concrete potentia. Hobbes’s later analysis of power would view ‘sleeping
sovereignty’ as a risky distraction from the real locus of political control.
For Hobbes’s later analysis, the sleeping sovereign is not in principle im-
possible, but it is highly risky, and its conditions of possibility vitiate the ro-
bust popular control that Tuck desires. In order to avoid provoking resistance
and rebellion by pursuing more substantial and contentious goals, a dem-
ocratic sleeping sovereign that wishes to keep its potentia never aspires to
do anything beyond uncontroversial constitutional plebiscites every few
decades.45 But this is a pyrrhic victory: what use is a conception of a sov-
ereign that retains sufficient popular potentia to render its potestas effective
only insofar as it respects extreme limitations on its scope of action? In this
light, it is easy to understand why Hobbes drops the sleeping sovereign when
writing Leviathan.46

4.4. The Political Problem in Hobbes’s Later Writings

The political problem, first introduced in Chapter 3, is that there may be a gap
between the obedience to which the sovereign is juridically entitled and what
it actually receives. Hindess observes that ‘sovereign power is a right to make
use of the powers of its subjects, but it does not follow from this, as Hobbes
would sometimes have us believe, that the sovereign will therefore have an
effective capacity to make use of those powers’.47 In light of Hobbes’s later
texts’ changed theoretical analysis of collective potentia and its separation
from potestas, it becomes possible to reformulate: the political problem is the
problem of a divergence between sovereign potestas and sovereign potentia.
In his early texts, Hobbes presumes that the sovereign’s punitive incentive

45 The recent case of Brexit illustrates the problem with more controversial exercise of plebisci-

tary democratic sovereignty. The authority of the popular vote for the UK to leave the European
Union was widely contested, with parliamentarians and members of the public seriously (although
ultimately unsuccessfully) arguing that the decision to leave should not be implemented. Even if a
sleeping sovereign is possible, it risks insurrection as soon as it attempts any controversial decision.
And this insurrection is not necessarily merely the forces of reaction, the vested interests of the ruling
government contrary to the interests of the sovereign. Rather, insurrection can be motivated by the
suspicion that the very will of the popular plebiscitary sovereign itself has been insidiously shaped
and formed by a different set of vested interests. See further discussion of the power distortions
within democratic fora in Section 4.4, but also in more detail in Chapter 5, Sections 5.3–​4.
46 Beyond his principled defence of plebiscitary democracy, Tuck also defends the quality of such

a democracy’s decisions, remarking that on this point the historical record is not too bad (Tuck, The
Sleeping Sovereign, 257 n. 8). But on my analysis, this is just a reflection of the powerlessness of the
plebiscitary sovereign.
47 Hindess, Discourses of Power, 15; see also 35–​39.
 The Political Problem 99

will be sufficient to render subjects obedient, and to bring its effective power
to meet the power to which it is entitled. In this section, I argue this picture
comes under pressure in his later civil science: the political problem becomes
pressing.48 I already argued that a sleeping democratic sovereign faces very
nigh insuperable difficulty in this respect, hence it is dropped from Hobbes’s
later texts. But now I show that even an ordinary active and governing sov-
ereign faces a grave version of the political problem. The changed political
ontology envisages a social sphere much less amenable to decisive unifica-
tion, and consequently forces a potentially much greater gulf between the
sovereign’s entitled potestas and its concrete capacity.
To clear the ground, I wish to distinguish the political problem from a
related issue in the contemporary literature: the threat to sovereignty from
rightful rebel associations. For Hobbes, no one is obliged to cooperate in
their own execution; thus, any subject who faces such penalty can rightly
rebel. If there are many such subjects, this amounts to a collective right to
rebel against the sovereign. Specifically, Hobbes argues that initially illegiti-
mate seditious rebel associations have a right to continue their insurrection
because, with a bounty on their heads, their ongoing action simply amounts
to defending their own lives:

[I]‌n case a great many men together, have already resisted the Sovereign
Power unjustly, or committed some Capitall crime, for which every one of
them expecteth death, whether they have not the Liberty then to joyn to-
gether, and assist, and defend one another? Certainly they have: For they
but defend their lives, which the Guilty man may as well do, as the Innocent.
There was indeed injustice in the first breach of their duty; Their bearing of
Arms subsequent to it, though it be to maintain what they have done, is no
new unjust act. (L 340–​341, 21.17)

There has been considerable discussion of whether allowing such a right

of rebellion is consistent with Hobbes’s larger system of absolute sovereign
right.49 However, this juridical discussion of right is tangential to my inves-
tigation of the play of forces between sovereign and multitude: I focus on the

48 Johnston and Astorga both note an increase in the sovereign’s vulnerability to a seditious multi-

tude. Johnston, The Rhetoric of ‘Leviathan’, 78–​80; Astorga, ‘Hobbes’s Concept of Multitude’, 5–​14.
49 Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, 433–​436; Sreedhar, Hobbes on Self-​Defence, 132–​

175; Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986), 197–​207.
100 Hobbes

non-​juridical question, can the sovereign in a Hobbesian polity be expected

to have sufficient concrete power to function as it is entitled to do? Whether
a rebel association is rightful or not makes little difference to this question.
The rebels’ rightful status is readily within the sovereign’s control: Hobbes
argues that the right of continued rebellion disappears if the sovereign offers
a pardon (L 340–​341, 21.17). But the concrete threat that the rebels pose
may continue unchanged even when their right is taken away. The polit-
ical problem asks, quite apart from questions of right, will there in fact be
rebellions in Hobbes’s commonwealth, will moments of rebellion gain mo-
mentum or dissipate, and how successful can we expect a sovereign to be in
containing them? Will Hobbes’s commonwealth concretely deliver the peace
that it promises?
In the early texts, there is no explicit rubric for the concrete power of the
sovereign, but nonetheless Hobbes is confident that it will be sufficient, as
I argued in Chapter 3. The multitude, or in other words the population be-
neath the sovereign, is constituted of flat, fragmented equality of power
among subjects: it certainly lacks collective agency as such, and no individual
within it has sufficient power to challenge the sovereign. The only way in
which the sovereign order is threatened is when out of a multitude a formal
faction is established for the express purpose of overthrowing the sovereign;
associations are so ineffective that they pose no threat. Correspondingly, the
commonwealth is secure so long as it can prevent the formation of seditious
unions.50
In Leviathan, the multitude is populated by moderately durable associ-
ations. This is just the structure of social life: the associations simply emerge
according to the spontaneous dynamics of the pursuit of power, as described
in Section 4.2, and they are not formed with seditious intent. But Hobbes
shows a new and persistent concern with these informal associations: wor-
rying about eminent individuals, masters with too many servants, the
immoderate greatness of towns, and the accumulation of treasure by monop-
olies or farms (L 372–​373, 460–​461, 516–​517, 22.31, 27.15, 29.19, 29.21). He

50 Abizadeh’s argument identifying the cause of commonwealth breakdown fits better with this

early view than with the later one. He argues that for Hobbes, disagreement is the primary cause of
conflict, because disagreement constitutes dishonour, which diminishes the dishonoured person’s
feeling of power (i.e., their glory. Arash Abizadeh, ‘Hobbes on the Causes of War: A Disagreement
Theory’, American Political Science Review 105, no. 2 (2011): 308–​310. Abizadeh identifies this as a
problem primarily afflicting the ambitious and idle (ibid., 311–​313). However, as I will argue, on the
later texts, conflict is not just a question of the hurt feelings of idle aristocrats, but a result of a con-
crete social power structure, in which the masses seek protection and avoid harm from whichever
patron appears most promising to them.
 The Political Problem 101

also inserts a new anthropology of religion, tracing the constant tendency for
the emergence of religious groupings from pervasive human passions of cu-
riosity and anxiety, and worrying that new religions can resurge at any time
(L 164–​171, 176–​179, 180–​181, 12.1–​11, 12.20, 12.23).51 Any de facto social
groupings are of concern: whether familial, socio-​economic, or religious (L
372–​373, 22.32).52
I now piece together Hobbes’s scattered remarks to reconstruct exactly
why he finds these associations so troublesome, even though they are not
formed for the sake of sedition. I argue that once the multitude features an
associational structure of powers, the punitive threat of the sovereign is
no longer so effective in motivating subjects’ conduct; but eliminating this
structure is far from straightforward.53
First, the associations provide means for sedition, if the intent does arise.
In the early texts, the means of sedition are secured only after an active de-
cision to form a faction for the purpose of sedition, because the only effec-
tive faction is one structured as a formal collective. In Leviathan, the means
(power blocs not dependent on the sovereign’s pleasure) are always being
generated, even without any seditious intent. Thus, should an ambitious in-
dividual develop seditious plans, they may already have at their disposal the
means to put these plans into action; it will be that much more difficult for
the sovereign to arrest these plans.54

[P]‌opularity of a potent subject (unless the commonwealth has very good

caution of his fidelity) is a dangerous disease, because the people (which
should receive their motion from the authority of the sovereign), by the
flattery and by the reputation of an ambitious man, are drawn away from
their obedience to the laws, to follow a man of whose virtues and designs
they have no knowledge. (L 516–​517, 29.20)

51 Religion poses two distinct threats: (i) it constitutes a this-​worldly power bloc; (ii) it inspires

subjects with a fear of otherworldly punishment (L Ch 38). In my argument, I focus on (i), but I do
not deny (ii). Indeed, this is also a newly prominent theme in Leviathan (L 226–​227, 15.8).
52 Scientific and intellectual groups were also problematic. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the

Air-​Pump, 320–​331. See Zagorin for a historical overview of the forms of social resistance in this pe-
riod. Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, 1–​50.
53 Montag also argues that Hobbes is acutely aware of associations as a threat to sovereignty,

drawing most especially on Behemoth. Montag argues that Hobbes has no theoretical resources to
grasp these associations (Bodies, Masses, Powers, 90–​103). But this is exactly what the theory of col-
lective potentia offers. (See also Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, 264–​272.)
54 In this light, Baumgold’s characterization of the problem of Leviathan as elite conflict is correct

but incomplete: the reason elite conflict is so troublesome is that elite power is deeply rooted in the
everyday fabric of social relations. Baumgold, Hobbes’s Political Theory, 2–​3, 121–​122.
102 Hobbes

This concern is further developed in Behemoth, in which the wealth, influ-

ence, and popular support of religious groupings and great towns are identi-
fied as the matrix of England’s descent into civil war (B 108–​111).
The second reason why these groups are dangerous to the sovereign is
even more serious. The very existence of other powers within the social order
in itself means the sovereign itself has less concrete power potentia. Powerful
subjects tend to engage in the commonplace pursuit of advantage; they do
not in general have the intent to seize power or to destroy the civil order, but
they do want to have things their way. In particular, they think they ought not
be punished, and hope to escape punishment.

And that such as have multitude of potent kindred, and popular men, that
have gained reputation amongst the multitude, take courage to violate the
laws from a hope of oppressing the power to whom it belongeth to put them
in execution. (L 460–​461, 27.15)

The sovereign knows that when it wants to issue or enforce some command
that is inconvenient to the powerful subject, it cannot presume it will secure
obedience from that subject, and perhaps not from the subject’s supporters
either. For the powerful subject and their followers have the power simply
not to comply. They may comply in some cases, they may limit their reaction
to noncompliance, or they may be provoked into hostile retaliation to teach
the sovereign not to trespass on their concerns. This is vividly illustrated by
King Charles I’s abortive attempts to impose the Book of Common Prayer on
Scotland and to demand ship money (B 142–​146, 155–​157). In all cases, the
sovereign’s power is weakened. It cannot simply ignore the fact of powerful
subjects in society and make no concessions to them, because any successful
display of disobedience publicizes the subjects’ power and gains them even
more allegiance. For this reason, crime from presumption of strength giving
impunity is much more politically pernicious than the everyday crime from
hope of not being discovered (L 470–​471, 27.30).
However, no alternative direct response from the sovereign is clearly
better. For if the sovereign acknowledges the limits on its own concrete effec-
tive power, it is drawn into a game of appeasement, which can only end badly.
The sovereign may bestow benefits on a subject (whether exempting from
punishment or making policy to please) ‘for fear of some power and ability
he hath to do hurt to the Common-​wealth’ (L 496–​497, 28.25). Such benefits
are ‘extorted by fear’ and are in this sense sacrifices that the sovereign ‘makes
 The Political Problem 103

for the appeasing the discontent of him he thinks more potent than himselfe’
(L 496–​497, 28.25). However, this strategy does not encourage obedience;
quite the opposite, it encourages increased extortion, as Charles I found after
his attempts to appease the Scots and Parliament backfired55 (B 204–​205,
234–​242, 260). For achieving the deference of the sovereign makes visible
the subject’s power, garnering more allegiance. Seeing the sovereign’s weak-
ness emboldens others to press for concessions too. This may defer civil war,
‘[Y]‌et the danger grows still the greater, and the public ruin is more assured’
(L 544–​545, 30.24).
The lesson from this analysis is a dispiriting one. Power groups spontane-
ously generate and, once established, cannot readily be eviscerated without
negative consequences. Instead, powerful subjects need to be cut down be-
fore their influence grows (L 544–​545, 30.24). There are measures that can,
and indeed must, be taken to prevent power blocs from reaching politically
disruptive dimensions. For instance, a sovereign should prohibit subjects
from holding more servants than necessary (L 372–​373, 33.31); and any
assembly that cannot give an account of its reasons for existing should be
disbanded and punished as seditious (L 374–​375, 22.34). But these kinds of
measures are difficult to implement, and will need to be undertaken with
utmost skill and delicacy if they are not to backfire. For example, Hobbes
says subjects should be prevented from honouring fellow subjects, for this
would constitute unequal powers not subject to the control of the sovereign
(L 526–​527, 30.8). But almost all social conduct has a valence as honour or
dishonour, and so it will be impossible to eliminate honour entirely (L 136–​
139, 10.19–​36). Furthermore, functionally, not all power differences can be
suppressed. The commander of the army needs to be popular to do his job,
even though this is a danger to the sovereign (L 550–​551, 30.28). Hobbes
suggests that the sovereign can minimize the danger from the popularity
of a subject by itself being popular (L 550–​551, 30.29). But a sovereign will
have to be very careful how it seeks to become popular if that status is not al-
ready secured; for as already discussed, granting benefits extorted by fear is
a highly dangerous political strategy, and pandering to the people does just
this (L 496–​497, 28.25). While a sovereign can take measures to try to deflate
and level out such powers, this will be an ongoing task for which success is
uncertain.56

55To be sure, Hobbes says the Parliament also actively desired to usurp sovereignty.
56Shapin and Schaffer argue that for Hobbes, the need for social order determines his scientific
method; in particular, his materialist monism and his geometrical conception of civil science (Shapin
104 Hobbes

Thus, the new political ontology shows that the sovereign will face a con-
stant need to maintain its power in the face of spontaneously emergent
powers in the populace; such powers are a threat even when they have no
seditious intent.57 On top of this, Hobbes does not display such confidence
as previously that deliberately formed seditious unions can be contained (L
370–​373, 516–​517, 22.29–​30, 29.20). The result is that it is a challenge for the
sovereign to achieve actual effective capacity potentia commensurate to its
entitlement potestas; peace is not so easily or definitively achieved as it was
in the earlier texts. If the image of Hobbes’s early science of politics was a
unifier over a fragmented field, the late image is of the sovereign as imperfect
hegemon, competing on a plane of potentia with emergent groups.
In the face of Hobbes’s authoritarian politics, some readers might celebrate
the emergence of popular groups putting up resistance to the sovereign’s
unfettered rule. Surely this represents the resurgence of unmediated popular
power, despite Hobbes’s best efforts to repress it?58 Hobbes does not admit
this himself. Even granting associations their own power potentia, Hobbes
denies that they might have agency. For despite having their own power, a
fundamental difference still remains between associations and unions: asso-
ciations lack a single will (L 248–​251, 16.13–​14).59 But it does not take much
effort to think around this requirement: just as the process of an association’s
formation endows it with a coherent power, it simultaneously establishes a
robust de facto convergence of wills. Certainly, the association does not have
the formal juridical authority to speak for its members, and correspondingly
individuals can dissent from the collective view without doing wrong. But
in practice, all might largely find themselves in concurrence, through the
processed outlined in Section 4.2. And surely there is something meaningful
in this, such that it is possible to attribute a de facto mass agency to this group
according to its de facto convergence of wills.

and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-​Pump, 14–​15, 21, 81, 99). My argument draws attention to a re-
verse process: an (unexpected, unwelcome) corollary of Hobbes’s materialist science when extended
to human collectivities generates difficulties for the efficacy of the civil science.

57 I concede that De Cive already displays an incipient worry with emergent powers even when

they are not deliberately for the purpose of sedition (DC 10.7). However, De Cive awkwardly analyses
this still in the language of formal unions, which is unconvincing for examples such as popularity and
wealth (DC 13.13).
58 Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power, 90–​ 103. Also suggestive are May’s examples of the masses
storming the Bastille, of the Arab Spring (May, Limiting Leviathan, 167–​173).
59 Skinner, ‘Hobbes on Persons’, 162–​163.
 The Political Problem 105

The crucial question is, what shape does this concrete collective power
take, and is this de facto agency of the people necessarily appealing? It is a
mistake to focus on the easy case of the multitude rising up against an un-
equivocally wicked tyrant. In virtue of the specific exigencies of that case,
popular agency is unified and has a good aim, uncontroversially advancing
the common good.60 But putting aside the easy case, what is the character of
the concrete power and de facto agency of the people more generally? Frost
attributes to Hobbes an appealing picture of ‘people power’. If power is truly
relationally constituted, then the restless pursuit of power after power needn’t
be conflictual; even in trying to secure their own self-​interest, people should
seek cooperative and peaceful forms of coexistence. People should help one
another because everyone’s power is interdependent and socially consti-
tuted.61 But Frost herself is clear that she is sketching a mere rational pos-
sibility, and not what is in fact likely to obtain; Frost upholds the Hobbesian
view that in real life, without a sovereign, social groups fall into conflict with
one another.62
Indeed, Hobbes’s own analysis draws attention to two highly unsatisfac-
tory features of this de facto mass agency. First, the multitude is not likely
to produce a single association encompassing all its members; the more
standard picture would be the emergence of multiple and competing power
blocs, sometimes compounding but other times in competition and con-
flict with one another. Second, even if there is an association encompassing
much of the membership of the multitude, this mass agent is no pure domain
of prepolitical equality.63 For the grounds of association are not horizontal
convergence. The mass agent emerges and finds it stability in the layered
patterns of assistance and deference amongst power-​seeking individuals;
and there is nothing to ensure that this process has symmetrical egalitarian
results. Rather, as established in Section 4.2, there are oligarchic tendencies
in the formation of associations: power blocs form around the wealthy, the
mighty, the seductive orator. The de facto will of an association reflects the

60 Even Hobbes recognizes that a very wicked tyrant fails against the normative standard of the

common good, although for him it does not follow that such an uprising is rightful (L Ch 30).
61 Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker, 135, 140, 146, 169–​170.
62 Ibid., 146–​148. The commentator who takes the appealing picture of a Hobbesian ‘people
power’ the furthest is James R. Martel, Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical
Democrat (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 3, 13. Unlike Frost, Martel doesn’t recognize
any difficulty for the realization of this popular power.
63 Hoekstra hints at this problem (‘Lion in the House’, 217). Similar ideas find a classic exposition

in the quite different context of 1960s US feminism: Jo Freeman, ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’,
Berkeley Journal of Sociology 17 (1972): 151–​164.
106 Hobbes

degree of hierarchy in the group, as lesser members defer to the opinions and
preferences of those whom they hope to propitiate. There is no natural con-
vergence of the will of an association with the egalitarian common interest of
its members.
In this chapter and the previous one, I have traced the changed conceptu-
alization of human power potentia from a proper individual power to a rela-
tional power. The changed conceptualization of potentia changes the stakes
of the political game. Rather than there being an originary prepolitical do-
main with each human individual in possession of their own potentia, and
the alienation of this potentia only occurring juridically through contract, on
the new picture, our potentiae are always already more or less imbricated with
the powers of others in more or less hierarchical ways. Against this backdrop,
the shift to politics represents a change of the forces to which we are subor-
dinated rather than a radical break; sovereignty appears not as an imposition
on a prior absence of power relations, but rather an attempt to reorder them.
The transformation of Hobbes’s treatment of power has far-​reaching
consequences for his science of politics. Juridical arguments may generate
an account of right and authority, but a cursory appeal to punitive incentives
is insufficient to establish the possibility that political order under such a ju-
ridical model could stably exist. In the later texts, establishing the correct
doctrine of juridical potestas/​imperium now needs to be distinguished from
and supplemented by a difficult and quite separate analysis of how the con-
cretely causal potentia to which the sovereign is entitled is to be achieved
and sustained. The political problem presses, with the sovereign continually
combatting the spontaneous associational dynamics of the social field. Nor is
capitulation to these associations an option: the associations are conflictual
amongst themselves, and in any case, they are unappealingly oligarchic. In
the next chapter, I trace out Hobbes’s own solution.
 5
Repressive Egalitarianism

5.1. Introduction

How should popular power be understood? One straightforward way

is to focus on power as formal juridical authority, then to judge its popu-
larity by asking whether the designated holder of that authority formally
includes everyone. Such an approach can reasonably claim Hobbesian fili-
ation. But Hobbes’s late sharpening of the distinction between power as au-
thority potestas and power as potentia points to an alternative Hobbesian
possibility: to understand political power as potentia, concerned with the
actual durable production of effects. This alternative possibility offers a su-
perior analysis of both power and of popularity in politics. First, regarding
power, the focus on juridical structure illuminates little if the juridical holder
of power does not substantively govern the workings of society, whereas a
focus on potentia addresses this substantive functioning directly. Second, re-
garding popularity, a juridical account of popularity is unable to identify or
recognize emergent hierarchies and dependencies amongst formal equals,
whereas the late Hobbesian analysis of power as potentia systematically
makes such dependencies visible.
To this point, I have established that Hobbes himself becomes acutely at-
tentive to the question of concrete power potentia in his later writings, and
that he puts forward a relational, socially embedded conception of that
power. Furthermore, I have established that this new analysis of power
reveals a previously downplayed problem, which I have called the political
problem: that sovereign potestas might lack the potentia to which it is enti-
tled. In his later texts, juridical Hobbesianism cannot stand without attention
to the underlying dynamics of power (potentia).
But I have not yet established (a) Hobbes’s solution to the political problem,
nor (b) what positively the popularity of this power as potentia might involve,
and Hobbes’s own attitude towards such popularity. In the present chapter,
I address these two remaining issues, and thereby complete my investigation
of late Hobbesian understanding of popular power. First, in Sections 5.2 and

Potentia. Sandra Leonie Field, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197533864.001.0001
108 Hobbes

5.3, I reconstruct Hobbes’s own solution to the political problem, including

its critical implications for democratic forms of decision-​making. Second, in
Sections 5.4 and 5.5, I argue that Hobbes’s late writings evince a certain min-
imal conception of and commitment to the popularity of potentia, insofar
as he offers what I will call a repressive egalitarianism. Previous scholarship
has drawn attention to Hobbes’s hostility towards the independent power of
churches; repressive egalitarianism represents a generalization of this hos-
tility. Repressive egalitarianism identifies the primary obstacle to popular
empowerment to be informal oligarchic distortions to the potentia of the
sovereign; correspondingly, it commits itself to crushing informal power
structures in the polity.
Hobbes’s resultant positive political program is highly ambivalent to con-
temporary sensibilities. But even if unpersuaded by this program, the reader
can still appreciate the critical insight that Hobbes offers: that any vote or
measure of mass opinion in a commonwealth that has not eliminated the in-
formal oligarchic structure of the social body can only have very weak claim
to be meaningfully popular. I conclude that Tuck’s Hobbesian plebiscitary
democracy, far from being the exemplary expression of the power of the
people, is likely to be neither popular nor powerful.

5.2. Internal and External Motivations of Subjects

Hobbes’s new attention to concrete power potentia is deeply unsettling for

his science of politics. For Hobbes, the fundamental purpose of politics is to
avoid war; absolute sovereign power potestas is offered as the unique means
to that end. Subjects in the disorderly and conflictual multitude hand over
all their right to a sovereign whose unified absolute authority commands
total obedience and thereby eliminates war. What I have called the polit-
ical problem is the problem of a divergence between the sovereign’s juridi-
cally entitled power and its concrete capacity, between (in the terms of the
later texts) sovereign potestas and sovereign potentia. The incipient form of
the problem is faction and sedition; its full expression is the dissolution of
the commonwealth and civil war. In the later texts, there is a new political
ontology of spontaneously emergent oligarchic groups. Sovereign power
potestas finds itself vulnerable in the face of emergent concrete powers of
the multitude: garnering the obedience to which it is entitled is no longer
straightforward.
 Repressive Egalitarianism 109

Let me now reconstruct Hobbes’s own solution to the political problem. In

his later texts, I argue, Hobbes envisages stabilizing the sovereign’s potentia
by transforming the internal motivations of both subjects (Section 5.2) and
sovereign (Section 5.3) to align better with the duties specified by his civil
science; this is done through a program of political rhetoric and education.
Duty and obligation are important to Hobbes’s civil science, early and late.
As outlined in Chapters 2 through 4, natural law is reason’s recommendations
for pursuing the ultimate good of self-​preservation (DC 3.26, 3.33; L 242–​
243, 15.41). There is an obligation, or duty, to abide by natural law.1 The cen-
tral political obligation posed by natural law is the obligation to establish and
uphold a commonwealth endowed with certain essential rights (EL II.1; DC
Ch 6; L Ch 18). Duty requires that subjects within commonwealths should
recognize these rights; in particular, they should submit totally to the sov-
ereign such that they obey its commands regardless of their content, and
they should not arrogate any rights to themselves.2 For the sovereign, duty
requires that it should rule for salus populi, for the good of the people (EL
II.9.1; DC 13.2; L 520–​521, 30.1). From the juridical point of view, once di-
rect threats to individuals’ self-​preservation are removed, then duties must
be performed (DC 3.27; L 240–​241, 15.36). But from the concrete point of
view, there remains the question of how the conformity of conduct with
duty is actually brought about. Free moral choice is not a sufficient explana-
tion, because Hobbes denies free will; rather, Hobbes needs to account for
the concrete causality that generates volitions to act in accord with duty (EL
I.19.7; DC 5.8; L 326–​327, 21.4). The question of the causality of acting in
accord with duty is especially pressing when it comes to subjects. If a signifi-
cant proportion of the population fails to do their duty, then this amounts to
insubordination. In this case, the sovereign faces the political problem and
peace is not secure.
Suppose we make a distinction between two components of voli-
tional3 human behaviour: what I will call internal motivation and external

1 Warrender’s classic exegesis drives home the centrality of duty and obligation, even if his thesis

about the divine grounding of that duty remains highly controversial. Warrender, Political Philosophy
of Hobbes.
2 Except retaining the right of self-​ defence in extremis (DC 6.13; L 336–​343, 21.11–​21); see
Sreedhar, Hobbes on Self-​Defence, for an extended discussion.
3 That is, behaviour that is mediated by a desire or appetite of the will. Hobbes’s own term is ‘vol-

untary’; but Pettit suggests substituting ‘volitional’. For in Hobbes’s use, the term ‘voluntary’ is ex-
pansive, excluding only physically forced behaviour such as bodily movement from being pushed
or enchained (EL I.15.13; L 92–​3, 6.54); whereas in common use, ‘voluntary’ refers to a subset of
will-​mediated action, namely, where the will is formed under fair conditions. Pettit, Made with
Words, 67–​68.
110 Hobbes

motivation respectively, a distinction I will characterize in detail later.4 Over

this and the next section, I make explicit the limitation of my earlier anal-
ysis, which considered only external motivation. I now ask, was this an ac-
curate rendition of Hobbes’s civil science? Does internal motivation by duty
play any role in avoiding the political problem and sustaining peace? And if
so, how is such motivation brought about? I argue that Hobbes’s early texts
provide a primarily external account of subject and sovereign motivation
to generate action in conformity with duty, and this external motivation is
presumed to be politically sufficient. Across his oeuvre, however, there is an
evolution in Hobbes’s views such that his later texts increasingly demand
the internalization of duties, by both subjects and sovereign, if the political
problem is to be resolved. Subjects’ internal grasp of duty renders their alle-
giance to the sovereign more resilient and less vulnerable to capture by the
lure of seditious leaders (this section); the sovereign’s internal grasp of duty
improves the quality of its rule (Section 5.3). The means of this internaliza-
tion is pedagogical and persuasive: the populace is to be educated; and the
sovereign is to receive good counsel.
I start by specifying my distinction between internal and external. By
the internal components of volitional action, I mean the individual’s moral
psychology, including passions, desires, and understanding. By external
components of action, I mean incentives and threats, or in other words, those
external goods and bads that connect with the individual’s moral psychology
to generate action. My exegesis in the previous chapters has so far accounted
for variations in human behaviour exclusively through change in external
incentives and threats. Specifically, subjects’ political behaviour is modelled
as being generated primarily by the imposition of sovereign punishment; in
the later texts I have also stressed the availability of social support and status.
Of course these external incentives and threats generate action only when
they encounter an individual’s moral psychology. But to this point, I have
simply presumed a certain average moral psychology, in which the internal
components of motivation are taken as more or less static, and which (in par-
ticular) lacks any internalization of duty.
According to this average moral psychology, there are desires for ex-
ternal goods: in the early texts, there are underlying desires for glory and
advantages and fear of their loss; in the later texts, it is desire for power and

4 This is a distinction between kinds of motivation for action and must not be confused with the

contrast in foro interno versus in foro externo (EL I.17.10; DC 3.17), which is a distinction between
intention and action.
 Repressive Egalitarianism 111

fear of its loss, as established in Chapter 4, Section 4.2. Duty is not essen-
tially opposed to these desires: after all, on Hobbes’s view, complying with the
duty posed by natural law (and therefore by reason itself) is the only means
to secure any durable advantages or power.5 But in practice, desires do not
order themselves in a coherent way; in result, duty has no inherent motiva-
tional traction. To the contrary, average moral psychology displays a char-
acteristic short-​sightedness and is deeply biased towards the present. ‘Men
cannot divest themselves of the irrational desire to reject future goods for the
sake of present goods (which inevitably entail unexpected evils)’ (DC 3.32).
People pursue their desires in a moderately but imperfectly rational way, as
the urgency of present passions obscures the means to longer-​term satisfac-
tion (L 254–​255, 17.2, 282–​283, 18.20). Hobbes does allow the in-​principle
possibility of changing internal motivations, in particular, of subjects more
or less thoroughly internalizing their duty. For a subject might come to feel
the connection between doing their duty and achieving the future goods that
they desire; if this connection is sufficiently vivid, they might be able to con-
duct themselves in the dutiful way even without the pressure of immediate
incentives or threats. For instance, a philosopher, blessed with a complex
combination of natural wit and suitable life experiences, might have a height-
ened capacity to focus on long-​term consequences (EL I.10; L 104–​105, 110–​
111, 8.2, 8.14). But for the average moral psychology that I have presumed to
this point, there is no such internalization of duty. If conformity with duty
is to be achieved, it will be in response to short-​to medium-​term external
goods and bads.
In my preceding chapters’ exegesis of Hobbes’s texts, was I right to ignore
internal motivation by duty? In Hobbes’s early texts, I claim, the internali-
zation of duty by subjects is not central to the good functioning of the com-
monwealth. To be sure, it is essential that subjects’ wills be materially shaped
to conform their conduct with their duty of obedience. But as I argued in
Chapter 3, Section 3.3, the shaping of wills is amply achieved through ex-
ternal incentives, principally terror of the sovereign’s sword (EL I.19.7; DC
5.8); for all subjects are powerfully motivated by a fear of imminent death.6
In a properly established commonwealth where the sovereign claims cor-
rect rights of sovereignty, the sovereign’s overwhelming punitive threat will

5The desire for glory, by contrast, always appears to be opposed to duty (DC 1.2).
6The worry that a fear of punishment in the afterlife might be greater than the fear of imminent
death is absent in The Elements of Law, but it does start to emerge in De Cive: compare EL II.8.5 with
DC 12.2.
112 Hobbes

generally conform subjects’ behaviour to their duties even without subjects

having any internal appreciation of the logic of the rights of sovereignty, or
any internal attachment to the corresponding dutiful behaviour.
It is true that Hobbes identifies subjects holding seditious beliefs and in-
correct political doctrines as one risk factor in the breakdown of the com-
monwealth, because these beliefs encourage subjects to deny their duties and
challenge the sovereign’s rights (EL II.8.4–​10; DC 12.1–​8). But without hope
of success, incorrect doctrine is insufficient to generate rebellion (EL II.8.11;
DC 12.11); and as I argued in Chapter 3, Section 3.4, the social ontology of
fragmented equality makes it easy to neutralize this risk. Each subject has no
hope of success alone; nor are there any enduring associations; and it is easy
to eviscerate any seditious unions. As a result, it is just not so important to
the functioning of the commonwealth that everyone understand and have a
deep sense of their duty. Correspondingly, while Hobbes does briefly discuss
the teaching of doctrine, he does not dwell on it (EL II.9.8; DC 13.9).
Any internalization of the duties of subjects in Hobbes’s early civil science
is important, not so much to establish the functioning of the commonwealth,
but instead to moralize the political relationship. In the Epistle Dedicatory
to The Elements of Law, Hobbes outlines the significance of his civil sci-
ence: ‘[T]‌he conclusions thereof are of such nature, as, for want of them, gov-
ernment and peace have been nothing else to this day, but mutual fear’ (EL
Ep). In other words, he does not deny that government and peace are possible
without explicitly knowing his doctrine. They are possible, but prior to his
doctrine, subjects in such an (unknowingly) well-​ordered polity understood
their obedience and deference as mere fearful responses to violent threats.
Learning Hobbes’s doctrine allows individuals to rationally and morally af-
firm what they are (within a well-​constituted commonwealth) driven by fear
to accept in any case.7
Now turning to Leviathan, I do not deny that external incentives, notably
the fear of punishment, remain essential in conforming subjects’ wills to
meet with their duty of obedience as stipulated by natural law.

For if we could suppose a great Multitude of men to consent in the obser-

vation of Justice, and other Lawes of Nature, without a common Power to
keep them all in awe [sine Potentia communi quae posset omnes cogere]; we

7 DC stands as a transitional text: mass knowledge of duty has a greater practical role in its civil sci-

ence than in EL. Compare EL Ep with DC Ep.6, Pref.5.

 Repressive Egalitarianism 113

might as well suppose all Man-​kind to do the same; and then there neither
would be, nor need to be any Civill Government, or Common-​wealth at all;
because there would be Peace without subjection. (L 256–​257, 17.4)

External incentives are necessary, certainly. But are they sufficient? I argue
that they are not. Within the insufficiency of external incentives, I distin-
guish two components, and I offer a novel explanation of the second. The first
component of the insufficiency of external incentives is developed at length
by Johnston. Johnston argues that Hobbes comes to recognize in his later
writings that subjects do not reliably fear death as the greatest evil. If only
they held an enlightened theology that supported such a fear of death, then
they would submit to the sovereign; but as it is, they are superstitious and
therefore captive to the threats of otherworldly punishment from their reli-
gious leaders.8 Johnston focusses on Hobbes’s lengthy theological discussions
in Parts III and IV of Leviathan, interpreting them as an attempt to displace
religious beliefs that conduce to insubordination. The project of Leviathan is
to educate the nation in a more civilly suitable theology.9
This theological diagnosis is surely correct as far as it goes, but it is only
half of the challenge facing the Hobbesian sovereign. Taken by itself, the
theological diagnosis suggests that if only subjects could come to have the
proper fears, if only they could come to have (what I have called) the average
moral psychology, then they could be properly motivated by external puni-
tive incentives. In other words, it would suggest that the success of Hobbes’s
civil science requires only a change in the internal composition of desires and
appetites, but not necessarily an increase in internalization of duty. To the con-
trary, however, in Leviathan there is ample textual evidence of a new concern
for subjects’ internalization of secular civil duties, quite apart from theology.
Leviathan’s Chapter 30, ‘On the office of the Soveraigne Representative’,
devotes extensive and detailed attention to proper education.10 The office

8 Johnston, The Rhetoric of ‘Leviathan’, 50–​ 54, 92–​

113. See also Arash Abizadeh, ‘The
Representation of Hobbesian Sovereignty: Leviathan as Mythology’, in Hobbes Today: Insights for the
21st Century, edited by S. A. Lloyd (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 116–​124.
9 Johnston, The Rhetoric of ‘Leviathan’, 67–​ 70, 114–​184. Johnston correlates the rise of the
problem of superstition with Hobbes’s changed conception of reason. In the early texts, reason is nat-
ural, but may be clouded by deceptive and superstitious rhetoric; all that is necessary is to clear away
that rhetoric. In the later texts, superstition naturally emerges from the human condition; reason is a
difficult and rare achievement (ibid., 106–​108).
10 The corresponding chapter in The Elements of Law features only one section on doctrine, at the

end of the chapter, and only as an afterthought to its core discussion of topics such as population,
wealth, tax (EL II.9.8). The discussion of education is similarly brief in De Cive (DC 13.9).
114 Hobbes

of the sovereign is to attend to the safety of the people, and fully half of the
chapter’s pages are devoted to ‘publique Instruction’ (L 520–​521, 30.2) in the
doctrine of the rights of sovereignty. Hobbes makes explicit that sovereign
punishment is insufficient to motivate subjects’ compliance; positive know-
ledge of rights and duties is required.

And the ground of these Rights [of the sovereign], have the rather need to
be diligently and truly taught; because they cannot be maintained by any
Civill Law, or terrour of legall punishment. (L 522–​523, 30.4)

Similarly, in De Corpore, Hobbes argues that war is prevalent because

people do not know their duties (DCo 1.7).
Thus, there is a second component to the insufficiency of the sovereign’s
punitive incentives to motivate subjects’ obedience.11 It is common to ob-
serve that in Leviathan, public instruction in civil duty is important to secure
a peaceful commonwealth. What is less clear, even in explicit discussion in
the secondary literature, is exactly why.12 Hobbes’s own direct explanation is
that the motivation to obey needs to be supported and stabilized by a sense
of duty:

[I]‌t is against his [the sovereign’s] Duty, to let the people be ignorant, or
mis-​informed of the grounds, and reasons of those his essentiall Rights; be-
cause thereby men are easie to be seduced, and drawn to resist him, when
the Common-​wealth shall require their use and exercise. (L 520–​521, 30.3)

This brief explanation demands elaboration. Why exactly is people’s seduc-

tion by incorrect doctrines now perceived to be more of a problem than
previously?
Johnston contextualizes Hobbes’s new demand for public educa-
tion in duty within the larger social changes underway in seventeenth-​
century England: the rise of mass education and literacy, the emergence of

11 Even though Johnston’s primary theme is the problem of fear of otherworldly punishment, he

does not deny that instruction in duty is also important. Johnston, The Rhetoric of ‘Leviathan’, 77–​91,
211–​213.
12 Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 97–​99; Mary G. Dietz, ‘Hobbes’s Subject

as Citizen’, in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, edited by Mary G. Dietz (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 1990), 91–​119; Sreedhar, Hobbes on Self-​Defence, 166; Teresa Bejan, ‘Teaching the
Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Education’, Oxford Review of Education 36, no. 5 (2010): 607–​626;
May, Limiting Leviathan, 122–​138.
 Repressive Egalitarianism 115

newspapers. The masses held political opinions and were enticed into polit-
ical arguments in an unprecedented way. Correspondingly, Johnston shows
that the intended audience of Leviathan is much wider than the narrow
scholarly and elite readership of the earlier texts.13 Education in the rights
of sovereignty is required because the rights will be idle unless they are met
with the corresponding submission and cooperation of the political com-
munity, and this political community now robustly includes the masses.14
But this doesn’t yet explain why the internalization of duty is required. For
if subjects’ submission to the sovereign were already externally overdeter-
mined by fear of sovereign punishment, then political education would still
not be necessary.
My analysis of Hobbes’s new social ontology offers a new answer: subjects
may have hope of success from collective power. If subjects can have hope
of success in rebelling against a sovereign, then even a powerfully felt fear of
death is not sufficient to shore up Hobbes’s absolutist state.15 As I established
in Chapter 4, Section 4.2, in Hobbes’s later works he offers a changed political
ontology, whereby the multitude is populated by spontaneously emerging
oligarchic groups, associations with potentiae of their own. Moderately du-
rable associations emerge constantly and unavoidably, the result of individ-
uals’ pursuit of power. To be sure, the sovereign must make continuing direct
efforts to reduce power blocs in the multitude, but as I argued in Chapter 4,
Section 4.4, this is a difficult and delicate task. Any power blocs that the sov-
ereign cannot contain furnish ready hope of success for sedition should the
intention arise; and also by their very existence they dilute the sovereign’s
potentia. Relying only on external incentives applied against a background
average moral psychology that fears death above all, I have argued that the
political problem emerges and may become pressing: sovereign potestas may
fail to garner the obedience to which it is entitled by right. Even within a
commonwealth with the correct array of juridical rights, if the sovereign is
not fully successful in limiting the growth of power blocs, external incentives
will be insufficient to conform subjects’ behaviour to the duties of obedience
stipulated by natural law.
The attention of Hobbes’s later writings to education and persuasion can
be understood as his attempt to partially insulate the commonwealth from

13 Johnston, The Rhetoric of ‘Leviathan’, 24–​25, 62–​91.

14 Ibid., 84–​85.
15 A related account is provided by Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker, 158–​163.
116 Hobbes

the political danger that the power blocs represent, by cultivating subjects’
internalization of their duties. Private power blocs provide temptations and
opportunities for subordination. But if subjects have a resiliently and robustly
internalized respect for the rights of the sovereign and an understanding of
their corresponding duties, then they may have some greater inclination to
maintain their submission to the sovereign despite the temptation to shift
their allegiance to seditious unions. With the newly fragile sovereign, in
order for the rights of sovereignty to be effective, they must be believed and
upheld by the masses. This inner motivation of duty does not merely mor-
alize government and peace, which could be achieved without recognition of
duty. Rather, it substantially assists government and peace.
Indeed, the content of public instruction foregrounds deference to the
sovereign and non-​deference to all other powers. Hobbes models his pre-
sentation of the public lessons of civil duty to defer to the sovereign alone
on the monotheistic duty to glorify God alone in the Ten Commandments.
Corresponding to the first commandment to follow the one true God
and have no other gods, Hobbes asserts that subjects must not be jealous
of governments of other countries; and that they should recognize that
prosperity in any country comes from obedience to existing powers.
Corresponding to the second commandment, not to make graven images,
Hobbes asserts that subjects are not to admire popular or powerful subjects.
Corresponding to the third commandment, not to take the Lord’s name in
vain, Hobbes asserts subjects are not to speak irreverently of the sovereign
nor to dispute his power potentia. Hobbes’s justification of this rule links
to his earlier relational analysis of power: disputing or questioning power
potentia brings the sovereign ‘into Contempt with his People, and their
Obedience (in which the safety of the Commonwealth consisteth) slackened’
(L 527–​528, 30.7–​9).
This pedagogy may be necessary; but how is it possible?16 I noted earlier
that some individuals might spontaneously comprehend the connection of
duty with true self-​interest. This class of individuals, presumably including
philosophers such as Hobbes, sounds likely to be small. But it is essential for
all, even the vulgar, to appreciate and internalize the civil science, regard-
less of whether they have any taste or aptitude for philosophy. Fortunately, as
Hobbes makes clear, all that is necessary for internalizing the duty is to know

16 Hampton argues it is impossible; but her conclusion relies on a highly stylized characterization

of the change required, as actually replacing subjects’ own judgement with the sovereign’s. Hampton,
Social Contract Tradition, 212–​213.
 Repressive Egalitarianism 117

the content of the duty, and to come to feel forcefully and vividly its connec-
tion with self-​preservation. This does not require understanding the full sci-
entific derivation and rational explanation of the duties. Hobbes thinks that
the experience of civil war should naturally sharpen people’s appreciation of
the importance of duty, but when the horrors of war have been forgotten,
the role of deliberate education of ‘the vulgar’ in the indivisible and absolute
rights of sovereignty comes to the fore (L 278–​279, 18.16). He is optimistic
about the possibility of educating the masses in this way:

[T]‌he Common-​peoples minds, unlesse they be tainted with dependance

on the Potent, or scribbled over with the opinions of their Doctors, are
like clean paper, fit to receive whatsoever by Publique Authority shall be
imprinted in them. . . . [I]n the instruction of the people in the Essentiall
Rights (which are the Naturall, and Fundamentall Lawes) of Soveraignty
[Iuribus Summae Potestatis], there is no difficulty (whilest a Sovereign has
his Power entire [dum illi, qui Summam habet Potestatem, manet Potentia
integra],) but what proceeds from his own fault. (L 524–​525, 30.6)

He offers some considerations to address the logistics of mass pedagogy,

of how to teach a mass of people who may not be particularly interested in
learning the truth of civil science for its own sake.
First, he targets universities. Students from universities go on to be influ-
ential leaders of popular opinion. ‘It is therefore manifest that the Instruction
of the people, dependeth wholly, on the right teaching of Youth in the uni-
versities’ (L 532–​533, 30.14). To stem the seditious ideas that may arise from
reading the ancients or the schoolmen, he proposes control of permissible
doctrines to be taught; if seditious doctrines are not taught or published in
universities, they will not reach the masses.17
Second, he proposes systematic organized mass teaching from the
pulpit: at the end of each church service, subjects should be reminded of the
correct doctrines of civil science (L 528–​529, 30.10). Beyond merely being
informed of the content of their duties, Frost argues, the theatrics of collec-
tive pedagogy enacts and reinforces the correct internalization of duties. At
these services, when they sit together collectively in church, they display

17 Bejan, ‘Teaching the Leviathan’, 607–​626. Admittedly, this represents a point of increased em-

phasis rather than a radical break with earlier texts: see EL II.9.8; DC 13.9.
118 Hobbes

their submission to these doctrines, and witness others’ submission.18 This

optics of power constitutes a real power for the sovereign and consolidates
its supremacy.
Third, consider Leviathan itself as a pedagogical instrument. As already
noted, Leviathan has a much wider intended audience than the narrow
scholarly and elite readership of Hobbes’s earlier texts. Hobbes complains
that his true civil science needs to compete with other books of politics that
are essentially histories retold for entertainment (DCo 1.7). In order to grab
the attention of this wider audience, Hobbes makes a marked change in style
between his early and late texts: from austere rational demonstration in The
Elements of Law and De Cive to florid and evocative rhetorical persuasion in
Leviathan.19 For his broader audience will not properly imbibe their duties
in an efficacious way by simply being told or demonstrated. One prominent
example mentioned earlier is the modelling of the contents of public instruc-
tion on the Ten Commandments, thereby tapping into deeper-​rooted moral
commitments and habits of thought of subjects of the commonwealth.20

5.3. Internal and External Motivations of Sovereigns

To this point I have focussed on subjects’ education in duty. Subjects’ con-

formity with duty is central for considering the success of civil science: for
it is when subjects fail to do their duty that the political problem emerges.
But Hobbes also enumerates duties for the sovereign, to rule for the safety
of the people. In this section, I ask, how important is it for the success of
Hobbes’s civil science that the sovereign conform its behaviour to duty?
And how is that conformity brought about, through internal or external
motivations?

18 Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker, 158–​163. Similar themes are developed in Tarlton,

‘Creation and Maintenance’, 313–​324.

19 Johnston, The Rhetoric of ‘Leviathan’, 24–​25, 84–​91. Skinner grants that rhetoric may serve for

persuading the masses, but he argues it is not only for the masses: the elite sections of the popu-
lation may equally have difficulty grasping civil science, because their understanding is clouded
by (immediate) self-​interest. Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 426–​437. Across Hobbes’s oeuvre, Evrigenis
finds not an increase in rhetoric, but a shift in rhetorical strategy. Ioannis D. Evrigenis, Images of
Anarchy: The Rhetoric and Science in Hobbes’s State of Nature (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2014), 44–​155. Evrigenis does note that Leviathan’s use of the biblical story of Cain and Abel
draws new attention to the problem of relapse from political order (159–​178).
20 For a broader discussion of the theological parallels in Hobbes’s doctrine of sovereignty, see

Abizadeh, ‘Representation of Hobbesian Sovereignty’, 124–​135.

 Repressive Egalitarianism 119

I will argue that in Hobbes’s later view, strong conformity is required, and
it is to be brought about by a change of sovereign internal motivations. In this
context, I draw out Hobbes’s analysis of the difficulty with democratic assem-
blies: far from enabling equal consideration of the needs and desires of the
whole population, the very structure of democratic assemblies thwarts such
consideration, due to corrosive oligarchic dynamics in both entry to, and the
everyday operation of, the assembly.
The foundation of Hobbes’s civil science is the enumeration of true rights
of sovereignty; a sovereign needs to claim and insist upon these rights, and
this will centrally involve demanding subjects’ obedience with threat of pun-
ishment. But this is not the full extent of the requirements that natural law
imposes on the sovereign; it is just one component of the larger duty of the
sovereign to serve the safety and prosperity of the people (EL II.9; DC Ch 13;
L Ch 30). This larger duty can be understood in a weak or strong sense. First,
the weaker sense of duty sets a floor on acceptable sovereign conduct: the
sovereign must not rule oppressively or wickedly. But second, Hobbes insists
that safety should be understood expansively, ‘So that this is the general
law for sovereigns: that they procure, to the uttermost of their endeavour,
the good of the people’ (EL II.9.1). The stronger sense of duty comprises a
suite of more specific duties in various policy domains, which collectively
amount to a model of virtuous rule. In The Elements of Law, Hobbes asserts
that the sovereign needs to maintain high population; minimize unnecessary
restrictions on subjects’ liberty; make regulations for labour and commerce
to support economic prosperity; establish clear and equitable property law
and tax policy; support a fair system of courts; punish the ambitious for in-
subordination; regulate doctrine in the universities; and maintain a military
for external defence (EL II.9); a similarly detailed list is repeated in De Cive
and Leviathan.21
In the early texts, it is not necessary to Hobbes’s civil science that the sov-
ereign perform its stronger duties. I argued in Chapter 3, Section 3.4 that,
if the sovereign claims its essential rights and if it also keeps an eye out for
ambitious subjects fomenting sedition, then the commonwealth will be ro-
bust. I didn’t make explicit that this also presupposes that the sovereign fulfils
its weak duty not to be grossly and systematically wicked. For even abject
and isolated subjects with no hope of success will not comply with a sover-
eign who threatens their lives or the things most dear to them (DC 6.13).

21 See discussion in Baumgold, Hobbes’s Political Theory, 101–​119.

120 Hobbes

Happily, the requirement of the sovereign performing its weak duties is easy
to meet: Hobbes thinks that frank wickedness will be so obviously counter-
productive as to be a marginal occurrence (DC 6.13). But beyond this fulfil-
ment of weak duty, positively good rule is not required. If the sovereign does
act as a model ruler to serve the public safety in the fullest and most virtuous
way (EL II.9.3–​9; DC 6.6–​17), then its subjects will be happier, and indeed,
the sovereign itself will share in the resultant prosperity. But it is not fatal
to peace if the sovereign fails to carry out these stronger duties. For due to
the political ontology of fragmented equality, even unhappy subjects lack the
hope of success in rebelling.
In the later texts, it is no longer the case that merely avoiding frankly
wicked rule would be sufficient to achieve a robust commonwealth.22 As
I established in Chapter 4, Section 4.4, Hobbes now conceives sovereignty
as more fragile than earlier. There are continually emergent power blocs in
the multitude, meaning subjects may have hope of success for any rebellion;
the margin for the sovereign to rule poorly is understood to be much more
narrow than previously. In order to retain individuals’ obedience and alle-
giance, the sovereign would be well advised to dampen all three component
causes of rebellion: hope of success (power blocs), pretence of right (seditious
doctrine), and popular discontent. Addressing the problem of power blocs,
the previous chapter argued that the sovereign must exercise extreme and
sustained prudence to ensure that both the power and the seditiousness of
these groupings are reduced rather than inflamed. Addressing the problem of
seditious doctrine, the previous section discussed the importance of subjects
being educated in civil duties, and noted that the text of Leviathan itself plays
some role in this education. But there is a large ongoing role for the sovereign
itself in carrying out a pedagogical program for subjects, as part of its duty (L
30.3–​14). Addressing the problem of discontent, the duties of the sovereign
include ruling in a manner that is transparently fair, with a particular em-
phasis on the dignity and legal equality of the poor (L 30.15–​24). These three
elements of good rule do not merely constitute a morally required duty; they
are imperative for the success of Hobbes’s civil science.

22 See also Lazzeri, Droit, pouvoir et liberté, 355–​360. Sreedhar is unclear regarding the threshold

quality of rule required to achieve stability. Despite first outlining the detailed list of the sovereign’s
strong duties, in her summary she asserts that merely not starving or killing the population will be
sufficient (Sreedhar, Hobbes on Resistance, 166–​167). I argue that in Leviathan the stronger require-
ment on conduct applies.
 Repressive Egalitarianism 121

Given that the conduct required of the sovereign is demanding, how is

it concretely brought about? Let us start by modelling sovereigns as having
an average moral psychology of moderately rational pursuit of desires. This
modelling is supported textually. The sovereign as a ‘politic person’ is at the
same time also either a natural individual or an assembly of natural indi-
viduals with their own private interests. Hobbes is clear that the natural
person(s) of the sovereign do not act from perfect far-​sighted reason; he
remarks that ‘for the most part, if the publique interest chance to crosse the
private, he preferrs the private; for the Passions of men, are commonly more
potent than their Reason’ (L 288–​289, 19.4).23 Hobbes’s default modelling of
human motivation as short-​sighted and externally driven should extend to
these natural individuals forming the sovereign.
Are there external mechanisms, incentives or threats, that can bring such a
sovereign’s conduct to align with duty? Hampton provides the following pes-
simistic analysis of the efficacy of positive incentives:

[A]‌shortsighted sovereign likely would believe that ruthlessness and sub-

stantial domination are the ways to self-​satisfaction. And this belief does
not seem obviously wrong, because the supposed benefits from moderate
rule are not clearly greater than the benefits (in the short and the long run)
from tyrannical rule.24

Indeed, even though Hobbes himself suggests that there are posi-
tive incentives for the sovereign to conform its behaviour with duty, the
incentives do not have traction within the sovereign’s presumed motivational
structure. Good rule may well lie in the long-​run interest of the sovereign,
both as public and as private person, because the wealth and flourishing of
the commonwealth is simultaneously the wealth and flourishing of the sov-
ereign: ‘[T]‌he good of the Soveraign and People, cannot be separated’ (L
540–​541, 30.21). But ruling well requires difficult judgement and sustained
focus and self-​discipline to implement. A sovereign impatient to accumulate
quick wealth and power would instead enrich those near and dear, or court
the favour of the wealthy. Indeed, Hobbes identifies nepotism as a perennial

23 Moller Okin argues that the duality of interests is an innovation of Hobbes’s later writings.

Susan Moller Okin, ‘ “The Soveraign and His Counsellours”: Hobbes’s Reevaluation of Parliament’,
in Thomas Hobbes: Critical Assessments, Vol. 3, edited by Preston King (London: Routledge, 1993),
789–​790. But to the contrary there are prior hints of a similar analysis (EL II.5.5–​7).
24 Hampton, Social Contract Tradition, 194; see also Baumgold, Hobbes’s Political Theory, 118–​119.
122 Hobbes

problem, especially in democracies. He suggests that democracies tend to si-

phon public funds into sectional interest more flagrantly than other regimes,
because in democracy each faction has its own friends and allies to enrich,
whereas in monarchy or aristocracy the number of personal contacts to en-
rich is limited (L 288–​291, 19.4, 19.8).25 Whether or not this analysis of the
relative intensity of nepotism in different regime types is correct,26 it hardly
provides any robust mechanism for achieving virtuous rule: at most it ac-
counts for differential degrees of bad rule across the regime types.
Where positive incentives do not succeed, might the sovereign’s fear of pu-
nitive or other sanction bring it to perform its strong duties? I have argued
that if the sovereign fails to perform its strong duties, subjects are likely to
become non-​compliant and rebel. Might it follow that the fear of subjects’
non-​compliance and rebellion constitutes an efficacious motivation for
a sovereign to perform its duty?27 To the contrary, even if a sovereign does
have such a fear, the behaviour motivated by the fear, in a sovereign with av-
erage moral psychology, does not conform to duty. The idea that the threat of
imminent rebellion could neatly motivate good rule rests on the image of an
undifferentiated multitude from which emerge an egalitarian band of rebels
speaking the true and wise heart of the people. But as discussed in Chapter 4,
Section 4.4, the multitude is not an undifferentiated domain of equality, and
correspondingly, rebellion is often fomented by oligarchic groups or inter-
ested factions in the multitude. This can be the case even if there is a genuine
and worthy underlying grievance. The most direct means to appease their
immediate threats is to buy off the power bloc’s factional interest: ‘[t]‌o buy

25 This line of defence of monarchy is also established in the earlier texts (EL II.5.5–​7; DC 6.13,

10.18). But it is less significant there because, as I have argued, in the early social ontology, the com-
monwealth can successfully achieve peace even when the quality of its rule is poor.
26 It is not obviously correct. For is it not possible that a sovereign monarch, being merely a single

weak human individual, would need to buy the allegiance of many supporters in order to retain
power and fend off usurpers?
27 Hoekstra hints at this possibility (‘Lion in the House’, 217). Hampton entertains the possibility,

only subsequently to raise difficulties relating to technological inequalities in the multitude (Social
Contract Tradition, 247–​248 versus 254–​255). The idea that the masses might be efficacious in put-
ting pressure on the sovereign to rule should not be confused with the stronger claim, advanced
by Curran, that subjects have a right to put pressure on the sovereign in this way. Eleanor Curran,
Reclaiming the rights of the Hobbesian subject (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 112–​116. But
the rights retained by subjects are carefully described such that they do not lead to or licence col-
lective destabilizing rebellion against any but the most wicked sovereign (L 336–​341, 20.11–​18).
What is at stake in my discussion is not the case of extreme wickedness, but the more common case
of a middle-​of-​the-​road sovereign who rules poorly. Indeed, while May is ‘tempted’ to argue that
laws that do not conform with the sovereign’s duty do not deserve subjects’ respect, he ultimately
concedes that there is still an obligation to obey (Limiting the Leviathan, 126). My point is to con-
sider whether the threat of rebellion might constitute an efficacious concrete restraint on sovereign
conduct, regardless of the situation with respect to right.
 Repressive Egalitarianism 123

with Mony, or Preferment, from a Popular ambitious Subject, to be quiet, and

desist from making ill impressions in the mindes of the People’ (L 544–​545,
30.24). This is directly contrary to duty. There are two aspects to the harm-
fulness of this course of action: it compounds the power of factions, and it
fails to carry out the harder work of acting for the public good by addressing
the deeper grievances underlying the rebellion. Hobbes remarks that ‘though
sometimes a Civill warre, may be differred, by such wayes as that, yet the
danger growes still the greater, and the Publique ruine more assured’ (L 546–​
547, 30.24).
In sum, the external incentives of hope of reward and fear of punishment
are not sufficient to conform sovereign behaviour to duty: to the contrary,
both can press a sovereign away from good governance. But such dutiful
behaviour is required if the political problem is to be overcome. Might the
sovereign internalizing its duty offer a solution?
Indeed, such a solution is implicit in Hobbes’s theory of counsel. Counsel
is a new and prominent topic in Leviathan, with a whole chapter devoted
to it (L Ch 25). Counsel was a common feature of political practice and
theory of early modern England, whereby monarchs would rely on trusted
counsellors to guide their rule. Hobbes recommends that expert counsellors
have the sovereign’s ear and provide serious, careful, and direct advice. There
was some controversy in Hobbes’s period whether rulers are under obliga-
tion to follow the counsel that they receive.28 Hobbes strongly denies any
such obligation. Counsellors do not impugn the absoluteness of sovereignty,
because counsel is not command, but mere advice. Its recipient adopts its
recommendations not because of the will of the counsellor, but at their own
discretion, insofar as they see the advice to serve their interests (L 398–​401,
25.2–​4). Counsellors have a subordinate status; they have no right to counsel,
much less to have their counsel accepted.
Despite counsellors’ subordination to the sovereign, nonetheless counsel
influences the sovereign. Whereas much of Hobbes’s politics is concerned to
insist on the subjects’ deference to the judgement of the sovereign, the role of
the counsellor is to challenge the sovereign’s prior understanding and moti-
vation and seek to change them (L 400–​401, 25.5). Good counsel consists ‘in a
deducing of the benefit, or hurt that may arise to him that is to be Counselled,

28 Joanne Paul, ‘Counsel, Command and Crisis’, Hobbes Studies 28 (2015): 103–​ 131; Thomas
Alexander Corbin, ‘The Role of Counsel in Hobbes’s Political Thought’ (MRes thesis, Macquarie
University, 2016), 62–​73.
124 Hobbes

by the necessary or probable consequences of the action he propoundeth’ (L

404–​405, 25.11). In the case of counsel to the sovereign, a good counsellor
will recommend courses of action that will ‘preserve the people in Peace at
home, and defend them against forraign Invasion’, including educating the
sovereign in civil science, as well as advising on more specific details of good
policy (L 406–​407, 25.13). But what is this but assisting the sovereign to be
motivated by duty? The sovereign is not externally enticed or compelled to
perform its duty; rather, it receives good counsel, which allows it to perceive
the longer-​term stakes of the situation, and choose the path of duty even in
the face of other temptations.29 It thereby provides the desired solution to the
political problem.
There is one major stumbling block for this solution: the counsel must be
of sufficient quality. The difficulty is to ensure that the counsellors are wise
and good; that their advice clear, accurate, and well communicated; and that
their advice is offered genuinely for the public safety and not covertly for
their own interest (L 404–​409, 25.11–​14). If counsel is bad, it compounds
rather than solves the political problem. Hobbes understands one of the key
determinants of the quality of counsel to be the institutional format within
which it is offered. One might have thought that counsel from a public as-
sembly might best serve the safety of the people. Hobbes vehemently opposes
such an idea, even at the same time as granting some of the considerations
that normally motivate the turn to collective counsel. He grants that there
is no reason to expect good counsel from the rich and noble (L 548–​549,
30.25). He acknowledges the importance of diverse counsel from many dif-
ferent experts (L 406–​407, 410–​413, 25.13, 25.16); he also explicitly endorses
taking counsel widely across the population. Right in the context of opposing
counsel from an assembly, he argues:

The best Counsell, in those things that concern not other Nations, but onely
the ease, and benefit the Subjects may enjoy, by Lawes that look onely in-
ward, is to be taken from the generall informations, and complaints of the
people of each Province, who are best acquainted with their own wants, and
ought therefore, when they demand nothing in derogation of the essentiall
Rights of Sovereignty, to be diligently taken notice of. (L 548–​549, 30.27)

29 Gabriella Slomp, ‘The Inconvenience of the Legislator’s Two Persons and the Role of Good

Counsellors’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 19, no. 1 (2016): 68–​85;
Corbin, ‘Role of Counsel’, 74–​90.
 Repressive Egalitarianism 125

But he stresses the multiple perverse effects of having those many counsellors
form a public assembly, whether the sovereign assembly of a popular (dem-
ocratic) commonwealth, or equally a parliament counselling a sovereign
monarch (L 288–​289, 402–​403, 408–​411, 546–​549, 19.5, 25.8, 25.14–​16,
30.25–​27).30
Assemblies offer poor counsel because of how their membership is de-
fined; and because of the interpersonal dynamics of those members when
they meet. Given the new centrality of counsel, Hobbes makes explicit that it
is part of the duty of the sovereign to choose good counsel; but only a mon-
arch (who is furthermore not tightly bound by a parliament) is able to dis-
charge this duty. For in aristocracy and democracy, the sovereign assemblies
constitute their own counsel and are unable to make this choice (L 288–​289,
546–​547, 19.5, 30.25). Far from the membership of such assemblies being
selected according to expertise, Hobbes notes that the kinds of individ-
uals in such assemblies tend to be those who know a lot about tending their
own private fortunes, but who may have no insight into public policy: they
‘have beene versed more in the acquisition of Wealth than of Knowledge’ (L
288–​289, 19.5).
Assemblies also offer poor counsel because of their interpersonal dy-
namics.31 Two kinds of problems emerge. The first problem is impaired or
obstructed cognition. Members of an assembly may not pay proper atten-
tion to the reasoning of the advice and instead be swayed by the rhetoric
of others in the assembly; they may be confused and dazzled by the many
digressions and interruptions to the discussion; the full picture cannot
be put forward before the assembly if it includes sensitive information (L
288–​289, 408–​409, 548–​549, 19.5, 25.14–​15, 30.26). The second problem
is distortion by power dynamics. The public meetings of an assembly pro-
vide a forum that is eminently susceptible to the formation, consolidation,
and reconfiguration of power blocs, according to the dynamics of sponta-
neous competition of relational power outlined in Chapter 2, Section 2.4
and Chapter 4, Section 4.2. The members of an assembly of counsellors are
worried about their status, power, and favour with respect to their peers.
They worry about looking stupid, or contradicting another assembly

30 Paul, ‘Counsel, Command and Crisis’, 171.

31 These concerns are famously shared by Rousseau, who only promotes popular decision-​
making when it is conducted by vote of a sufficiently informed populace with no communication
amongst voters. Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, translated by Donald A. Cress
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), Book 2, Chapter 3.
126 Hobbes

member whose favour they seek to curry. They seek safety and patronage
by allying themselves with the opinions of the wise or influential; they
heap scorn upon non-​conformers; they embrace conflict with partisans
of another patron in order to prove their loyalty to their own side. These
interpersonal dynamics lay open the assembly to being hijacked by pri-
vate interests. Whether because they are too confused and inattentive to
identify the underlying agendas of speakers in the assembly, or whether
because they are motivated by considerations of power and status to col-
laborate in giving poor advice, the assembly does not serve its purpose (L
408–​413, 25.15–​16).
Hobbes places great stock in private counsel for monarchs; he
recommends a best practice of the sovereign doing its business ‘by the help
of many and prudent Counsellours, with every one consulting apart in his
proper element’ (L 410–​411, 25.16). To start with, the selection process is
the choice of the sovereign and can be conducted according to expertise (L
546–​547, 30.25). Furthermore, the problematic dynamics of group counsel
are eliminated. When a monarch holds private court with a counsellor, cog-
nitive confusion is stemmed, and the optical power effects are neutralized.
Poor reasoning and ulterior motives can be probed. The monarch ‘may in-
terrupt [the counsellor], and examine his reasons more rigorously, than
can be done in a Multitude, which are too many to enter into Dispute, and
Dialogue with him that speaketh indifferently to them all at once’ (L 402–​
403, 25.7–​8).
In result, Hobbes finds different forms of government differentially able to
overcome the political problem. Hobbes remarks sharply that democratic
commonwealths survive in spite of the open consultations of their assemblies,
not in virtue of them (L 412–​413, 25.16). Considering a monarch counselled by
a parliament, Hobbes offers the memorable image of a tennis player in a wheel-
barrow pushed by many hands (L 412–​413, 25.16). The contrast with a sover-
eign taking private counsel is sharp: such a sovereign does not need to respond
to whims of populace, but Hobbes is optimistic that at the same time such a sov-
ereign actually rules for subjects’ benefit.
Hobbes’s overall weighing of the merits and demerits of different forms of
counsel are highly contestable. He pays little attention to possible perversities
of private counsel, and he doesn’t address whether the problems he identifies
in assemblies might be overcome. Even by his own standards, he may have
been too swift in his condemnation of collective forms of counsel: Moller
Okin shows that favourable experience with the 1661 Cavalier Parliament
 Repressive Egalitarianism 127

roused Hobbes to a late sympathy for government by assembly.32 But the

evaluative discussion of the different regime forms in relation to the quality of
their counsel clarifies what is at stake in some of Hobbes’s most explicit anti-​
democratic polemic: its capacity or incapacity to deliver sovereign conduct
in conformity with duty. The sovereign’s duty includes stifling the emergent
formation of oligarchic powers in broader society; but Hobbes worries that
these very powers may corrupt and subvert the counselling process, wher-
ever the sovereign’s counsel is delivered via popular assembly. The discussion
forcefully raises the possibility of a well-​intentioned democratic form having
perverse oligarchic effects; in the second half of the book, I will demand that
any Spinozist account of popular power take such perversities seriously.
In this section, I have established counsel to the sovereign as one element
of Hobbes’s own response to the political problem. Facing the problem of
sovereign potentia insufficient to potestas, due to emergent power blocs,
I have argued that Hobbes’s solution is to maintain his absolute model of pol-
itics, and to conform the behaviour of the political actors within it through a
program of political pedagogy and persuasion in duty. This has two halves.
In Section 5.2, I showed that Hobbes seeks to educate subjects in their duty;
in this section I have shown that the other half of the solution is counselling
sovereigns. But it is important to see that despite Hobbes’s appeal to duty, his
solution is not a moralism that purports to transcend the informal powers
potentiae in society; rather, the solution amounts to proposing detailed insti-
tutional forms that can manage, channel, and reduce those powers. The sim-
plicity and clean juridical lines of Hobbes’s early science of politics are now
thoroughly muddied by a persistent worry about informal collective power.

5.4. Repressive Egalitarianism

What does it amount to, Hobbes’s absolutism reinforced by duty; and how
does it relate to the question of popular power? Hobbes’s writings dis-
play a curious ambivalence in relation to popular power. On the one hand,
Hobbes’s civil science takes a theoretical starting point shared with the rad-
ical egalitarians and democrats of his day.33 Hobbes’s model of the state of

32 Moller Okin, ‘Soveraign and His Counsellours’, 800–​805.

33 Curran, Reclaiming the Rights, 26–​62. See Zagorin for an overview of the Levellers’ beliefs.
Zagorin, History of Political Thought, 8–​42.
128 Hobbes

nature places everyone in equal juridical status; it is from this equal right of
everybody that political authority emerges. But on the other hand, Hobbes
takes this radical egalitarian starting point to different ends. First, he is con-
sistently and polemically hostile to the possibility of the mass of individuals
in a society (the multitude) exercising agency. Hobbes polemically redefines
the people to be (or to be personated by) the sovereign, even if a monarch.
Second, in defining group agency of the people through the will and authority
of the sovereign, Hobbes takes pains to deny that the sovereign is in any way
required to be responsive to the expressed demands of the multitude. Third,
he argues vigorously in favour of a monarchical sovereign against a demo-
cratic sovereign. In result, Hobbes appears to endorse a commonwealth re-
taining formal popular ground without any institutional popular influence.
In taking the reasoning of radicals and using it to shore up sovereign
power, Hobbes scandalized his contemporaries. Is the popular element of
Hobbes’s civil science purely rhetorical, cynically harnessing the language of
his political opponents contrary to their intentions?34 Or is the truth just the
opposite? Martel argues that the ambiguities of Hobbes’s texts subvert their
own official authoritarianism in favour of an underlying anti-​authoritarian
democracy.35 Does any of the foundational commitment to equality and
popular power remain in the model ultimately endorsed by Hobbes’s civil
science, and if so, in what form?
In this section, I characterize Hobbes’s absolutism as repressive egalitari-
anism, and I argue that it represents a commitment to a certain conception
of the popularity of political power. I argue that the Hobbesian combination
of authoritarianism and democracy is not cynical; rather it is a coherent po-
litical position that genuinely shares some elements with radicals, even as it
diverges in other respects. This much is perhaps not original.36 But I offer a
novel account of the radicalism at stake, arguing that the popular commit-
ment remains not merely in the formal juridical modelling of rights, but also,

34 Skinner, ‘Hobbes on Persons’, 161.

35 Martel, Subverting the Leviathan, 1–​13.
36 Lee shows that the doctrine of popular sovereignty has historically been open to widely varying

ideological interpretations (Popular Sovereignty, 317–​318). More specifically, in a prominent debate

between Tuck and Hoekstra, both authors agree that Hobbes is genuinely and non-​cynically com-
mitted to the popular grounding of political authority, and at the same time that this commitment
leads to a defence of despotic sovereignty. They disagree only over how to characterize Hobbes’s
institutional recommendations: insofar as Hobbes discusses democratic sovereignty and endorses
democracy without an assembly or administrative power, is this really a democracy at all, or is it in-
stead a de facto (and therefore substantive) a monarchy? Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Democracy’, 171–​190;
Hoekstra, ‘Lion in the House’, 191–​218.
 Repressive Egalitarianism 129

more significantly, in the preferred arrangement of the concrete power po-

tentia of the multitude. I argue that Hobbes’s absolutism seeks (to the ex-
tent possible) to diminish all forms of inequality of power potentia, except
that between the sovereign and the multitude. To be sure, this raises crit-
ical worries that Hobbes is insufficiently sensitive to excesses of sovereign
power. But what is often overlooked is his intense sensitivity to the excesses
of powers that exist in the multitude apart from the state. The key element in
common between Hobbes and the radicals of his time is an antifeudal op-
position to old power blocs, freeing the individual from non-​state powers;
in Hobbes’s hands, this extends beyond mere traditional power blocs such
as the church also to emergent new ones. I argue that Hobbesian repressive
egalitarianism represents an early attempt to think a non-​hierarchical so-
ciety. If the multitude is a domain of oligarchic power blocs, then even from
the most egalitarian and popular perspective it is not desirable to conform
the state to its will. Hobbes views any collective formation within the political
body with great suspicion, and he is convinced that only through the state ac-
tively atomizing and disempowering the multitude can equality and popular
power worthy of the name be achieved. Some institutional forms may run
contrary to this goal of eliminating insidious oligarchic influences; I suggest
that Tuck’s popular plebiscite is just such a form.
I start to vindicate these suggestions by considering Leviathan’s treatment
of church structure, which is a microcosm of the larger dilemma. Hobbes
offers an extended sympathetic discussions of the primitive Christian church
(L 774–​851, 42.2–​66). Hobbes’s discussion emphasizes the non-​despotic
character of the early church, focussing on two of its striking features: its
flat and non-​hierarchical structure, and its free and plural treatment of its
members. First, it was non-​hierarchical: he characterizes it as an association
or congregation lacking coercive power (L 778–​781, 42.5–​8). The Apostles,
and after them the ministers, were only teachers; and they were answer-
able to their flock, by whom they were selected (L 828–​860, 42.46–​60). Even
the ultimate power of the church, excommunication, was weak: merely
a non-​ authoritative recommendation not to keep company with the
excommunicated person. Second, the early church was free and plural in its
relation to individual members. The flock were free to read independently
and advance scriptural interpretations contrary to their teachers (L 812–​813,
42.35); and excommunication was possible only for actions, not for errors
of opinion (L 804–​805, 42.27). In sum, members of the primitive church
followed the Apostles only out of free reverence for their moral virtues (L
130 Hobbes

1114, 47.19). The democratic flavour of Hobbes’s reflections on church struc-

ture is not limited to the distant past. After centuries of false and ambitious
claims of a hierarchical church to coercive authority, Hobbes celebrates the
demise of papal and episcopal power. He expresses sympathy for the reli-
gious Independents in his own time, whose churches were conceived as mere
congregations of coreligionists, rather than authorities over their flocks, and
as such most closely resembled the desirable free and flat structure of the
early church (L 1116, 47.20).
This celebration of democratic association is striking against Leviathan’s
larger insistence upon the absolute power of the civil sovereign. Even
Hobbes’s conception of sovereign democracy, laid out in clarity by Tuck,37
is despotic; whereas the early church’s insistence on the absence of coercive
power and toleration of internal plurality offers a radically non-​despotic
conception of democracy. Martel claims that Hobbes’s positive portrait of
the flat structure of the early church is simply incompatible with Hobbes’s
official authoritarianism and the antidemocratic elements of his polit-
ical philosophy.38 He reasons that opposing church authority should entail
also opposing state authority.39 But Hobbes himself sees no contradiction;
and Collins’s extended study of seventeenth-​century English ecclesiology
provides historical context to understand the compatibility, or even more
strongly, the mutual support, between the apparently conflictual elements of
Hobbes’s system. Collins shows that Hobbes sympathized with the ‘magiste-
rial Independents’.40 As Independents, they opposed religious authority. The
problem of freeing individuals from church power is central. But the magis-
terial independents took the Erastian view that the conditions of possibility
of this form of non-​hierarchical religious association is best secured through
strong state power that can enforce equality in the structure of a religious
community.41 Like the magisterial Independents, Hobbes is not separately
considering two different forms of social organization: one flat, democratic,
and free; the other authoritarian. Rather, he is putting forward a theory in
which the two domains are intimately connected. A non-​hierarchical struc-
ture of church governance relies on an authoritarian state as its condition of
existence.

37 Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Democracy’, 172.

38 Martel, Subverting the Leviathan, 6.
39 Ibid., 103–​134, 205.
40 Jeffrey R. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 124.
41 Ibid., 88–​114.
 Repressive Egalitarianism 131

On Collins’s account, Hobbes’s combination of egalitarianism and au-

thoritarianism is not an anomalous and incoherent combination, but rather
fits with a clear and prominent strain in early modern English political
thought.42 Collins stresses the ambitious modernism of Hobbes’s text. Even
as Leviathan emphatically opposes rebellion against effective rulers, Collins
characterizes the book as ‘a revolutionary text, not composed to re-​establish
a traditional monarchical order but, rather, one emerging out of the forward-​
looking state-​building and religious reform projects of the English revolu-
tion’.43 Collins groups Hobbes along with republicans such as Harrington
and liberals such as Locke as proponents of the modernization of the state,
opposed to the separate political authority of the church, preferring a model
in which ‘the monolithic state presided over a polity of atomized individ-
uals’.44 Leviathan is ‘driven by an obsessive fear of the independent power
of the Christian church, and by a sympathy with one of the central polit-
ical goals of the English Revolution: securing an Erastian church settlement
under the aegis of the modernizing state’.45
Collins’s analysis is limited to questions of church power. But now I gener-
alize the schema that it provides. Collins’s account shows that when it comes
to religion, the citizen’s status as a free and equal individual was achieved
through power of the state. The juridical egalitarianism that lies at the foun-
dation of Hobbes’s theoretical structure is brought into concrete reality
through the application of state power. Lesser state power would amount to
being more deferential to the power of the various churches, thereby leaving
their congregations captive to the domination of the church hierarchy. But
the power of the church is just one specific, albeit central, case of a more ge-
neral phenomenon. Recall my presentation of Hobbes’s deromanticized view
of the popular multitude in Chapter 4, Sections 4.2 and 4.4: power congeals
around any form of eminence: wealth, oratory, or most alarmingly, even the
bare fact of appearing to have others’ allegiance. The multitude is not in a
state of innocence or equality: Hobbes’s analysis of emergent associations

42 See also Zagorin, who insists that Hobbes is ‘no monstrous birth without a counterpart in

its time. The case is just the reverse’. European consciousness at the time was characteristically
antifeudal, anticlerical, bourgeois, and ambitious to remake society; Hobbes’s absolutist egalitari-
anism fits right in. Zagorin, History of Political Thought, 187. See also Kinch Hoekstra, ‘Early Modern
Absolutism and Constitutionalism’, Cardozo Law Review 34, no. 3 (2013): 1079.
43 Collins, Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 116.
44 Ibid., 279. But see Arash Abizadeh, ‘Publicity, Privacy, and Toleration in Hobbes’s Leviathan’,

Modern Intellectual History 10, no. 2 (2013): 288–​291, who argues that Hobbes’s Erastianism is com-
patible with the existence of (tightly regulated) non-​public churches.
45 Collins, Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 5; similarly, Johnston, The Rhetoric of ‘Leviathan’, 185–​213.
132 Hobbes

shows that there is such a thing as private power. This power is in itself mor-
ally indeterminate: there is nothing necessarily innocent about forms of de-
pendency in private association that involve stark hierarchical and oligarchic
tendencies; civil society is not by itself a realm of freedom and equality.46
Thus, putting aside Hobbes’s juridical egalitarianism of right, Hobbes
also offers a concrete egalitarianism of power.47 Given the relational under-
standing of power, the challenge for politics is subjects’ involvement in col-
lective associations. Equality is achieved by neutralizing and diminishing
the power of collective organization to the extent possible; and this is exactly
what Hobbes’s late absolutism seeks to do. This Hobbesian program has res-
onance with Richelieu’s absolutist centralization of political power in France.
Indeed, England had already progressed some distance in this direction
in the century prior to Hobbes’s writing: dissolving monasteries, revoking
grants of crown land, and subordinating provinces, to a greater degree than
its European counterparts.48 In Leviathan, Hobbes includes a new chapter
about political systems (associations), in which he counsels the sovereign to
oppose the institutional solidification of the power blocs of the multitude,
whether the church, the social classes, clans, or anything else (L 372–​373,
22.32); subjects are also to be prohibited from holding more servants than
necessary (L 372–​373, 22.31). Any assembly that cannot give an account of
the reasons for its existence is to be disbanded and punished as seditious
(L 374–​375, 22.34). Related recommendations are peppered through the
text. For instance, he recommends the sovereign not accept claims of right
to press counsel, whether from popular parliaments or from hereditary no-
bility (L 25.4, 30.25, 400–​401, 546–​549). Furthermore, as discussed at length
in Section 5.2, the sovereign is to indoctrinate its subjects to bolster its own
power through an optics of public displays of worship and submission, and
to do everything it can to reshape its subjects such that they recognize and
act upon their primary obligation to obey the sovereign, ahead of any other
allegiances they may have. It may be that the reshaping cannot in fact reach
full equality, instead needing to make some concessions to existing power
relations, for fear of backlash. That is, sometimes co-​optation, rather than

46 For similar ideas outside of a Hobbesian context, see Freeman, ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’.
47 Hobbes’s concrete egalitarianism is primarily political, by which I mean it is concerned with
power and allegiance. It is not a twenty-​first-​century economic egalitarianism: money is only one
amongst many possible grounds of accumulation of power; and Hobbes does not countenance rad-
ical economic redistribution. His view of fair economic policy is charitable but anti-​redistributive (L
536–​541, 30.17–​19).
48 Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, 1–​50, 133.
 Repressive Egalitarianism 133

destruction, of oligarchic forces may be a tactical necessity.49 But the ideal is

to reduce such forces to a minimum.
Once the private power of associations is recognized, absolute sovereignty
comes to be viewed not as an imposition of power on a previously equal so-
cial domain devoid of power relations, but as an intervention and reshaping
of a field of highly layered and hierarchical power relations. Pettit stresses
Hobbes’s rejection of the key republican goal of non-​domination: being
protected against arbitrary interference; not depending on the good favour
of another. Quite rightly, Pettit observes that Hobbesian subjects are dom-
inated by their sovereign.50 But what this analysis omits is Hobbes’s frontal
assault on the pervasive informal domination that occurs within the mul-
titude. In Hobbes’s later civil science, he strives to create secondarily what
was presumed in his earlier works to exist naturally: a political ontology of
fragmented equality. An all-​powerful sovereign does not immediately pre-
side over such a sphere of undifferentiated equality; it must create it.
The result is reminiscent of Rousseau’s later proposal for a state in which
the horizontal independence of citizens is held together by their absolute
vertical subordination to the state as subjects. In Rousseau’s ideal political
community, ‘[E]‌ach citizen would be perfectly independent of all others and
excessively dependent upon the city. This always takes place by the same
means, for only the force of the state brings about the liberty of its members’.51
To be sure, there are differences: for Rousseau, equality is the direct moti-
vation, whereas Hobbes’s interest in egalitarianism is often expressed as in-
strumental to the larger program of avoiding war and sedition. But even if
instrumental, the demand for equality is intense and pervasive.
Why exactly is equality so important? Hoekstra’s discussion of Hobbes’s
egalitarianism focuses on the resentment that inequality rouses.52 In
asserting natural human equality, ‘Hobbes’s priority is not to reveal an un-
derlying ontology of equality, but to mitigate the disastrous effects of pride,
contempt, and open disagreement about comparative worth’.53 Hobbes’s
ninth law of nature rules that ‘every man acknowledge other for his Equall by

49 Zagorin notes that even Richelieu, centralizer extraordinaire, regretfully recognized the impos-

sibility of entirely eliminating the power of the nobility, and contented himself with domesticating it
(Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, 87–​121). And even the degree of centralization that Richelieu achieved
was precarious, provoking the counterreaction of the Fronde (ibid., 188–​222).
50 Pettit, Made with Words, 132–​140.
51 Rousseau, On the Social Contract, Book 2, Chapter 12.
52 Kinch Hoekstra, ‘Hobbesian Equality’, in Lloyd, Hobbes Today, 76–​112.
53 Ibid., 112.
134 Hobbes

Nature’ (L 234–​235, 15.21). People will not peaceably accept unequal status—​
‘[M]‌en that think themselves equall, will not enter into conditions of Peace,
but upon Equall terms’ (L 234–​235, 15.21)—​therefore all should recognize
one another as equal. Correspondingly, the duty of the sovereign includes
not giving preferential treatment to the mighty, in order not to arouse the re-
sentment of the masses (L 534–​534, 542–​543, 30.15–​16, 30.23).
On Hoekstra’s analysis, it is unequal treatment that is destabilizing; and
it is destabilizing because subjects resent it: the villains in this story are the
elite who wish to assert their superiority.54 Surely there is a problem with elite
desire, but Hobbes’s analysis reveals that the masses are hardly innocent. In
light of my exegetical emphasis on Hobbes’s relational conception of power,
we can see that popular desire does not simply or consistently oppose in-
equality. As Leviathan, Chapter 10, explains in detail, people curry favour
with the powerful, hoping to benefit or at least avoid harm from that power.
As I argued in Chapter 2, Section 2.4 and Chapter 4, Section 4.2, this behav-
iour consolidates and amplifies the power of the powerful: indeed, human
power is relationally constituted. Thus, even if people do wish to be formally
respected as equals, so many aspects of their everyday behaviour have va-
lence as honour and unintentionally contribute to the emergence of great
inequalities of power. People’s attitudes towards these emergent inequalities
are ambivalent: they may resent the special privileges that the great enjoy
at the hands of the sovereign, and they may resent the might of the great if
they suffer under it. But at the same time, they may accept or enthusiasti-
cally endorse the power of their own patron and accept their subservience
to that patron. A sovereign may act contrary to duty and grant privileges to a
mighty person not because it wants to treat subjects unequally, but out of fear
of the mighty person’s power (L 146–​147, 10.51, 496–​497, 28.25), which in
turn rests on the person’s popular following. It is a key threat to the common-
wealth that the masses celebrate the impunity of the powerful with whom
they are allied: ‘[T]‌he popularity of a potent subject . . . is a dangerous di-
sease, because the people . . . by the flattery and by the reputation of an am-
bitious man, are drawn away from their obedience to the laws’ (L 516–​517,
29.20). As I argued in Chapter 4, Section 4.4, power blocs in the multitude
are problematic because their very existence diminishes the absoluteness of
sovereign power and lays the groundwork for the destabilization of the po-
litical order. The problem of equality is not only the arrogance of the mighty;

54 Ibid., 110.
 Repressive Egalitarianism 135

it is the pervasive willingness of everyone else to defer to and ally with the
mighty. If only subjects were so consistent in their egalitarianism as Hoekstra
portrays.
I have characterized this repressive egalitarianism as expressing a certain
conception of and positive commitment to popular power, where its popular
character is seen most vividly in its opposition to informal private oligarchy.
I now turn to consider the implications of this repressive egalitarianism for
the formal institutions of government. Hobbes urges sovereigns to take into
account information and demands sourced in detail from across the entire
country:

The best Counsell, in those things that concern . . . the ease, and benefit the
Subjects may enjoy . . . is to be taken from the generall informations, and
complaints of the people of each Province, who are best acquainted with
their own wants, and ought therefore, when they demand nothing in der-
ogation of the essentiall Rights of Sovereignty, to be diligently taken notice
of. (L 548–​549, 30.27)

But what is the institutional means to this end? As foreshadowed earlier,

Hobbes is triply hostile to democratic solutions. He is sceptical regarding
claims to speak in the name of the people; he rejects any need for a sovereign
to be responsive; and he is hostile to governance by democratic assembly.
Martel argues that beneath Hobbes’s official hostility towards popular ex-
pression not mediated by the sovereign, Leviathan in fact endorses the spon-
taneous unmediated expression of the people’s will.55 But to the contrary,
I will show that Hobbes’s repressive egalitarian conception of popular po-
tentia makes sense of his anti-​democratic commitments.
Hobbes’s explicit reason for scepticism regarding claims to speak in the
name of the people is part of his juridical theory of collective agency: without
formal personation, the multitude remains just a collection of separate
individuals (L 248–​251, 16.13–​14). Martel’s suggestion sidesteps this argu-
ment and invokes a non-​juridical emergent voice of the multitude. But what
would this be? The actual de facto expressed will of the people? As I outlined
in Chapter 4, Section 4.4, and elaborated earlier in this present section,

55 Martel, Subverting the Leviathan, 3, 242. In what follows, I do not address Martel’s highly conten-

tious interpretive strategy, instead focussing my criticisms on the coherence of the substantive view
that he develops.
136 Hobbes

Hobbes’s account of the concrete power potentia of informal associations

poses its own obstacles to identifying a will of the people distinct from the
state. First, there is no reason to think that the expressed will of the people
will be a single coherent thing; there may be two or more identifiable emer-
gent wills corresponding to different groupings within the multitude. And
second, even the expressed will of a given grouping does not necessarily dis-
play the egalitarian shape that might render it normatively and politically
appealing. If the potentia of the masses is oligarchic, then so too will be the
de facto expressed will: people conform their speech and conduct to secure
their favour and protection within informal power blocs in the multitude.
It can be the impure result of interested parties capturing the popular im-
agination for their own self-​interested purposes.56 A Hobbesian analysis of
the multitude’s power foreshadows Schumpeter’s famous argument centuries
later that there is no natural object ‘the will of the people’.57
Hobbes is not merely sceptical about the credentials of a natural de facto
will of the people; he is also sceptical about the people’s will as expressed by
public assemblies. One might have thought that democratic or parliamentary
institutions offer a proper gauge of popular will, because the formal political
equality of those institutions overcomes and overrides the power blocs of the
multitude. In a common way of thinking about popular power, amongst the
radicals of Hobbes’s time as well as more recently, the key question is who
holds formal power and franchise; it is implicitly presumed that this will be
a good guide to political outcomes.58 Rulers tend to rule for themselves; it
is necessary to have the people rule. But for Hobbes especially in his later
works, far from democratic institutions being sufficient to establish political
equality, they in fact run contrary to this goal. At best, the formally egali-
tarian structure might simply reflect the background power inequalities;59
but Hobbes argues that an even worse outcome is likely. Recall the discus-
sion of counsel in Section 5.3: Hobbes believes that democratic institutions

56 A sharp topical example is provided by political events in Australia in 2011. The Australian

mining industry mounted a public relations campaign that unseated the ruling prime minister, as a
fairly transparent retaliation for his attempts to tax mining companies at a greater rate. Mark Davis, ‘A
Snip at $22m to Get Rid of PM’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 February 2011.
57 Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 250–​268.
58 Indeed, this is the key question underlying De Cive’s conception of the sleeping democratic sov-

ereign, recently celebrated by Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, 86–​106.

59 Similarly, Marx observes that a formally popular constitution may not challenge the underlying

oligarchic social relations with the social body; to the contrary, it may perpetuate and solidify it.
Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique’, 61. The Hobbesian framework offers the advantage that it can
understand power beyond its economic forms.
 Repressive Egalitarianism 137

perversely compound the problem, by providing a stage on which undesir-

able hierarchical power blocs in the multitude can be magnified.
This brings us back to Tuck’s proposal for despotic democratic sovereignty.
Tuck’s proposal is distinct from rule by a democratic assembly: he imagines a
non-​assembled, non-​deliberative mass plebiscitary vote. For now, put aside
the problem already discussed in Chapter 4 for this kind of ‘sleeping sov-
ereign’ to maintain its real power. Presuming this despotic sovereign is ef-
fective (that is, its votes make a difference and are respected and obeyed), is
it a good gauge of popular will? Even Rousseau, arch-​democrat, expresses
grave reservations: Rousseau promotes popular decision-​making only when
it is conducted by the vote of a sufficiently informed populace with no com-
munication amongst voters. Tuck emphasizes Hobbes’s Rousseauvian worry
about mass deliberation, and it is for precisely this reason that Tuck argues
that democratic sovereignty finds its most meaningful expression via ple-
biscitary vote.60 But it is unclear how Rousseau imagined voting could be
insulated from communication amongst voters; and certainly, the plebisci-
tary voting that Tuck recommends invites a period of campaigning in which
there is ample room for opportunistic political competition. Witness the
2016 Brexit vote, in which there was ample campaigning, a fair part of which
was arguably driven by factional struggles for power.61 Furthermore, even
supposing there could be truly non-​deliberative voting, Rousseau does not
believe that the good operation of sovereignty is automatic: on his account, it
presupposes a small and equal population.62
Hobbes grants that it is in principle possible that a public assembly in a large
country might operate as it should, as an egalitarian and reliable measure of
interests. But this would depend on certain particular conditions: members
should be united by fear of a foreign enemy, or by ‘mutuall feare of equall
factions’ (L 412–​413, 25.16). Presumably the same applies to the de facto will

60 Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, 5–​6.

61 The popular credentials of plebiscites are further diminished when we consider the process by
which the plebiscitary question is set in the first place: this process offers ample opportunity for cyn-
ical shaping of the plebiscitary outcome. For two particularly egregious examples, consider the 1999
Australian Republican Referendum, and the 1962 Singapore Referendum on Merger. In 1999, polling
suggested high levels of support for no longer having the queen of England as Australian head of
state, but the referendum question (set by a pro-​monarchy prime minister) offered only a choice
between an American-​style presidency or retaining the status quo. Entirely predictably, Australians
voted against the American system. In 1962, all three options on the ballot, as well as all spoilt ballots,
effectively supported the government’s favoured policy of Singapore’s merger with Malaysia. Melanie
Chew, Leaders of Singapore (Singapore: Resource Press, 1996), 92.
62 In particular there must be minimal economic inequality, and no separate powerful towns.

Rousseau, The Social Contract, 2.11, 3.13.

138 Hobbes

of the popular multitude even prior to its entry into parliament. But short
of these exceptional circumstances, private power stands as a problem;
Hobbes’s solution is equal treatment via repressive egalitarianism. Popular
power worthy of the name is only to be had through the state that aggres-
sively manages the informal power dynamics of the social body. Simply ap-
pealing to the will of the people, even as channelled through democratic
process, is not enough, unless private power is tackled. This analysis reveals
the fundamental inadequacy of juridical readings of Hobbes.
This analysis of Hobbesian politics from the point of view of concrete
power provides a solution to a dilemma, originally posed by Hobbes’s con-
temporary critics, and recently resurrected by Hoekstra.63 Hoekstra claims
there is a dilemma for Hobbes’s conception of the unity of sovereignty. Either
it is possible to unify distinct entities into a single sovereign, or it is not. But
Hobbes appears to want it both ways: he allows that the multitude can be uni-
fied into a single democratic sovereign, but he rejects the possibility that the
various political bodies of a mixed constitution could together constitute a
single sovereign. Hoekstra does not see a convincing distinction between the
two cases. However, analysing through the lens of relations of potentia, the
distinction between the cases becomes clear. In asking whether a collection
of parts can constitute a collective with a single will (a sovereign will), the key
question is whether the parts have the power potentia to challenge or destabi-
lize the sovereign so formed. When the parts are the various political bodies
of the mixed constitution, some of them may well have hope of success from
their private power potentia to challenge the collective decision. But when
the parts are mere isolated individuals, with their possibility of collective ac-
tion with their fellow citizens stymied by a thoroughgoing policy of repres-
sive egalitarianism, then they do not have sufficient potentia to mount any
such challenge. In result, only under a despotic (non-​mixed) sovereign can
there be any hope to generate a sovereign with power potentia proportional
to its right.
Hobbes’s late absolutism can be seen as an attempt to break down the
conflictual oligarchy of the multitude and recombine it as disempowered
equality. This amounts to an attempt to achieve, but now through delib-
erate effort, the social domain of fragmented equality that was blithely
presupposed in his early civil science. In his commitment to eviscerating
private power, Hobbes crushes expressions of public will as mediated by

63 Hoekstra, ‘Early Modern Absolutism and Constitutionalism’, 1092–​1094.

 Repressive Egalitarianism 139

traditional and emergent communities and groupings, whether in the

public sphere or in political assemblies. He views civil society as fractious
and oligarchic. But through this repression, Hobbes also takes subjects out
of the power of private power blocs and establishes equal standing for the
entire populace. No doubt Hobbes’s analysis takes too sanguine a view of
aristocracy and monarchy’s credentials. No doubt there is something per-
verse about insisting on human equality, only then to be most happy to
hand over the reins of absolute power to a single individual or small aristo-
cratic assembly. No doubt the ruling class of the state represents the most
privileged site of hierarchy, and entrenches unequal power. But what re-
mains valuable in Hobbes’s analysis is his withering scepticism of claims to
speak for the people. Hobbesian analysis poses challenges to a politics that
fears state power, but which turns a blind eye to the non-​state powers that
shape and control individuals’ lives.

5.5. The Conditions of Success of Hobbes’s Politics

For Hobbes, a proper science of politics should explain the causes of war
in such a way that human industry can in the future prevent it (DCo 1.7).
Indeed, Hobbes claims to have found out principles of reason (expressed in
his account of the rights of sovereignty) such that a commonwealth organized
according to those principles may be everlasting (barring external violence)
(L 522–​523, 30.5). In that spirit, accepting the regime of rights and duties that
Hobbes claims reason gives us, I ask whether the resultant model of politics
concretely offers peace. In my discussion, I have identified and analysed a
threat to peace, what I have called the political problem. If a commonwealth
is correctly constituted according to the principles of Hobbes’s civil science,
is it possible for the sovereign to garner concrete obedience commensurate
to absolute potestas? Will subjects in fact durably submit to such a sovereign?
Does Hobbes’s absolutism account for the genesis of the concrete behaviour
of both subjects and sovereign that it relies upon? Many commentators do
not consider this concrete standard of success. Traditionally it has been more
common to focus on juridical questions of the rationality and justification of
the system of rights and obligations. The secondary literature emphasizing
rhetoric and education does obliquely consider concrete success, and is gen-
erally optimistic that, given sufficient education of the subjects and sovereign
in their civil duties, peace will be secured. The model works, not in virtue
140 Hobbes

of fear of punishment alone, but only through fear of punishment when

supplemented with civil indoctrination.64
I grant that for the most part, Hobbes himself appears optimistic about pos-
sibilities of indoctrination in civil duties for the masses and sovereign, as de-
tailed in Sections 5.2 and 5.3. However, the upshot of my discussion over the last
four chapters is to bring into view the broader organizational and interpersonal
determinants of compliance or non-​compliance with duty. Thus, Hobbes’s civil
indoctrination must operate in tandem with persistent and farsighted efforts to
minimize the size and strength of power blocs. For there is a limit to the efficacy
of rhetorical and educational strategies taken alone to overcome the political
problem, due to the indocibility of some and the excess docibility of others.
Hobbes himself complains that unlike the masses, powerful individuals
tend to be insubordinate and refuse to accept his doctrine, often instead
spreading seditious counterdoctrines. The elite and the educated are resistant
to his educational and rhetorical program. He diagnoses possible grounds
for their resistance in the most unflattering of terms: far from being inter-
ested in understanding true civil science, they do not even work to achieve
the practical prudence that they cultivate in their private business. For in
public affairs, they are more interested in maintaining a reputation for wit
and do not care if the public business goes to ruin (L 76–​77, 5.22). Hobbes
reflects most on these problems in the case of democracy, where there is an
assembly in which these powerful individuals seek to capture allegiance. But
equally in monarchies a related problem presses: for the universities and
churches continue to exist as forums in which insubordinate individuals pro-
mote their doctrines. ‘Potent men, digest hardly any thing that setteth up a
Power to bridle their affections; and Learned men, any thing that discovereth
their errours, and thereby lesseneth their Authority’ (L 524–​525, 30.6). In
other words, the powerful uphold seditious civil doctrines because they
hope better to preserve their own private power, wealth, and status thereby.
Certainly, a prudent sovereign seeks to suppress such doctrines and promote
the correct doctrine of rights of sovereignty, but these elites are ex hypothesi
already powerful, so effort to force their compliance is fraught.65

64 Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker, 165–​169; Sreedhar, Hobbes on Self-​Defence, 163–​167;

Johnston, The Rhetoric of ‘Leviathan’, 163; MacPherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism,
97–​99; Tarlton, ‘Creation and Maintenance’, 313–​324; Pettit, Made with Words, 111. By contrast,
Garsten argues the model will not be successful. Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of
Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 17–​18, 184–​185.
65 Frost emphasizes that Hobbes does make some allowance for special strategies to neutralize

powerful subjects—​bestowing titles of honour and corresponding privileges on ambitious people,

 Repressive Egalitarianism 141

Hobbes himself identifies the problem on the side of the elite; but one
might wonder whether there is an opposite difficulty on the side of the
masses: the problem of excess docibility. As discussed earlier, given the insuf-
ficient public interest in philosophy, the masses are taught their duty without
necessarily understanding its rational grounding. Their duty is impressed on
them through religiously imbued imagery and ritual; they are encouraged
in habits of deference to authority, including deference to the sovereign’s au-
thority over religion and scriptural interpretation. But as Qudrat argues, this
is in itself risky, because deference to authority is achieved at the expense
of judgement and understanding. With the capacity to think critically about
religion dampened, the masses become vulnerable to any false prophet
claiming religious sanction for their political projects.66 This point might
apply equally to secular political pretenders: in hard or tumultuous times,
subjects who have imbibed the lesson of uncritical submission to authority in
return for promised security might be tempted by strong usurpers.
Thus indoctrination alone is not sufficient to solve the political
problem: rather, what is required is indoctrination combined with the
substantive weakness of would-​be usurpers. At the foundation of good
Hobbesian politics lies the multitude of fragmented equality, maintained
through a persistent labour to diminish and disband potential counterpowers
in the social body. If the power of associations is repressed in this way,
the sovereign, as sole bearer of the person of the people, acts freely for the
population’s interests, guided by the prompting of good counsel and without
grassroots pressure. In the English Leviathan, Hobbes expresses confidence
that a commonwealth properly constituted according to his account of the
rights of the sovereign will be everlasting. Perhaps this confidence falters
a little: by the time of the later Latin edition, the corresponding passage is
more chastened: ‘Whether the principles which I have set forth above can
produce this result, I do not know’ (L 522–​523, 30.5). It is possible that the
practical deliverances of Hobbes’s civil science may be less perfect than
he initially expected, but they are far from absurd or incoherent. Indeed,

in order to enlist them as allies of the sovereign (L 138–​139, 146–​147, 10.35–​36, 10.52; Frost, Lessons
from a Materialist Thinker, 161–​163). But such a strategy requires caution, because it risks sliding
into appeasement of the powerful; it emboldens them and threatens the sovereign’s supremacy (L
494–​496, 536–​537, 28.24–​25, 30.16).

66 Maryam Qudrat, ‘Confronting Jihad: A Defect in the Hobbesian Educational Strategy’, in

Hobbes Today: Insights for the 21st Century, edited by S. A. Lloyd (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), 229–​240.
142 Hobbes

Singapore might offer an instance of Hobbesian government: government is

via expert counsel for the public good, including comprehensive and (at least
in the early decades post-​independence) egalitarian public provision of the
citizenry’s needs; formally democratic but organized so as to crush all non-​
governmental collective organization.67
A striking feature of Hobbes’s solution is the imperfection of the mech-
anism ensuring sovereign action in accord with duty. The two extreme cases
are easy. On the one hand, suppose the sovereign receives good counsel
and acts appropriately on this counsel: suppose it prudently and justly
discharges its duty to serve the people, all the while repressing the emer-
gence of counterpowers. Then it will have solved the political problem, and
will enjoy peace and prosperity. On the other hand, suppose the sovereign
entirely ignores the good counsel it receives, and rules in a self-​serving and
reckless manner. Then it will incur the political problem, and will suffer
dissent, turmoil, and eventually, collapse. The challenging case is the inter-
mediate one. Suppose the sovereign listens selectively to the good counsel
it receives: it carefully represses counterpowers, it rules well enough not to
arouse immense indignation, but its manner of rule remains self-​serving.
Such a sovereign avoids the political problem and secures its own stability.
But it can simultaneously quite contentedly enrich itself and fail to advance
the common good, because it faces no challenge to its poor rule.
Hobbes is untroubled by this feature of his proposal: for if his civil science
is correct, then there are no other alternatives for achieving peace apart from
repressive egalitarianism. In this case, the lack of insurance against the stably
unjust regime must be borne, as the price of peace: this just attests to the
imperfection of human existence in general. But might there be a different
way to deal with the power blocs of the multitude? Rather than crushing
those groups, is it possible instead to think about their positive political po-
tentiality? Rather than weakening and fragmenting, might it be possible to
strengthen and integrate them, such that they can improve rather than ruin

67 See Chua Beng Huat, ‘Towards a Non-​ liberal Communitarian Democracy’, Communitarian
Ideology and Democracy in Singapore (New York: Routledge, 2006), 184–​202; Chua Beng Huat,
Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press,
2017), 176–​194; Cherian George, Freedom from the Press: Journalism and State Power in Singapore
(Singapore: NUS Press, 2012), 93–​116. Chua sharply identifies some supplementary mechanisms
containing elite indocibility in Singapore. Elite dissent is readily dissipated by permitting its expres-
sion through subversive theatre productions. Chua Beng Huat, ‘Disavowing Liberalism: Political
Development in Singapore since 1980s’, talk delivered at Yale-​NUS College, 12 October 2017.
Chua also emphasizes the aspiration of the elite to state-​sector employment. Chua, Liberalism
Disavowed, 182.
 Repressive Egalitarianism 143

the state’s commitment to the common good? I will return to consider this
possibility in my discussion of Spinozan popular power in Chapter 9.
With this section, I draw now to the end of my consideration of Hobbes’s
politics, and with it, I come to the end of the first half of the book. Hobbes
has laid down a fundamental provocation: there is nothing good about the
prepolitical multitude itself. The multitude is fractious and oligarchic, and
something needs to be done to overcome its tendency to internal conflict.
Focussing on the potentia of the multitude leads us decisively away from
Tuck’s radical democracy, as a proposal reflecting an inadequate analysis
both of popularity and of power. If popular power is reconceived as collective
potentia that has eliminated capture by private interests, then Hobbes’s own
model for realizing popular power is what I have called a repressive egali-
tarianism: a levelling-​down equality that seeks to weaken and fragment the
multitude in order to bring it to submit to sovereign rule and thereby consti-
tute itself as a peaceful commonwealth. Repressive egalitarianism eliminates
grassroots collective pressure as much as it can: without the disproportionate
influence of particular factions, the sovereign is freed to rule according to
its best, well-​counselled judgement. In the second half of the book, I turn
to Spinoza’s analysis of the multitude’s potentia, which is alleged to provide
a rather different grounding of radical democracy. But for this to succeed, it
must address the worry about informal oligarchy that Hobbes so insistently
raises.
 PART II
SPINO Z A
 6
Ethics and Efficacy

6.1. Introduction

The core concern of this book is power and popular politics. If there is such
a thing as popular power, what precisely is it? Radical democrats attempt to
locate popular power somehow more authentically in the power of a pop-
ulation, rather than in the regular institutions of the state: the agent of this
popular power could be a Hobbesian-​inspired, plebiscitary, absolute, dem-
ocratic sovereign, or a Spinozist-​inspired spontaneous multitude.1 But these
attempts raise critical questions. Are plebiscites and social movements them-
selves always so pure? In what sense are their decisions and actions more
truly reflective of popular power, whatever that might mean, than the insti-
tutional forms of politics? This book uses a novel reading of Hobbes’s and
Spinoza’s philosophies to establish and defend a new conception of popular
power. The new conception still facilitates a critical attitude to institutional
politics, but it does so without relying upon a romanticized view of non-​
institutional politics.
Having discussed Hobbes in the first half of the book, now in this second
half of the book I turn to his slightly younger contemporary Spinoza.
Notwithstanding Tuck’s promotion of a ‘democratic Hobbes’, to most readers
Hobbes remains a deeply anti-​popular thinker. Spinoza’s practical political
prescriptions appear more pro-​popular and less authoritarian than Hobbes’s;
this is often explained as a consequence of his focus on concrete power. On
the standard interpretations, Hobbes, theorist of juridical power potestas,
is the proponent of repressive political forms; Spinoza, theorist of concrete
power potentia, promotes liberal or even radically liberatory democracy.
This is because the concrete potentia of the popular multitude constitutes a

1 Multitudo, multitude or crowd, is a term found in both Hobbes and Spinoza. Hobbes contrasts

multitudo, as a mass of individuals without reference to juridical organization, to populus, the people
as a juridically defined mass agent (DC 6.1; see my Chapter 3, Section 3.2). In Spinoza’s hands, the
term appears to have a similar meaning, but it does more positive work in his politics even as its pre-
cise conceptual structure remains elusive. This has generated disagreement amongst interpreters, as
I will elaborate subsequently.

Potentia. Sandra Leonie Field, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197533864.001.0001
148 Spinoza

limit on sovereign power potestas, a limit that juridical projections of potestas

ignore at their peril. On the view of radical democratic Spinozists, popular
power is the power potentia of the multitude, and it finds its exemplary ex-
pression in social movements and mass insurgencies.
These standard accounts are not entirely false, but they rest on an unsus-
tainably romantic theory of concrete popular power. In the first half of the
book, I demonstrated that Hobbes not only theorizes juridical power, but
in his later writings also provides an account of concrete power potentia of
emergent groupings. Collectivities can have concrete power, but this power
is not necessarily normatively appealing: for the internal dynamics of the
multitude often spontaneously generate oligarchy and conflict. Insofar as the
multitude’s potentia does not sufficiently support sovereign potestas (or in the
terms of my preceding chapters, insofar as the political problem arises), then
Hobbes’s solution is not to defer to the multitude, but to the contrary, to over-
come its oligarchic and conflictual tendency by deepening its fragmentation
and disempowerment. I have labelled Hobbes’s proposal repressive egalitar-
ianism, focussed on crushing non-​state powers, and I have claimed that it
reflects a commitment to a useful (albeit thin) conception of popular power.
If Spinoza’s account of the concrete power potentia of the multitude appears
so different in its political implications, what accounts for these differences?
Does Spinoza mean something different by power than Hobbes, or does
he offer some different analysis of concrete power’s dynamics that allows it
to overcome its undesirable features? Does the Spinozist perspective truly
support conceiving social movements as exemplary of popular power? And
if not, what should replace that conception? My answer to these questions
unfolds over the four chapters of the second half of the book. Regarding
popularity: I criticize the idea that there is anything innocent or necessarily
wholesome about the concrete power potentia of Spinoza’s multitude. Just as
for Hobbes, the multitude’s power may harbour antisocial and hierarchical
tendencies; it can break apart in conflict, or (depending on your perspective)
even worse, it can hold together to maintain and entrench its own inner hier-
archical forms. And regarding power: for Spinoza just as for Hobbes, I argue
that all power must be judged within its actual social and relational context;
and that any overall characterization of the power expressed in a given polit-
ical order should be determined at the level of systematic outcomes. In result,
a Spinozist account of popular power does not rely on appeal to a naturally
existing mass democratic subject, nor even on a great faith in the democratic
process per se. Rather, Spinozist popular power is expressed when the entire
 Ethics and Efficacy 149

ecology of a political order durably generates equality and participation.

Spinoza’s difference from Hobbes lies not primarily in the fundamental con-
ception of popular power as potentia, but in his estimation of the means best
adapted to this end: Spinoza grants the possibility of good and civic forms of
pressure on the holder of sovereignty, which can consolidate the orientation
of the state to the common good. Against Hobbesian repressive egalitari-
anism, Spinoza offers a model of civic strengthening: the meticulous insti-
tutional cultivation and consolidation of non-​oligarchic forms of citizenly
action.
More specifically, I carry out my argument in the following steps. For
this chapter, I schematize two broad interpretive approaches to Spinoza’s
political philosophy: what I call the radical approach; and the constitu-
tionalist approach. Against the sunny romanticism pervading both these
interpretations’ conceptions of popular power, I pose three Hobbesian
problems: the problem of the multitude’s inner oligarchy; the problem of
nonideal endurance; and the problem of democracy’s perverse effects. In
Chapter 7, I establish a new interpretation of Spinoza’s political conception
of potentia from within his broader metaphysical framework. Centrally,
I distinguish between, on the one hand, potentia operandi (power of pro-
ducing effects), which I argue corresponds closely to Hobbes’s late notion of
power (potentia); and on the other hand, potentia agendi (power of acting),
associated with a thing’s essence and virtue. Politically, this manifests as a
distinction between merely having right, versus being in control of one’s
own right (being sui juris); it raises but does not answer the question of
the relation between the sui juris status of a political collectivity and the
sui juris status of the members making up that collectivity. In Chapter 8,
I establish a more precise way to characterize a thing’s own proper power
of acting, building on an interpretation of being sui juris as homeostasis.
I then use this analytical frame to explain how and in what sense Spinoza
acknowledges both the Hobbesian problem of the multitude’s inner ol-
igarchy, and the problem of nonideal regime endurance. In Chapter 9,
I establish a neo-​Spinozist criterion of popular power, whereby popular
power is judged at the level of systematic effects and outcomes of a political
order. I provide a taxonomy of organizational elements that might best ad-
dress the Hobbesian problem of democracy’s perverse effects and thereby
express meaningful popular power. In this frame, social movements and
insurgencies are decentred: they are no longer the exemplary expression
of popular power as the radical Spinozist would have it, but rather are one
150 Spinoza

partial element within a larger political ecology that may or may not have
an overall popular character.
Before starting my substantive argument, let me offer a note on the texts.
Spinoza’s political philosophy is primarily to be found in his Theological-​
Political Treatise (1670) and his Political Treatise (1677), then also to a lesser
extent in his Ethics (1677).2 The comparison of Hobbesian and Spinozist
concepts has a strong historical rationale: Spinoza’s Theological-​Political
Treatise transparently takes Hobbes’s writings as a starting point, mod-
elling itself on Hobbes’s terminology, and developing its anti-​Hobbesian
conclusions from within a robustly Hobbesian theoretical frame, leading
Curley to characterize Spinoza as being on the surface nothing more than
an ‘eccentric Hobbesian’.3 Spinoza was in a good position to engage with
Hobbesian ideas: he owned Hobbes’s De Cive in his private library; and it is
possible that Spinoza had access to Leviathan.4
Even though I will ultimately argue that Spinoza’s potentia operandi is sim-
ilar to the potentia of Hobbes’s later writings, I am not arguing that he nec-
essarily cribbed it from Leviathan. For first, as I have argued in Chapter 4,
Hobbes’s non-​juridical conception of power, especially of non-​juridical col-
lective power, remains submerged in Leviathan, subordinated to the domi-
nant discussion of juridical power; second, Spinoza himself makes a strongly
juridical characterization of Hobbes’s philosophy; and third, Spinoza’s theory

2 Only the Theological-​Political Treatise was published during Spinoza’s lifetime. By Curley’s esti-

mation, the first two parts of the Ethics were written by around 1665; the Theological-​Political Treatise
was completed in 1669; the remaining three parts of the Ethics were written by 1675; and the Political
Treatise was still in progress at the time of Spinoza’s death in 1677, resulting in an incomplete dis-
cussion of democracy (as I will consider in detail in Chapter 9). Benedict de Spinoza, The Collected
Works of Spinoza, Vol, 1, translated by Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1985), 405–​406; Benedict de Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. 2, translated by Edwin
Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 59, 491.
3 Curley offers this only as a provisional characterization, before subsequently emphasizing deeper

differences between the two thinkers and outlining Spinoza’s similarities to Machiavelli. Edwin
Curley, ‘Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan’, in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, edited by
Don Garrett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 315–​318, 328–​333.
4 The inventory of Spinoza’s library on his death includes Hobbes, Elementa Philosophica (Jacob

Freudenthal, Die Lebensgeschichte Spinoza’s in Quellenschriften, Urkunden und Nichtamtlichen

Nachrichten [Leipzig: Verlag von Veit & Comp., 1899], 163). Elementa Philosophica is the title of
Hobbes’s three-​volume systematic presentation of his philosophy, including De Corpore, De Cive,
and De Homine. It is not clear from the somewhat telegraphic inventory whether Spinoza held all
three volumes; but commentators presume he held at least De Cive. Spinoza did not read English, but
it is likely he had access to Leviathan: a Dutch translation appeared in 1667, and the Latin Leviathan
was republished in Amsterdam in 1668. Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and Spinoza’, Aspects of Hobbes
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 41, 47. Schoneveld claims that Spinoza had access to the
in-​progress Dutch translation of Leviathan while he was writing the Theological-​Political Treatise.
Cornelis W. Schoneveld, Intertraffic of the Mind: Studies in Seventeenth-​Century Anglo-​Dutch
Translation (Leiden: Brill, 1983), 40.
 Ethics and Efficacy 151

of political potentia has organic connection to Spinoza’s larger systematic

philosophy. Thus, my thesis about similarities between their theories does
not rely on strong claims of whether Spinoza read Leviathan or not.
Whereas Hobbes’s three core political works are essentially revisions of
the same text, by contrast Spinoza’s two political treatises are substantially
different documents. I gave a stylized account of the relation between these
treatises in my Chapter 1, Section 1.2. However, I grant that that account was
somewhat reductive. There are numerous differences of structure, topic, em-
phasis, terminology, and concepts,5 and there is debate in the secondary lit-
erature about what exactly these differences might amount to. Furthermore,
between the two texts, there was a period of great political turmoil in the
Dutch republic, including the lynching of Republican leader Jan de Witt by
an angry mob, and the resurgence of a quasi-​monarchical stadtholder;6 there
is debate regarding the degree to which the changes were prompted by po-
litical events.7 In my arguments, I make use of both political texts, in combi-
nation with the Ethics for systematic background. However, given (as I will
argue in Chapter 7, Section 7.3.2) its superior conceptualization of potentia,
the Political Treatise will emerge as the authoritative text.

6.2. Spinoza’s Immanent Critique of Hobbes

The standard account of the core conceptual difference between the polit-
ical philosophies of Hobbes and Spinoza is that Spinoza understands politics
through concrete power potentia, whereas Hobbes understands it through

5 Prima facie differences include a significantly diminished theoretical prominence of a social

contract; the emergence of the concept of the multitude; the greater consideration of monarchy and
aristocracy; the lesser attention to imagination, religion, faith; and the more minute focus on institu-
tional design.
6 For an overview of the historical and political context of Spinoza’s writing, see footnotes 27 and

28 in Chapter 1.
7 There is a considerable literature that limits itself exclusively to the earlier Theological-​Political

Treatise. But of those commentaries that read the two texts together, notable accounts of the change in
the texts include Balibar and Negri, who (in different ways) find a deepening of the theory of democ-
racy; and Feuer and Prokhovnik, who argue that Spinoza becomes more favourable to aristocracy.
Étienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, translated by Peter Snowdon (New York: Verso, 1998), 51–​
75; Antonio Negri, ‘The Political Treatise, or, the Foundation of Modern Democracy’, in Subversive
Spinoza: (Un)contemporary Variations, edited by Timothy S. Murphy (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2004), 22–​24; Feuer, Rise of Liberalism, 136–​197; Raia Prokhovnik, Spinoza and
Republicanism (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 75, 181. For a recent account of the rela-
tion between the texts that does not find any strong difference in regime preference, see Justin D.
Steinberg, Spinoza’s Political Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
152 Spinoza

juridical power potestas. In this section, I lay out the standard account, but
I argue that it rests on an uncharitable characterization of Hobbes’s mature
political philosophy.
The prima facie puzzle posed by the political texts of Hobbes and
Spinoza is how, from a very similar starting frame, they end up with such
pointedly different political prescriptions.8 Spinoza, like Hobbes, moves
from a state of nature, via a transfer of right, to an absolute state (TTP
III/​190, 16.8, III/​193, 16.25; TP 2.15–​17). But even a brief glance at the
texts reveals Spinoza frequently evincing a greater sympathy for pop-
ular political forms and a greater hostility to absolute rule than does
Hobbes.9 Whereas Hobbes grants the sovereign right over religion and
requires subjects to comply outwardly, Spinoza supports free expression
and freedom of religious affiliation (TTP III/​239–​240, 20.1–​9). Whereas
Hobbes denies the possibility of popular right apart from its authorita-
tive expression through the state (DC 6.1–​2), for Spinoza, the terms are
reversed: the state is defined in terms of the right and power of the mul-
titude, and he allows that that power might be withdrawn and turned
against the state (TP 2.17, 3.9). Whereas Hobbes appears to approve of
democracy only insofar as it minimizes popular participation and contes-
tation, for Spinoza a monarchical state becomes more absolute insofar as
royal power is mediated by strong laws and a strong popular assembly (TP
6.8, 7.1). Regarding the relative merits of the three forms of sovereignty,
Spinoza expresses a preference for rather than against democracy (TTP
III/​74, 5.23–​25, III/​194–​195, 16.30, 16.36; TP 8.3, 9.1).
An obvious starting point for understanding the differences between the
thinkers is their divergent conceptions of right jus. In a letter to his friend
Jelles, Spinoza explicitly identifies this as the crux of his political difference
from Hobbes.

8 The classic framing of this problem is found in Curley, ‘Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan’,

317–​318.
9 There are genuine differences between the thinkers, even without going so far as Israel, who poses

Spinoza as the founder of the modern values of egalitarianism, democracy, secularism, and univer-
salism. Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of
Modern Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 241. For a polemical criticism
of the anachronism of such characterizations of Spinoza’s political views, see Yitzhak Y. Melamed,
‘Charitable Interpretations and the Political Domestication of Spinoza, or, Benedict in the Land of the
Secular Imagination’, in Philosophy and Its History: Aims and Methods in the Study of Early Modern
Philosophy, edited by Justin Smith, Mogens Laerke, and Eric Schliesser (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 258–​277.
 Ethics and Efficacy 153

As far as Politics is concerned, the difference you ask about, between

Hobbes and me, is this: I always preserve natural Right unimpaired, and
I maintain that in each State the Supreme Magistrate has no more right over
its subjects than it has greater power over them. This is always the case in
the state of Nature. (Ep 50, IV/​239b)10

Indeed, in the state of nature, the philosophers are in broad agreement. For
Spinoza,

[T]‌he Right and Established Practice of nature [Jus & Institutum naturæ],
under which all are born and for the most part live, prohibits nothing ex-
cept what no one desires and what no one can do: not disputes, not anger,
not deception. Without qualification, it is not averse to anything appetite
urges. (TTP III/​190, 16.9)

Similarly, Hobbes claims that ‘nature has given each man a right to all things’
(DC 1.8), and each individual’s rights do not generate any corresponding
duties in others (DC 1.10; L 198–​199, 14.4). But this superficial agreement
rests on a divergent underlying understanding of right. Whereas Hobbes
conceives of rights as juridical permissions to exercise power (potentia) (DC
1.7; L 198–​199, 14.1–​2), for Spinoza rights are not mere permissions. At the
foundation of his political philosophy is his notorious11 assertion that right,
jus, is coextensive with power, potentia (TTP III/​189, 16.3–​4; TP 2.3–​4).
Juridical right can be handed over, but for Spinoza, ‘No one will ever be able
to transfer to another his power, or consequently, his right [suam potentiam
& consequenter neque suum jus], in such a way that he ceases to be a man’
(TTP III/​201, 17.2): each thing always keeps its potentia (and thus any right
corresponding to that potentia) (TTP III/​201, 17.1–​5). This underlying di-
vergence generates distinct analyses of the state’s right. On the one hand, we
have Hobbes, theorist of sovereign power potestas constructed out of absolute

10 I provide the passage in English, not in Latin, because the original letter was composed in Dutch,

and only subsequently translated into Latin. Furthermore, Curley argues that the Latin translation
was probably not at Spinoza’s own hand: for he argues Spinoza probably meant to write Staat (=
state = civitas) not Stat (= city = urbs), but the Latin provides urbs (Spinoza, Collected Works, Vol. 2,
406 n. 70). Given the unreliability of this letter’s Latin, when I reconstruct the systematic relation of
Spinoza’s terms, I will not attach much weight to the letter’s translation of power as potestas rather
than potentia, focussing instead on Spinoza’s own Latin presentation in his treatises.
11 Now notorious, but not unusual in Dutch intellectual life of the time. For a discussion of Dutch

attempts to de-​juridify Hobbes in this period, especially in the works of the De La Courts, see
Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and Spinoza’, 40–​46.
154 Spinoza

transfer of juridical right ius, leaving subjects lacking in any right against the
sovereign; on the other hand, we have Spinoza, theorist of potentia, where po-
tentia remains bound to those human subjects whose potentia it is, refusing
to acknowledge any right ius that parts company from that potentia. This
appears to explain the philosophers’ differing political preferences: because
Spinoza recognizes non-​juridical power, he can acknowledge non-​state pop-
ular agency; because Spinoza recognizes non-​juridical power, he prefers
forms of juridical power that cleave as closely as possible to their non-​
juridical underpinnings.
It is clear that Hobbes has an elaborate system of juridical right that is
lacking in Spinoza’s political writings. But what exactly follows from this?
Do we merely have a case of two parallel but different ways of classifying and
evaluating political phenomena?12 To the contrary, it is commonplace to un-
derstand the Spinozist conception of right as effecting an immanent critique
of Hobbes. The Spinozist analysis is taken to serve as a critique that Hobbes
by his own lights would need to accept.13 Hobbes’s position is not merely in-
nocently different from Spinoza’s: rather, the Spinozist analysis is alleged to
show Hobbes’s position to be self-​defeating.
The immanent critique runs as follows. Hobbes’s politics is focused on ju-
ridical power and right and is committed to central tenets: that the sovereign
has the right to rule with impunity, and that the sovereign has the right to
demand total subjection of subjects. But in taking this focus, Hobbes stands
accused of ignoring concrete power. Spinoza points out that a functioning

12 There are a few scholars who do not position the Spinozist position as superior to Hobbes, but

instead simply chart divergences: where Hobbes claims a certain act or mode of governance to be
rightful but Spinoza denies it; or where Spinoza attributes right to a collective as such but Hobbes
grants it only to individuals who happen to be collected together. See, for instance, Malcolm, ‘Hobbes
and Spinoza’, 50; Jonathan Havercroft, Captives of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 53–​75.
13 Spinoza scholars almost universally position Spinoza as a political thinker superior to Hobbes.

The reason most often given is this alleged self-​defeating character of the focus on potestas. See
Aurelia Armstrong, ‘Natural and Unnatural Communities: Spinoza beyond Hobbes’, British Journal
for the History of Philosophy 17, no. 2 (2009): 281–​283, 293; Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 103–​104;
Curley, ‘Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan’, 327–​331; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 258–​262;
Lazzeri, Droit, pouvoir et liberté, 215; Alexandre Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza
(Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988), 221–​222, 464–​465; Michael A. Rosenthal, ‘Spinoza’s Republican
Argument for Toleration’, Journal of Political Philosophy 11, no. 3 (2003): 334; Montag, Bodies, Masses,
Power, 67–​71, 90–​103. There are also other reasons offered for Spinoza’s superiority. For Negri, there
is absolutely an opposition between Spinoza and Hobbes—​Spinoza is ‘the anti-​Hobbes’. But the
problem with the Hobbesian focus on potestas is not that it is (immediately) self-​defeating, but that
it dominates and blocks potentia (Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 110–​113). For Den Uyl, Spinoza is
superior to Hobbes because Hobbes relies on an excessively pessimistic model of human behaviour.
Douglas J. Den Uyl, Power, State, and Freedom: An Interpretation of Spinoza’s Political Philosophy
(Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1983), 158–​159.
 Ethics and Efficacy 155

juridical model depends on concrete power. All the juridical specifications of

sovereign potestas are idle unless potestas is effective in the world; if concrete
efficacy is too far eroded, then potestas itself collapses. Implicitly, Hobbes
accepts some form of this observation: he repeatedly notes that the sover-
eign maintains its right only so long as it is able to provide security (DC 8.8,
9.4; L 344–​345, 21.21–​22, 1133–​1134, Review and Conclusion.6). But what
is the ground of this ability? Spinoza points out that the power that either
supports or destroys potestas is the concrete power of the multitude, and (so
the accusation goes) Hobbes’s juridical approach, obsessed with parsing con-
tractual obligations, prevents him from understanding this power and re-
mains merely and perniciously theoretical (TTP 17.1, III/​201). Spinoza, by
contrast, focuses on popular potentia and its problematic relation to sov-
ereign efficacy. He denies that it is possible for individuals fully to subject
themselves to a sovereign, and he thinks that demanding total subjection is
destabilizing (TTP III/​201, 17.1–​4; TP 3.8). Spinoza twice quotes Seneca: no
one continues violent rule (violenta imperia) for long (TTP III/​74, 5.22, III/​
194, 16.29); this is taken as a riposte to Hobbes’s formidable and terrifying
sovereign. The idea central to Hobbes’s absolutism, that allowing a ruler to
rule with impunity conduces to stability, is roundly rejected (TP 7.14, 7.23,
7.29). Spinoza’s most prominent example concerns free expression: against
Hobbes’s ambitious control of speech and teaching, Spinoza denies the sov-
ereign has the power potentia or the right to such control, because humans
cannot simply hand over their power of thought or speech; thus the sover-
eign lacks the power to put the control into effect. More precisely, the ca-
pacity of a sovereign to control speech will have differential efficacy across a
population: in insisting upon that course of action, it antagonizes citizens of
principle and elevates sycophants, thereby undermining the state (TTP 20.1–​
9, III/​239–​240, 20.27–​31, III/​243–​244). So Hobbes’s political model of abso-
lute potestas will be prone to undermine its own concrete power, and thereby
undermine itself. By contrast, Spinoza’s politics is not self-​defeating, because
he allows potestas only insofar as it is a name for potentia, and he assiduously
concerns himself with the concrete popular grounds of potentia. He clearly
recognizes that any attempt to assert potestas beyond what is supported by
the people’s power is doomed to failure.
The standard account of the relation between the political philosophies
of Hobbes and Spinoza is unfair to Hobbes. I do not deny that this ac-
count is encouraged by Spinoza himself: in his letter to Jelles, quoted pre-
viously, he does attribute to Hobbes a purely juridical discussion of politics.
156 Spinoza

Furthermore, it is true that in Hobbes’s early writings, discussion of indi-

vidual concrete power is quickly superseded once we move to the juridical
discussion of state: the core of the early civil science is a purely juridical ac-
count of collectivities. But as I have argued at length, in Hobbes’s later work
we have a clear theory of concrete potentia, including collective potentia.14
Nor is it sustainable to accuse Hobbes of lacking the conceptual resources
to grasp the problem of overweening potestas unsupported by potentia: for
this problem is nothing other than the political problem, which, as I have
argued, Hobbes makes vigorous efforts to solve. Perhaps Spinoza is correct
that extreme tyranny and extreme repression of speech are politically unsus-
tainable. But this is something that Hobbes himself can readily grant. Despite
affirming the in-​principle rightfulness of such rule, those are not modes of
government that Hobbes recommends. Indeed, his detailed concrete meas-
ures are crafted to minimize wicked rule. Rather, as I argued in Chapter 5,
Hobbes brings the collective potentia of the people to match entitled potestas
through what I have called repressive egalitarianism, in which counterpowers
are eliminated, and the resultant regime of fragmented equality is stabilized
by well-​counselled sovereign rule and the moralized obedience of individual
subjects. This repressive egalitarianism is not obviously unworkable; al-
though to be sure, it is possible to raise doubts as to how profoundly it will
advance the common good.
In result, Spinoza’s alleged immanent critique of Hobbes is not a re-
sounding success, and the divergence of the philosophers’ respective po-
litical prescriptions cannot simply be explained by accusing Hobbes of not
recognizing potentia.

14 Why does Spinoza not remark on the theory of concrete collective potentia? First, he may only

have been working from De Cive, in which the theory is not yet developed (see footnote 4). Second,
even if he is working from Leviathan, Hobbes’s theory of collective potentia is submerged in the text
and less prominent than the juridical theory of potestas, as I have argued in Chapter 4, Section 4.3.
In characterizing the relation between the thinkers, Spinoza scholars, especially scholars in a more
Marxist tradition, have not only drawn on the actual content of Hobbes’s texts, but have also been
unduly swayed by MacPherson’s interpretation of Hobbes. Already in my Chapters 2 and 4, I have
criticized central aspects of MacPherson’s reading of Hobbes: notably, although MacPherson does
concern himself with concrete power in Hobbes, he alleges that Hobbes fails to conceive collec-
tive concrete power. MacPherson does not himself discuss Spinoza, but MacPherson’s (mis)char-
acterization of Hobbes is regularly relied upon in order to defend the superiority of the Spinozist
alternative. See Armstrong, ‘Natural and Unnatural Communities’, 280–​281; Balibar, Spinoza and
Politics, 55; Eugene Holland, ‘Spinoza and Marx’, Cultural Logic 2, no. 1 (1998): §23; Matheron,
Individu et communauté, 86, 222; Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 69–​71, 206, 220. Indeed, Negri wrote
the preface to the Italian edition of MacPherson’s book. Antonio Negri, ‘Prefazione all’edizione
italiana’, in Crawford B. MacPherson, Libertà e proprietà alle origini del pensiero borghese: La teoria
dell’individualismo possessivo da Hobbes a Locke (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Internazionale Milano,
1961), 13–​22.
 Ethics and Efficacy 157

6.3. Combining Ethics and Efficacy: Two

Standard Approaches

To understand why Spinoza is more enthusiastic than Hobbes about

popular political forms, despite both authors recognizing potentia, per-
haps it is a mistake to fixate upon the textual presence or absence of this
term potentia in the authors’ respective texts. After all, potentia is a term
of art, and there is no reason to think Hobbes and Spinoza should use it
with the same meaning and theoretical structure. Indeed, Spinoza’s con-
ception of potentia appears just fundamentally different from Hobbes’s,
textually linked to an entirely different constellation of terms. In partic-
ular, in his later texts, Hobbes’s power is a pure question of effects within
a flat-​footed mechanistic non-​normative frame. But while Spinoza does
retain some sense of efficacy, Spinoza’s power appears deeply ethical. In
this section, I sketch out key textual indications of an ethical structure
to Spinoza’s potentia. I delineate two main interpretive strategies in the
literature for making sense of this combination of ethics and efficacy, in
particular as it bears upon Spinoza’s politics. In the following section,
I articulate three problems that cast these two interpretive strategies
into doubt.
In my Chapters 2 and 4, I insisted on the relational and de-​essentializing
character of Hobbes’s late conception of potentia, and correspondingly
its determination in social context; I made this argument both with re-
spect to Hobbes’s natural scientific treatment of natural bodies and also
with respect to human beings. I argued that there is no normative grain
to potentia on this late conception; a thing’s potentia is not a normative
tendency, nor does greater potentia necessarily match with greater nor-
mative appeal. In particular, I demonstrated that collective human po-
tentia is layered and hierarchical, conceived as teeming with oligarchic
power blocs.
Spinoza is not unconcerned with efficacy: he prides himself on of-
fering a realistic political philosophy, in contrast to the utopian fantasies
of other philosophers (TP 1.1), in particular, one that can account for the
security and stability of the political orders that it sketches.15 Nonetheless,

15 Whatever else a political order must achieve, it must be stable and secure. The Political Treatise

asserts that the virtue of the state is its security (TP 1.6); the Theological-​Political Treatise still requires
security (TTP 3.20), but additionally states that the ‘end’ of the state is individual freedom (TTP
20.12; see also TP 5.2, 5.5). I will return to the question of freedom in Chapter 8, Section 8.3.
158 Spinoza

his conception of power potentia itself seems to build in a deeply ethical

grain. In the previous section, I outlined in a general way the connection
between Spinoza’s power analysis and his commitment to normatively ap-
pealing forms of politics. The concept of potentia developed in the Ethics
shows these combined characteristics of efficacy and ethics even more
forcefully. In a series of enigmatic but crucial propositions in Book 3,
Spinoza connects potentia with essence, striving conatus, and persever-
ance (E 3p4–​3p8); throughout Book 4, potentia is linked to virtue (E 4d8,
4p20d, 4p36s2, 4p54). I now draw attention also to a more specific feature
of Spinoza’s political philosophy: against Hobbes’s hierarchical layering,
there are suggestions that the structure of collective power is horizontal.
In the Political Treatise, Spinoza introduces the concept of a multitude, on
whose power potentia rests the state, by explaining that human collective
right (ius, which has already been equated with power potentia [TP 2.3])
is constituted from individuals joining together and thereby being able
to do more together than they could individually (TP 2.13, 2.17; see also
E 4p35c2s). A similar idea can be read back into a similar passage in the
Theological-​Political Treatise, although the term potentia is not specifically
used: Spinoza claims that democracy is the most natural form of govern-
ment because it reflects the natural equality of the state of nature (TTP III/​
74, 5.23–​25, III/​195, 16.36).
Any reconstruction of Spinoza’s conception of potentia needs to account
for its distinctive amalgam of ethics and efficacy. But at the same time, it will
need to escape the charge of political naivete: in particular, it must account
for ethically unappealing yet efficacious regimes, examples of which impose
themselves on any student of history. I divide the literature into two stylized
strands. The first group, whom I will label the radical interpreters, celebrates
the people’s power potentia against sovereign power potestas. Popular power
potentia is normatively appealing, but its intrinsic tendency to express itself
can be thwarted by external obstacles of potestas (understood as political
institutions and the political power of rulers). The radical interpretation can
take either liberal or democratic form. The second group, whom I will label
the constitutional interpreters, does not insist upon a strong distinction be-
tween potentia and potestas: the sovereign’s potestas is just one emergent fea-
ture of the people’s collective potentia. Their distinction is instead between
fragile and enduring power. Tyrannically structured collectivities tend to
collapse; therefore, ultimately, greater normative appeal and greater efficacy
go hand in hand.
 Ethics and Efficacy 159

6.3.1. The Radical Approach

Consider first the radical interpretations of Spinoza. According to the rad-

ical liberal interpretation,16 the power potentia of natural individuals is
their essence, and an essence is something that cannot be separated from
the individual whose essence it is. By contrast, a state is not a natural indi-
vidual, so it lacks any potentia of its own.17 In consequence, the state and
its potestas should avoid infringing on a libertarian sphere of individual
self-​determination, within which the individual can exercise and develop
potentia. The state’s proper role is minimal: just warding off ‘bothersome
hindrances’ to individual human development, such as famine, invading
armies, and harm from other citizens,18 perhaps paired with some checks
and balances on rulers.19 This is what should occur; but what will actually be
efficacious? For radical liberals, on the one hand, states regrettably can and
often do trespass on subjects’ freedom and power.20 On the other hand, if the
state reaches so far as to grossly oppress its subjects’ freedoms, it will not suc-
ceed because the people will rebel.21
The radical democratic interpretation22 finds its canonical expression
in Antonio Negri’s 1981 book The Savage Anomaly.23 Negri grants that the

16 Stephen Barbone and Lee Rice, ‘Introduction’, in Benedictus de Spinoza, Political Treatise

(Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 1–​30; Den Uyl, Power, State, and Freedom, 67–​80, 117–​118, 128;
Stephen Barbone, ‘Power in the Tractatus Theologico-​Politicus’, in Piety, Peace and the Freedom to
Philosophize, edited by Paul J. Bagley (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 91–​109.
17 Barbone and Rice, ‘Introduction’, 12–​19, 26–​27; Barbone, ‘Power’, 97–​99; Den Uyl, Power, State,

and Freedom, 67–​80. There has been a lively controversy in Spinoza studies regarding the individu-
ality of the state and its possession of a potentia of its own. Radical liberal interpretations have been
the main focus of the controversy, but insofar as radical democrats deny potentia to the state, they
are also implicated. For overviews, see Justin D. Steinberg, ‘Spinoza’s Political Philosophy’, in The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2013 ed., edited by Edward N. Zalta (http://​plato.stan-
ford.edu/​archives/​win2013/​entries/​spinoza-​political/​), §5; Andre Santos Campos, ‘The Individuality
of the State in Spinoza’s Political Philosophy’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 92 (2010): 1–​9. See
also my Chapter 8, Section 8.2.
18 Barbone, ‘Power’, 108; also 103–​104; Den Uyl, Power, State, and Freedom, 117–​118, 128.
19 Barbone and Rice, ‘Introduction’, 27–​28; Den Uyl, Power, State, and Freedom, 112–​118, 126.
20 Den Uyl, Power, State, and Freedom, 86, 126.
21 Ibid., 82.
22 The label ‘radical democratic’ is also claimed by some interpreters who count as ‘constitutionalists’

(Section 6.3.2) by my taxonomy, for instance, Martin Saar, ‘The Immanence of Power: From Spinoza
to “Radical Democracy” ’, Mededelingen Vanwege Het Spinozahuis 106 (Uitgeverij Spinozahuis,
2014). However, I will use the term only to refer to the Negrian conception.
23 Negri, The Savage Anomaly. Originally published in Italian as L’anomalia selvaggia: Saggio su

potere e potenza in Baruch Spinoza. I rely on the English translation. Negri’s reading of Spinoza’s
politics has been reiterated in his essays through the subsequent three decades; he also frequently
calls upon it as the theoretical ground for the concept of the multitude in his immensely popular
collaborations with Michael Hardt. Antonio Negri, ‘Reliqua Desiderantur: A Conjecture for a
Definition of the Concept of Democracy in the Final Spinoza’, in The New Spinoza, edited by Warren
Montag and Ted Stolze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 219–​247; Negri, ‘The
160 Spinoza

Theological-​Political Treatise toys with liberalism. However, he claims that

this is superseded in Spinoza’s mature view, which is to be found in the later
Political Treatise,24 where Spinoza introduces a new third element between
individual and state: the ‘multitude’ (multitudo), a non-​juridically conceived
collectivity of human beings (TP 2.17, 3.2, 3.7, 3.9). Spinoza’s politics still
lies in his affirmation of power as potentia rather than potestas of state—​‘the
defining struggle is that of power [potentia] against Power [potestas]’25—​but
instead of tying potentia to individuals as in the Theological-​Political Treatise,
Negri claims the entity holding potentia, and therefore right, is the collective
mass subject, the multitude.26
In the first half of the book, I discussed radical democracy in a Hobbesian
context: Tuck’s celebration of plebiscitary democratic despotism. Tuck reads
Hobbes as a radical democrat insofar as his absolutism refuses any limit on a
democratic sovereign’s power.27 Tuck’s Hobbes is suspicious of the oligarchic
machinations of any complex established system of government, and refuses
to subordinate the sovereign people to such a system. But from the point of
view of the radical democracy of Negri’s Spinoza, Hobbesian democracy—​
whether Tuck’s plebiscitary democracy or Hobbes’s own democracy via rep-
resentative assembly—​counts as a ‘democratic monarchy’,28 because of its
juridical conception of the mass popular agent as ‘the people’. The Hobbesian
‘will of the people’ is really a decision of the sovereign that is then aggressively
imposed upon the populace. Even when the sovereign decision is defined by
democratic vote, the juridical and impositional character of the popular will
remains: dissenters are obliged to acknowledge the sovereign will as their
own.29 Negri argues that Spinoza’s non-​juridical perspective allows him to
understand popular mass agency without juridical mystification: or in other
words, the multitude.
What exactly is the multitude? Negri makes a distinction between the mul-
titude in its historical shape and the multitude in its ontological foundation.

Political Treatise’; Hardt and Negri, Empire, 73–​91, 184–​185; Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 184–​194,
221–​222, 240, 311–​330; Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 43–​53, 171–​195, 235–​236; Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, Assembly (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 14, 78.

24 Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 114, 194; Negri, ‘The Political Treatise’, 9, 23.
25 Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 196.
26 Ibid., 190–​197, 226–​229; Negri, ‘The Political Treatise’, 15–​20. By contrast, liberals vigorously op-

pose the attribution of potentia to collectivities. Rice and Barbone, ‘Introduction’, 18 n. 61; Barbone,
‘Power’, 103.
27 See my Chapter 4, Section 4.3.
28 Negri, ‘Reliqua Desiderantur’, 222.
29 Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 68–​73, 112–​113, 139.
 Ethics and Efficacy 161

On the one hand, Negri interprets Spinoza’s multitude as the population in

its historical actuality. In all cases, instances of command, potestas, emerge
only from the actual historical configuration of the collective power potentia
of the multitude (a ruler has power potestas only if and to the extent subjects
actually obey). But on the other hand, Negri understands the multitude as
an (in principle) entirely non-​hierarchical and unalienated combination of
human singularities of productive force. The two aspects of the multitude are
related through what Negri calls ‘constitutive process’. The ontological ten-
dency of the multitude to equality plays itself out over the ages in actual his-
torical experience: through the historical succession of state forms, conflict
and hierarchy gradually overcome themselves in a ‘constitutive advance of
power’.30
On Negri’s analysis, giving Hobbesian right to ‘the people’ cramps and
overrides the naturally plural potentiae of individuals in the multitude. The
ideology of Hobbesian juridical potestas might effectively allow the consol-
idation of an actual alienated political form of potestas for a period of time;
sometimes a similar effect can be produced by religious superstition. But ul-
timately the juridical illusion faces the concrete limits of the power of the
multitude.31 When Spinoza defines the state by the power of the multitude,
he removes the possibility of this mystification and debunks the claim of
any institution whatever to authority, even forms of democratic right of the
people. Potentia is inevitably temporarily consolidated into successive his-
torical forms of potestas, but any particular potestas should be and will be
disrupted to match the underlying dynamic tendency of the multitude’s po-
tentia toward horizontality.32 Radical democrats present Spinoza as a proto-​
Marxian; Negri’s interpretation is replete with the language of revolution and
counterpower, and he considers insurgent mass movements against the po-
litical status quo as the paradigmatic manifestation of the multitude.33

30 Ibid., xviii–​
xxiii, 119, 226–​229; Negri, ‘Reliqua Desiderantur’, 229–​237; Negri, ‘The Political
Treatise’, 15–​20.
31 Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 69–​71; Negri, ‘The Political Treatise’, 17, 24.
32 Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 108–​119. A pressing problem for the Negrian view is how a mul-

titude can act without forsaking its nature as multitude. For a detailed reconstruction both of the
problem and of Negri’s answer, see Sandra Leonie Field, ‘Democracy and the Multitude: Spinoza
against Negri’, Theoria 59, no. 131 (2012): 21–​40.
33 Negri, The Savage Anomaly, xxi, 112, 119, 141, 190–​191, 221. The Marxian frame of Negri’s in-

terpretation is explicit and pervades his analysis, including the core distinction of potestas versus
potentia. Negri maps the multitude’s potentia onto the productive force of the proletariat, whereas the
structure of potestas—​obligation generated by consent—​is shared by both the capitalist market and
the state. But in both cases, potestas mystifies the human productive force that is their underpinning;
indeed these two forms of mystification are intertwined. Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 68–​73, 136–​
143, 218, 229.
162 Spinoza

For both radical liberal and democratic interpretations of Spinoza’s pol-

itics, minimizing or removing the state doesn’t reveal individual human
subjects who are already ethically virtuous. But they both display optimism
regarding potentia’s ‘ontological force’:34 both radical views believe human
virtue has its own tendency to increase if not prevented by the external
force of the state. Furthermore both radical views share a horizontal non-​
hierarchical interpretation of the natural structure of human collectivities.
The radical liberals acknowledge the need for a minimal state to prevent
harm between imperfectly virtuous subjects. But within this space cleared
by the state, individual virtue can gradually increase of itself.35 And between
these individuals there is no natural hierarchy: potestas is understood as a
deliberate imposition on a field previously free of power relations, as an as-
sertion of ‘control over’.36 For radical democrats, individuals cannot increase
their virtue alone; but in collective existence in the multitude, and when
not distorted by pressure from a state claiming transcendental right, there
is an upward spiral of increasing virtue and freedom amongst members of
the multitude.37 Negri recognizes that the still imperfectly virtuous and ra-
tional individuals in any actual multitude may have hostile relations amongst
themselves. But he claims that even human antagonism and conflict are a
manifestation of an ontological movement towards ‘horizontality’ and ‘beau-
tiful and animated flatness’.38 Hierarchical relations of potestas are viewed as
contingency, aberration, or even non-​being: ‘[U]‌nreality . . . rises up to pose
relationships of slavery’. But in all cases they are transient, to be swept away
by the underlying ontological force of equality.39
The result, in slightly different ways for the liberals and radicals, is a poli-
tics hostile to complex institutional forms. Both groups attribute to Spinoza
a normative vision in which the ethical potentia (of individuals or of the
multitude) ought to and does tend to resist the encroachments of potestas.40
Potestas is acceptable only if it ‘flattens onto’ the potentiae of the multitude or
of the collection of individuals, and not if it puts pressure on them.

34 Negri, ‘The Political Treatise’, 20.

35 Den Uyl, Power, State, and Freedom, 112–​118, 125; Barbone, ‘Power’, 104.
36 Barbone, ‘Power’, 100.
37 See footnotes 31 and 32.
38 Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 119.
39 Ibid., 194, 226.
40 This is a curious rapprochement. In terms of gross political orientation, the two groups are poles

apart: autonomist Marxists against American right-​libertarians. Nonetheless, their underlying phil-
osophical framework is not so divergent.
 Ethics and Efficacy 163

Both these radical lines of interpretation are somewhat dated with respect
to the cutting-​edge anglophone literature. Yet both have had an enduring
influence. The radical liberal interpretation is forcefully stated in the intro-
duction to the widely used Hackett (2000) edition of the Political Treatise.41
The radical democratic interpretation represented an important voice within
the vibrant francophone Spinozist milieu of the late twentieth century. At
publication, Negri’s book included laudatory prefaces and introductions by
luminaries of French Spinozism.42 Outside of mainstream anglophone polit-
ical philosophy narrowly conceived, it is common to find representations of
Spinoza’s political philosophy resting on Negrian understandings of insur-
gent democracy and the multitude.43 Some authors merge a Negrian reading
of the contrast between potentia and potestas with a left-​Schmittian con-
trast between constituent and constituted power.44 And at a further remove,
Negri’s radical democratic reading of Spinoza has been taken up in a general
way in other domains of the humanities.45

6.3.2. The Constitutionalist Approach

I now turn to the ‘constitutional’ interpretation, which offers a different

way to bring together the ethical and effective elements of Spinoza’s po-
tentia. Potentia is interpreted as efficacy, producing effects. This con-
ception is ontologically permissive and normatively ambivalent. It is
ontologically permissive: where the radicals denied that the sovereign has

41 Barbone and Rice, ‘Introduction’, 1–​30.

42 Gilles Deleuze, Alexandre Matheron, and Pierre Macherey wrote prefaces to the French edi-
tion: Antonio Negri, L’anomalie sauvage, translated by Alexandre Matheron (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1982). Of course, writing a preface does not entail substantive agreement
on particular arguments or points of exegesis. The strong endorsements can partly be understood in
relation to the historical context. The book was published shortly after Negri’s release from being a
political prisoner (Negri, The Savage Anomaly, xxiii); philosophers rallied to defend the merit of his
research.
43 Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power, 66–​85; Michael Hardt, ‘Translator’s Foreword: The Anatomy of

Power’, in Negri, The Savage Anomaly, xi–​xvi. Holland is critical of Negri’s teleology, but accepts his
account of horizontal potentia against vertical potestas (‘Spinoza and Marx’, §§26–​29).
44 Del Lucchese objects to the abstract, dehistoricised flavour of Negri’s discussion of constit-

uent power, but his own more historical interpretation retains the crucial idea of a real tendency
to equality. Filippo Del Lucchese, ‘Spinoza and Constituent Power’, Contemporary Political Theory
15, no. 2 (2015): 184–​204; Filippo del Lucchese, Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and
Spinoza: Tumult and Indignation (New York: Continuum, 2009), 109–​166.
45 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life,

translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e),
2004), 21–​26; Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics; Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian
Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).
164 Spinoza

potentia of its own, the constitutionalist interpretation is less restrictive.

The sovereign does have potentia, which is nothing other than the po-
tentia of the multitude. It is normatively ambivalent: whereas the radicals
built a normative grain into potentia itself, the constitutionalists do not.
Certainly, virtue is power, but this is merely a stipulative definition of
virtue. In proportion to their efficacy, all regimes have potentia and virtue,
whether good, bad, popular, or tyrannical, and no matter how the indi-
vidual potentiae are combined to form collective potentia. In both these
respects, the constitutionalist interpretation of potentia is closer to that
found in Hobbes’s later work. Correspondingly, it faces the Hobbesian po-
litical problem: how to constitute a sovereign with sufficient potentia not
to fall apart? How to constitute a stable political order? Spinoza’s solution
combines efficacy and ethics in the long run, because greater efficacy is
achieved in a normatively appealing46 liberal democratic political order;
in turn, this is so because such an order best secures the loyalty of subjects.
Less normatively appealing political orders are prone to collapse: tyran-
nies never last long.47
Della Rocca puts forward such a line in clarity. The right of the state is
coextensive with its power, and power is just producing effects; but there
is an important qualification: the relevant power is only power in the long
run. And tyrannies never last long. So power is just efficacy, but the regimes
that endure are the normatively appealing ones.48 Similarly, Rosenthal asks,
‘[O]‌nce Spinoza has identified right with power in his social contract theory,
then does not anything that we have the power to do make it right?’49 He
answers in the negative, by appeal to an idea of stability: ‘A state is stable to
the extent that it can foster broad and deep participation among its citizens’;50

46 I provide a fuller analysis and taxonomy of being ‘normatively appealing’ in Chapter 8,

Section 8.3.
47 As well as Della Rocca and Rosenthal quoted subsequently, see also Armstrong, ‘Natural and

Unnatural Communities’, 269–​299; Étienne Balibar, ‘Spinoza, the Anti-​Orwell: The Fear of the
Masses’, Rethinking Marxism 2, no. 3 (1989): 121–​125; Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 51–​75; Susan
James, Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion and Politics: The Theologico-​Political Treatise (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 251–​260; Matheron, Individu et communauté, 287–​514 but especially
428; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 258–​262; Lazzeri, Droit, pouvoir, et liberté, 347, 364; Saar, ‘The
Immanence of Power’, 12; Hasana Sharp, ‘Violenta Imperia Nemo Continuit Diu: Spinoza and the
Revolutionary Laws of Human Nature’, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 34, no. 1 (2013): 133–​
148; Justin D. Steinberg, ‘Spinoza on Being Sui Juris and the Republican Conception of Liberty’,
History of European Ideas 34 (2008): 239–​49.
48 Michael Della Rocca, Spinoza (New York: Routledge, 2008), 206–​215.
49 Michael A. Rosenthal, ‘Spinoza’s Political Philosophy’, in The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, ed-

ited by Michael Della Rocca (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 431.
50 Ibid., 428.
 Ethics and Efficacy 165

so, ‘While oppression might in the short term produce stability, in the long
term it will not’.51
For the constitutionalists, the state plays an active role in the development
of human virtue. Recall that the radicals disagreed. For the radical liberal
view, state institutions should simply prevent gross harm and restrain rulers;
for the radical democratic view, the state should simply channel the current
voice of the multitude: then the natural unfolding of human virtue can pro-
ceed. But for the constitutionalists, while states sometimes repress individual
development and enforce hierarchy, human virtue and freedom cannot be
advanced simply by winding back the state. For humans have both sociable
and unsociable tendencies. Individual virtue and power are not an inner es-
sence waiting to be expressed; nor can the horizontal relation of imperfectly
virtuous individuals be taken for granted. Rather, equality and virtue need to
be generated, and this is done through the scaffolding of external supports,
especially the institutional structures of the state.52

6.4. Three Hobbesian Problems for Spinoza’s

Political Philosophy

I have presented two interpretations of Spinoza’s political philosophy that

both interpret potentia to reconcile efficacy and ethics and, correspondingly,
offer a rosy picture of popular power. To deal with apparently unappealing
political regimes, both make some kind of distinction between two senses
of the word ‘power’, whether potestas against potentia, or fragile potentia
versus durable potentia. For the radicals, so long as external distortion from
an overbearing state is kept at bay, popular power tends to have a normatively

51 Ibid., 430. Rosenthal recognizes that for some societies, the appropriate form will be aristocratic

rather than democratic (due to low levels of rationality). But he claims that the principle isolated
through analysis of democracy—​maximizing the rationality and participation of the populace—​
guides the models of other forms of state (ibid., 427–​428). See also Steinberg, Spinoza’s Political
Psychology, 163–​189. Matheron argues that in conditions of modernity, there are four possible stable
types of regime: liberal monarchy, centralized aristocracy, decentralized aristocracy, or democ-
racy. Democracy is the most ideal, even if it is not always the most suitable. Matheron, Individu et
communauté, 465–​467.
52 Armstrong, ‘Natural and Unnatural Communities’, 297–​305; Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 76–​

95; Matthew J. Kisner, Spinoza on Human Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011),
215–​234; Matheron, Individu et communauté, 281–​283, 505–​513, and more generally 287–​514;
Mugnier-​Pollet, La philosophie politique de Spinoza, 84–​89; Steinberg, Spinoza’s Political Psychology,
101–​128, 163–​189; Ericka Tucker, ‘The Multitude’, in Spinoza: Key Concepts, edited by André Santos
Campos (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2015), 129–​141.
166 Spinoza

appealing horizontal structure, within which individual virtue tends to in-

crease. For constitutionalist readers, popular power is collective efficacy, and
that efficacy increases in proportion to the good organization of the state. But
from the late Hobbesian point of view, if Hobbes’s analysis of the emergence
of oligarchic power blocs within the multitude is correct, then the alleged
Spinozist view, on either interpretation, looks romantic and naive. I sketch
three specific ways in which Hobbesian analysis poses problems to the al-
leged Spinozist reconciliation of ethics and efficacy. I also show elements in
Spinoza’s own texts that render support to the Hobbesian political scepticism.
Insofar as Spinoza’s philosophy imposes on itself a requirement of realism, the
Hobbesian accusations must be answered and the sceptical textual elements
must be integrated. In the subsequent chapters, I will offer a new character-
ization of the distinction between two kinds of power within Spinoza’s pol-
itics, which better meshes both with the sceptical textual passages and with
Spinoza’s systematic philosophy, and which relieves Spinoza of Hobbesian
accusations of naivete. This lays the groundwork to provide a new charac-
terization of the stakes of the disagreement with Hobbes on democracy and
mass popular power. Ultimately, my interpretation counts as a variant of the
constitutionalist interpretation of power, insofar as it will insist on the insti-
tutional scaffolding of human potentia, but it diverges insofar as it rejects the
pervasive political romanticism which near-​universally characterizes extant
constitutionalists.
The first critical point is the problem of the multitude’s inner oligarchy, and
it applies most pointedly to the radical interpretation. I noted that for the
radicals, the structure of collective power is normatively appealing: the mul-
titude consists in a horizontal combination of individual potentiae, which are
conceived as the essential possession of each individual; hierarchical human
relations are the result of the imposition of potestas. This bears striking re-
semblance to Hobbes’s early view of power as faculties, which generated a
model of social life populated by independent actors, amongst whom the
only power is either horizontal combination or full vertical domination of
potestas53 (with the difference that radical Spinozists are, unlike Hobbes, sus-
picion of potestas). But as I argued, Hobbes comes to reject his own early
view. Human interpersonal dynamics constantly generate asymmetrical re-
lations falling short of total domination, ramifying into emergent hierarchies
and power blocs: human relations have an inner oligarchic structure. For

53 See Chapter 2, Sections 2.2–​3, and Chapter 3, Sections 3.2–​4.

 Ethics and Efficacy 167

later Hobbes, the idea of a natural horizontal combination of powers is just a

perniciously misleading abstraction.
Indeed, in Spinoza’s own works, the key textual basis for the radical view
of horizontal combination of powers is far more equivocal than the radicals
admit. Just prior to the famous passage imagining two individuals joining
together and thereby being able to do more together than they could indi-
vidually (TP 2.13),54 Spinoza discusses potestas. In the political discourse of
the period, potestas was normally conceived as purely vertical domination;55
Spinoza’s discussion works to expand this definition. He initially provides a
commonplace gloss, relating potestas to gross force or domination: a person
is in control of his own right (sui juris), or equivalently, avoids being in an-
yone else’s power (in/​sub potestate) ‘so long as he can fend off every force and
avenge an injury done to him, as seems good to him, and absolutely, insofar
as he can live according to his own mentality’ (TP 2.9). But Spinoza then
expands the definition of potestas: A has power over B (sub potestate habet)
if (1) A binds B in chains; (2) A deprives B of arms; (3) B is frightened of A;
or (4) B hopes for some benefit from A. Thus, even if physically unbound
and unthreatened, B only escapes A’s potestas if B has neither hope nor fear
in relation to A (TP 2.10). Even this specification is too loose: for A can have
power over B if A is more knowledgeable than B; the only way to be truly sui
juris is to be perfectly guided by reason (TP 2.11). Thus, potestas includes any
kind of human dependence whatsoever, however slight.56 Potestas need not
be a perfectly vertical relation of domination; rather, it is a matter of degree.57
Now consider the implications of this analysis for conceiving human com-
bination and for conceiving the multitude. The multitude is the collection of
diverse human singularities. From the Ethics, we know that being perfectly
guided by reason is impossible for human beings (E 4p2–​4p4);58 and even
54 The passage is regularly cited by Negri at critical points of his argument. Negri, The Savage

Anomaly, 194; Negri, ‘Reliqua Desiderantur’, 225; Negri, ‘The Political Treatise’, 16.
55 For an overview, see Steinberg, ‘Spinoza on Being Sui Juris’, 242–​243.
56 Here I am claiming a conceptual congruence between Hobbes and Spinoza, but not a termino-

logical congruence. Under the heading of potestas, Spinoza illuminates the complex inner structure
of collective potentia, in a manner similar to Hobbes. But Hobbes himself does not use the term
potestas to analyse concrete power, reserving it for the juridical relation of vertical domination.
57 One interesting implication of this conception is the breakdown of the conception of ‘power

over’ as necessarily unidirectional. To combine two of the examples from above: imagine a cunning
person encountering a strong person, who has the potestas? On Spinoza’s analysis, it seems natural
to say that both do: in different respects, they are each hopeful and fearful in respect of one another
(although not necessarily equally).
58 On this point, the two texts use the same technical language. In the Political Treatise, Spinoza

explains that we are maximally sui juris and avoid relations of potestas insofar as we are guided by
reason, because to that extent we are determined to action by causes that can be understood ade-
quately through our own nature alone (quæ per solam ejus naturam possunt adæquatè intelligi) (TP
168 Spinoza

achieving the status of a sage who is maximally guided by reason takes life-
long effort of cultivation and reflection (E 5p42s; TTP 16.7, III/​190; TP 1.5).
Thus the multitude will not predominantly be composed of sages. For a di-
verse collection of people, who have mostly not achieved sagehood, it is hard
to see how there could fail to be relations of potestas between them. Each
person will have some kind of hope or fear in relation to the other, and in ge-
neral, there will be differences of knowledge. Thus potestas is pervasive and
natural, and internal to the multitude. The multitude is not a horizontal plane
of unhierarchized potentiae: to the contrary, juxtapositions of potentiae al-
ways already involve potestas.59 On this reading, the point of Spinoza’s dis-
cussion is to dissolve the strict analytical distinction between vertical and
horizontal combinations of human potentiae, in favour of a continuum be-
tween the two forms of combination.
Spinoza is less explicit than Hobbes in providing a general account of
how these hierarchical micro-​ relations might compound to constitute
larger blocs. But the ingredients for such an account are already there. In
the potestas relations (3) and (4) above, powers are joined together to form a
new composite body: A binds B through B’s fear of harm or hope of benefit,
and B aligns B’s own wishes with A’s.60 Surely this process could be iterated
or compounded. For instance, Spinoza acknowledges the problem of nepo-
tism: people tend to favour their kin and their allies (TP 8.12–​15, 11.2). A dif-
ferent mechanism is illustrated by the case of religious enthusiasms. People

2.11). In the Ethics, he argues it is impossible for a person to ‘undergo no changes except those which
can be understood through his own nature alone [per solam suam naturam], and of which he the
adequate cause [adæquata causa]’ (E 4p4). This technical language will be important in Chapter 7,
Section 7.3.2.

59 See also Field, ‘Democracy and the Multitude’, 29–​ 31; Freeman, ‘The Tyranny of
Structurelessness’, 152–​153.
60 Further corroborations can be found in the Ethics, where Spinoza offers an affective (feelings-​

based) theory of affinity. We hate things that reduce our feeling of power, and love things that in-
crease it; correspondingly, we strive to destroy the former and maintain the presence of the latter
(E 3p13). Thus, we strive to maintain a relationship with those from whom we hope for benefit.
Superficially, an important difference between Spinoza’s and Hobbes’s analysis is that Spinoza focuses
on affects, whereas Hobbes offers a rational-​strategic model. However, for Spinoza, the conscious de-
sire to persevere in one’s being is one of the primary affects (E 3p9–​11), so he can accept the (at least
partial) usefulness of an analysis of conduct in terms of strategic desires. The limitation of Hobbesian
analysis might be its difficulty to account for non-​strategic affective identification: explaining why it
is that subjects rejoice at the joys of those they identify with, or of those who remind them of those
whom they love; and conversely for hatred (E 3p15–​3p24). See Matheron and Lazzeri for a useful
account of the differences (putting aside their shared, unsustainable claim that Hobbes’s Leviathan
understands actual human behaviour as oriented to the end of biological preservation: see my dis-
cussion in Chapter 4, Section 4.2). Matheron, Individu et communauté, 153–​156; Lazzeri, Droit,
pouvoir, et liberté, 61–​89.
 Ethics and Efficacy 169

find an outlet for their hopes and fears in superstitious allegiance, meaning
that they eagerly subordinate themselves to religious visionaries. At the same
time, this allegiance constitutes great power for religious leaders. Corrupted
by greed and ambition, they mobilize religion and theology to win more
supporters and demonize followers of other sects (TTP Pref.15, III/​8).61
These considerations should defeat any simple claim that an actual mul-
titude, when freed from state domination, will have a horizontal structure
freed from potestas. But Negri’s claim, in its more careful and precise articu-
lation, is sometimes more subtle: that it is potentia as ontological foundation
that is horizontal, even if the actual historical manifestation does not im-
mediately match. For Negri, the reason that the Political Treatise’s Chapter 2
discusses potestas first and the horizontal combination of potentiae second is
that this reflects the historical sequence of constitutive process: relations of
potestas tend over time to be superseded and displaced by a horizontal com-
bination of potentiae. Attempted domination provokes resistance, and this
antagonism between subjects is the motor of ‘constitutive progress’ towards
equal combination.62 Indeed, I admit that there are some suggestive textual
passages claiming that people will not tolerate inequality (TTP 5.23, III/​74;
TP 7.5). But there are equally numerous passages in the Ethics suggesting
not a virtuous spiral towards horizontality but a vicious escalation of pas-
sion and oppression (E 3p40, 3p52s, 4p54s, 4p57d, 4p58s). Negri dismisses
such passages as evidence of the ‘unfinished character’ of Spinoza’s philos-
ophy in the Ethics.63 But even putting aside the Ethics, Negri’s reading of the
critical passages 2.9–​11 of the Political Treatise is not obviously more plau-
sible than my more pessimistic alternative account; adjudicating the case will
require a larger consideration of Spinoza’s metaphysics, as will be provided in
Chapters 7 and 8.
I turn now to the constitutional reading. Insofar as this reading conceives
power as producing effects, there is no presumption that individuals possess
an essential power independent of the relations in which they find them-
selves. Thus, they can readily accept that there may be inner oligarchy within

61 I am not claiming that such power blocs are sufficient as government. My claim is merely that

human capacities and behaviours need to be understood not through individual endowments, but
through interpersonal structures of dependence, as in later Hobbes.
62 Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 194–​195. Even some readers that I classify as constitutionalist share

some version of this idea: for instance, Matheron offers an evolutionary explanation of the improve-
ment of politics, driven by the self-​interest of sovereigns witnessing the collapse of tyrannical regimes
(Individu et communauté, 428).
63 Negri, ‘Reliqua Desiderantur’, 237–​238.
170 Spinoza

the multitude. Indeed, as I noted in Section 6.3.2, writers in this tradition are
critical of the anti-​institutionalism of the radicals. Institutions are required to
scaffold and shape a good multitude; this is not a need that will be historically
superseded. My own approach will share this understanding of the impor-
tant constructive role of institutions. However, constitutionalists combine
this view with a further distinctive claim that I wish to put under scrutiny.
They near-​universally claim that regimes are more efficacious in proportion
as their structure is more normatively appealing. Democracies are effective;
tyrannies never last long.
This leads to my second and third critical points. The second point is the
problem of nonideal endurance. Do tyrannies really never last long? I grant
that Spinoza makes such claims numerous times, especially in his earlier
Theological-​Political Treatise (TTP 16.28–​31, III/​194, 17.2–​4, III/​201, 17.11,
III/​203, 20.1–​9, III/​239–​240; TP 3.7–​9). But the claims invite scepticism.
Certainly, some extreme and poorly calibrated kinds of tyranny tend to
collapse; and certainly, Spinoza insists that stability requires commanding
popular loyalties (TTP 17.16–​17, III/​203–​204). But there are possibilities of
stability that depart from Rosenthal’s ‘broad and deep’ citizen participation.
For starters, there is Hobbes’s repressive egalitarianism, which is far from
obviously unstable.64 Curley, who otherwise takes a broadly constitution-
alist view, departs from other commentators’ rosy assessment of the popular
credentials of Spinoza’s political philosophy. For he notes that there can be
very durable tyrannies; insofar as right is nothing but power, he worries that
Spinoza lacks any conceptual resources to criticize such regimes.65 Beyond
Hobbes’s repressive egalitarianism, we could add examples that are Spinoza’s
own, or readily derivable from Spinozist premises: Turkish despotism (TTP
Pref.9, III/​7; TP 6.4);66 the original model of commonwealth of the Hebrews
(TTP 17.101, III/​218, 18.1, III/​221);67 regimes repressing a majority (women

64 See Chapter 5, Section 5.5.

65 Curley, ‘Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan’, 333–​335.
66 Revisionist scholarship has shown ‘Turkish despotism’ to be an orientalist figment of the
European republican imagination. Patricia Springborg, Western Republicanism and the Oriental
Prince (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992). My point in this context is simply that Spinoza him-
self upholds the standard representation of Turkish despotism as a stable yet normatively unaccept-
able political form.
67 Although the secondary literature contains two quite different reasons for not classifying the

Hebrew republic as an instance of nonideal endurance, neither reason is compelling. First, Mugnier-​
Pollet claims the Hebrew republic was not durable. He points out that in fact it collapsed; a fortiori it
was unstable (Mugnier-​Pollet, La philosophie politique de Spinoza, 152). Of course it did in fact col-
lapse, but Spinoza’s argument is that it would have been extremely stable if it had been established as
it was initially planned. In fact, it was unstable because the original plan was broken, to give privileges
to the Levites (TTP 17.101, III/​218). Second, Rosenthal challenges the characterization of the
 Ethics and Efficacy 171

and/​or servants) (TP 11.3–​4); regimes repressing small minorities (minority

as scapegoat);68 paternalistic rule by outsiders (derived from Spinoza’s dis-
cussion of smaller cities within a republic) (TP 9.2, 9.13); slave regimes from
colonial conquest (TP 5.6);69 or corrupt pyramid regimes of voluntary ser-
vitude (as I will explain later). Indeed, at the very opening of the Political
Treatise, Spinoza acknowledges the astuteness of political practitioners: the
regimes of these shrewd politici tend more ‘to set traps for men than to look
after their interests’, and pose the problem of durable but normatively un-
desirable forms of politics (TP 1.2). Would constitutionalist interpretations
have us reclassify these instances of prima facie bad rule as good, insofar and
to the extent they are durable? Or should we find some other way to discrim-
inate amongst them, regardless of their stability?70
I do not claim that Spinoza necessarily knew La Boétie’s Discourse on
Voluntary Servitude,71 but the text offers an interesting model of well-​
calibrated tyranny, one that might be conceived as an extension of a Spinozist
analysis. La Boétie asks how it is that people willingly shoulder the yoke of
an oppressive ruler who has no power save what their own obedience grants
him.72 Similarly, Spinoza himself asks, in the preface to the Theological-​
Political Treatise, why people ‘fight for slavery as they would for salvation’
(TTP Pref.9).73 Spinoza explains that people’s fearfulness makes them

original plan as nonideal, instead emphasizing how Spinoza uses it as a positive historical example
Michael A. Rosenthal, ‘Why Spinoza Chose the Hebrews: The Exemplary Function of Prophecy in
the Theological-​Political Treatise’, History of Political Thought 18, no. 2 (1997): 237–​238. I do not deny
that the example is in some respects a positive exemplar (in particular, its separation between reli-
gious and political authority). However, I would note that Spinoza is simultaneously critical of it in
other respects, especially its reliance on the unthinking obedience of its citizens (TTP 17.88–​78, III/​
216), and on their hatred of foreigners (see footnote 68).

68 Spinoza remarks that a unified and powerful commonwealth can be based on a multitude united

by a common fear, or by desire to avenge a common loss (TP 3.9). His classic example is the Hebrew
republic, in which hatred of outsiders consolidated political unity (TTP 17.80–​81, III/​215). But I am
suggesting the same dynamic could apply against an internal minority.
69 Spinoza does not endorse this form of rule (TP 9.13). But what is at stake here is not its desira-

bility, but its possible durability. Matheron’s example of Genghis Khan conquering a small Spinozistic
republic (Alexandre Matheron, ‘Le ‘droit du plus fort’: Hobbes contre Spinoza’, in Études sur Spinoza
et les philosophies de l’âge classique [Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2011], 154; Curley, ‘Kissinger, Spinoza, and
Genghis Khan, 333–​334), is often dismissed as being unstable in the long run. But this is far from
clear. In the history of colonialism, some conquests have been unstable, but others rather durable.
70 An obvious route to investigate is Spinoza’s distinction between free and slave regimes (TP 5.4).

I will return to discuss this in Chapter 8, Section 8.3. But for present purposes, the important point is
that the non-​democratic and repressive regimes, however we label them, can be durable.
71 Étienne de la Boétie, ‘Discourse on Voluntary Servitude’, in Michel de Montaigne: Selected Essays,

translated by James B. Atkinson and David Sices (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2012), 284–​312.
72 Ibid., 285.
73 This is Curley’s older translation. Benedictus de Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and

Other Works, translated by E. M. Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 6. In the
172 Spinoza

susceptible to superstition; both he and La Boétie note a history of tyrants

investing themselves with divine grandeur to capture these fears politically.
But they both think that this strategy will only constitute a robust govern-
mental structure with a very stupid or barbarous population (TTP Pref.8–​10,
III/​6–​7, 17.20–​24, III/​204–​205).74 The constitutionalist reading of Spinoza
would leave us thinking that this is the end of the matter: tyrannies never
last long, at least when we presume modern levels of education.75 But this
is not La Boétie’s conclusion. Instead, La Boétie identifies the true ‘source
and secret of domination’ amongst more sophisticated populations as a pyr-
amidical structure of capture of desire.76 In La Boétie’s preferred model of
voluntary servitude, society is stabilized by being segmented into multiple
hierarchical layers, each layer of the population hoping to retain the favour of
their superiors and the mastery of those below them; citizens are crafted into
voluntary sycophants by the well-​designed structure of incentives. Subjects
find themselves ‘clutching at servitude with both hands and embracing it’;
and even the upstanding characters amongst them often find themselves un-
able to resist.77 In this spirit, Lordon constructs an explicitly Spinozist model
of joyful hierarchical submission in order to understand neoliberal employ-
ment relations: rather than a Marxian enmity between capitalist and worker,
between whom there is an ever-​widening gulf, instead in neoliberalism each
level of managers internalizes capitalist imperatives and imposes them on its
subordinates.78
Let me apply this model to reassess Spinoza’s argument for the self-​
defeating character of restrictions on free expression. When Spinoza claims
in the Theological-​Political Treatise that the sovereign lacks power to restrict
expression, recall (from Section 6.2) that it is not strictly impossible. The law
can be made, and it may be reasonably effective: for many people can be led
to believe and say all manner of things. Rather, the problem with a such a
law is its practical ramifications: it has the effect of elevating sycophants and

Collected Works, Curley translates salus as survival rather than salvation; the newer translation blunts
the rhetorical sharpness of the paradox.

74 La Boétie, ‘Discourse on Voluntary Servitude’, 305.

75 Matheron, Individu et communauté, 465–​466; Steinberg, Spinoza’s Political Psychology, 159–​160.
76 La Boétie, ‘Discourse on Voluntary Servitude’, 305–​308.
77 Ibid., 307–​309. In this light Matheron’s attempted exhaustive taxonomy of stable regimes (see

footnote 51) appears inadequate; the difficulty is that Matheron does not consider layered forms of
power (Individu et communauté, 446, 502).
78 Frédéric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, translated by Gabriel

Ash (London: Verso, 2014), 1–​104.

 Ethics and Efficacy 173

antagonizing citizens of principle, thereby indirectly reducing the durability

of the state (20.27–​31, III/​243–​244). One way to stave off this instability,
Spinoza’s own, is to permit free expression. But another response would be
possible: try to increase the proportion of sycophants in a population. Maybe
there will always be some citizens of principle who cannot be co-​opted, but
with sufficient incentives, might their number be reduced so as not to be po-
litically troubling? Certainly, the La Boétie model is not perfectly stable; in
particular there can be problems of succession and praetorian struggles at
the top.79 But on the other hand, if well calibrated, such a regime could have
moderate success.80
The third critical point is the problem of democracy’s perverse effects. Are
democracies effective? As detailed in Chapter 5, Sections 5.3–​4, Hobbes is
sceptical. He argues that popular regimes and religiously tolerant regimes
corrupt themselves. Indeed, they are acutely subject to the political
problem: for democratic assemblies may unintentionally allow and even en-
courage the formation of power blocs, as may a policy of toleration of reli-
gious sects. The rise of these power blocs means that liberal democracies,
even if stable, do not necessarily rule for the common good; and sectarianism
and poor rule mean that they may lead themselves into instability.
Spinoza himself oscillates in his assessment of democracies. The
Theological-​Political Treatise initially appears to view a democratic con-
stitution as a political panacea, as something which by its very structure
overcomes all political problems. Spinoza argues that since in a democracy
laws are by common consent, they preserve freedom and express equality
(TTP 5.25, III/​74). Furthermore, he argues that a large assembly is unlikely
to agree to anything very stupid (TTP 16.30, III/​194). But on the other hand,
in the later Political Treatise, he acknowledges that of all regimes, ‘none have
been less lasting’ than popular or democratic regimes (TP 6.4). Already in
the earlier text, Spinoza remarks that democracy is inappropriate for socie-
ties accustomed to a monarch (TTP 18.30–​33, III/​226–​227); but this hardly
entails that democracy will run smoothly for those who are accustomed to
it. He observes that everyone, both rulers and ruled, tends to be governed by
affects rather than reason; they are ‘easily corrupted’ by the pursuit of profit.
He identifies the fundamental political challenge: to bring everyone to put
public good over private interest (TTP 17.14–​16, III/​203). One wonders how

79 Matheron, Individu et communauté, 309–​312.

80 See Chapter 5, footnote 67.
174 Spinoza

such destructive dynamics are to be kept at bay within the democratic as-
sembly: for even though a democratic constitution establishes formally equal
status and removes private violent threat, this far from exhausts power rela-
tions between democratic subjects, as per the earlier discussion of potestas.81
Furthermore, the confidence in democratic governance exists in some ten-
sion with his liberal commitments. Spinoza famously argues that sovereigns
lack the right to oppress citizens, or to treat as enemies those who disagree;
they should allow the people the freedom to say and teach as they please
(TTP 20.1–​9, III/​239–​240). But what ensures a democratic assembly will not
be oppressive in these ways towards political or other minorities?
Thus we are left with three Hobbesian criticisms of Spinoza’s political phi-
losophy, which are not well answered by existing interpretations; and there
are textual hints that Spinoza himself could acknowledge their force. In the
following chapters, I will develop a new interpretation that makes analytical
space for a fundamental divergence between ethics and efficacy, and thereby
can accommodate these criticisms. This new interpretation will give rise to
a new conception of popular power that conceives a collective’s own power
as its ongoing robust self-​driven efficacy in determining social and political
outcomes, and its popularity in terms of its elimination of oligarchic and hi-
erarchical affronts to equal status. Social movements and popular plebiscites
will be resituated as possible contributing elements within a larger complex
ecological conception of popular power, rather than its defining and exem-
plary instances.

81 As a Marxian perspective also reveals: see Chapter 5, footnote 59.

 7
The Power of Producing Effects

7.1. Introduction

The two common and influential interpretations of Spinoza’s political po-

tentia linking efficacy and virtue, laid out in Chapter 6, paint an altogether
too rosy picture of popular political power. Their respective attempts to
distinguish between two senses of power each fail to redeem Spinoza from
accusations of political naivete. In this chapter, I present a different distinc-
tion: between potentia operandi and potentia agendi. To sketch the distinc-
tion that I will develop more fully as I proceed, in Spinoza’s hands potentia
operandi is the power of doing or (in Curley’s translation) producing effects
(not making a distinction whether what is done is active or passive); whereas
potentia agendi is the power of acting (in contrast to passive undergoing).
Potentia operandi accounts for whatever actually occurs, including fractious
and oligarchic behaviour, and is fundamentally normatively ambivalent. By
contrast, potentia agendi is the source for the positive readings of power in
Spinoza: it is potentia agendi that is linked to essence, striving, and virtue.
Potentia operandi is little analysed as such; but it is crucial for understanding
Spinoza’s political philosophy and its relation to Hobbes; and more broadly
for understanding Spinoza’s theory of popular power and democratic mass
agency.
In this chapter, I offer a brief precis of Spinoza’s metaphysics. In partic-
ular, I explain the place of operari, producing effects, within this system, and
establish the metaphysical contrast between potentia agendi and potentia
operandi (Section 7.2). I then argue that the Political Treatise’s distinction be-
tween having a right and being in control of one’s right (being sui juris) offers
a far more adequate political rendering of this metaphysical distinction than
do the concepts of the earlier Theological-​Political Treatise. I show how the
conception of being in control of one’s right applies separately to individual
persons and to a political collectivity (Section 7.3). In both sections of this
chapter, I show that potentia operandi is similar to Hobbes’s late relational
conception of potentia, concerning the actual production of effects within a

Potentia. Sandra Leonie Field, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197533864.001.0001
176 Spinoza

complex network of causal influences; this lays the groundwork for the three
Hobbesian problems outlined in Chapter 6 to have purchase on Spinoza’s po-
litical thought.
In the following chapters, I will argue that my new interpretation relieves
Spinoza’s politics of accusations of naivete, insofar as it allows for a stark di-
vergence between ethics and efficacy; I will bring to the fore the strong an-
tinomian current of Spinoza’s philosophy. But at the same time, I will show
how Spinoza’s potentia agendi lays the groundwork for a distinctive con-
ception of popular power that, while not hostile to social movements and
popular plebiscites, decentres them and no longer counts them as popular
powers’ exemplary expression.

7.2. Potentia Agendi and Potentia Operandi

Spinoza’s philosophical system reflects his intellectual context within

early modern substance metaphysics, within the milieu of early modern
encounters between scholastic and mechanical philosophy.1 As discussed
in Chapter 2, within the earlier scholastic hylomorphic metaphysics, a sub-
stance is something that exists in itself, and is not dependent as a part or
a predicate of some other thing. So for Aquinas, humans, animals, plants,
and rocks are all substances. It is these substances that each have a potentia.
Science involves identifying substances and investigating their potentiae, as
inherent qualitative tendencies proper to the particular substance in ques-
tion. In Spinoza’s time, new philosophers such as Descartes worked am-
bivalently within the frame of substance. On the one hand, Descartes still
identifies various substances: God, human souls, and extended substance.2
But on the other hand, when we focus on the natural sciences, the substance
metaphysics recedes into the background. For extension as a whole is a single

1 For a general overview, see Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Ethics: An Introduction (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2006), 52–​121. For readers interested in Spinoza’s proximate sources be-
yond the immediate Hobbesian/​Cartesian context, see Julie R. Klein, ‘Spinoza’s Debt to Gersonides’,
Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 24, no. 1 (2003): 19–​43; Yitzhak Y. Melamed, ‘Teleology in
Jewish Philosophy: Early Talmudists To Spinoza’, in Teleology: A History, edited by Jeff McDonough
(New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Charles Harry Manekin, ‘Spinoza and the
Determinist Tradition in Medieval Jewish Philosophy’, in Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy,
edited by Steven Nadler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 36–​58.
2 René Descartes, ‘The Principles of Philosophy’, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans-

lated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), 1.48, 1.51–​52.
 The Power of Producing Effects 177

substance; the animals, plants, and rocks that are parts of extension do not
have their own distinct substantial existence, and are instead understood in
their mechanistic causal interaction within extended substance.3
Spinoza starts the Ethics with a definition of substance: ‘By substance
I understand what is in itself [in se est] and is conceived through itself [per
se concipitur]’ (E 1d1). He argues that there is a single unique and infinite
substance, otherwise known as God, which encompasses all of nature. His
argument can be read against the backdrop of Cartesian metaphysics.4 By
Descartes’s own admission, only God is strictly independent; whereas human
souls and extension are dependent on God, relying on his ‘concurrence’.
Nonetheless, Descartes still calls them substances, as they are independent of
everything else apart from God.5 This is unsatisfactory for Spinoza: in accord
with his definition of substance, the conceptual dependence of everything on
God means that in fact, only God is substance (E 1p14). Everything that is,
is in God; God is not a creator standing outside creation, but the ‘immanent’
cause of all things (E 1p18). Human beings, along with all other finite things,
are not substances, but instead modes within substance (E 1p10, E 2p10).
Spinoza replaces the contrast between God and his creation with a contrast
between two aspects of God: natura naturans, which is God considered as the
cause of himself, uncaused by anything else; versus natura naturata, which is
everything that follows from God’s nature. This is God considered as the sum
of his modes, or in other words, nature as a whole (E 1p29s).6
In result, Spinoza’s metaphysics offers a radicalization of the Cartesian
mechanistic account of the natural world. Like Descartes and Hobbes, nat-
ural bodies exist in a causal network, such that each thing within this net-
work, and the effects it produces, is the result of the causal effects on it by
infinite other things (E 1p28). This causality is deterministic: if an effect is
caused, it cannot be rendered uncaused; but against Descartes,7 this applies
to humans as much as anything else, removing free will (E 1p29). And

3 Ibid., 2.23–​64, 4.199. For his part, Hobbes is less ambivalent, more hostile to retaining any robust

notion of substance. He imagines an extended void with bodies placed in it. The bodies are subsistens
per se only in the sense that they are not dependent on our thought; their motions are mechanistically
understood within nature as a whole (DCo 8.1, 8.19; see also my Chapter 2, Section 2.5).
4 Spinoza was intimately familiar with Descartes’s works; indeed, he composed a geometrical re-

construction of Cartesian metaphysics. See Spinoza, Collected Works, Vol. 1, 221–​348.

5 Descartes, ‘Principles of Philosophy’, 1.51.
6 For a more precise presentation and defence of this interpretation, see Yitzhak Melamed,

‘Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Substance: The Substance-​Mode Relation as a Relation of Inherence and

Predication’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78, no. 1 (2009): 17–​82.
7 René Descartes, ‘The Passions of the Soul’, in Philosophical Writings of Descartes,, Part 1.
178 Spinoza

against both Descartes and Hobbes, Spinoza also argues that nature is ne-
cessitarian: a different chain of causal effects could not have been put in play.
For God, natura naturans, being uncaused, acts from the necessity of his own
nature and could not have acted any other way (E 1p33).
Let me now situate the concepts of power potentia, acting agere, and pro-
ducing effects operari, in relation to my sketch of Spinoza’s metaphysics. At
the very start of Ethics, Spinoza links action to a thing’s causality from its own
nature alone; whereas producing an effect is linked to causality by another:

That thing is called free which exists from the necessity of its nature alone,
and is determined to act by itself alone [à se solâ ad agendum determinatur].
But a thing is called necessary, or rather compelled, which is determined by
another to exist and produce an effect [ab alio determinatur ad existendum,
& operandum] in a certain and determinate manner. (E 1d7)

In Book 1 of the Ethics, it is substance that acts, whereas finite modes only
produce effects. Spinoza constantly links action with substance: God acts
from his own nature alone, and as such is free. Towards the end of Book
1,8 Spinoza also links action with power potentia: God’s power potentia, by
which he acts, is the same as his essence, which is the same as his nature (E
1p34–​36, 1App). By contrast, there is no discussion of action or power in
relation to finite modes: they merely produce effects. All finite things are ‘de-
termined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an ef-
fect in a certain way [ad certo modo existendum, & operandum]’ (E 1p29; see
also 1p26–​28). This determination does not come directly from God’s abso-
lute divine nature, but rather, indirectly within the infinite causal network
of all other finite things (E 1p28). In sum, action and producing effects both
ultimately pertain to God, but in different ways. As natura naturans, or as
cause of himself, or as substance, God acts. But as natura naturata, as an in-
finite collection of his modes, God is necessarily caused to exist and produce
effects (E 1p29).
Even if nature as a whole can be said, from different perspectives, to act
or to produce effects, on the basis of Ethics Book 1 there is no hint that sin-
gular things (finite modes) themselves have any activity. Each finite thing

8 Perhaps Spinoza delays in deploying the term potentia systematically due to the volume of

misconceptions he needs to clear before claiming the term for his own purposes: in several scholia in
the earlier part of Book 1, he tentatively makes use of it without defining it, primarily in the context of
criticizing other mistaken understandings of God. See E 1p9s, 1p15s, 1p17s, 1p31s, 1p33s2.
 The Power of Producing Effects 179

is, emphatically, determined by another to produce effects (E 1p26–​1p29).

Indeed, amongst his contemporaries, Spinoza had good precedents for a
view of a passive nature of deterministic causal relations. In Descartes’s
metaphysics, human beings are active because they have substantial souls;9
but within extended substance, there is no active power for individual nat-
ural bodies. Animals are conceived as elaborate mechanical machines.10
Notwithstanding his retention of the word ‘power’, Hobbes’s later meta-
physics offers an even more passive picture of nature: including human
beings also as part of nature and denying them Cartesian free will.11
But against such precedents, the continuation of Spinoza’s Ethics takes the
idea of action, and especially human action, as absolutely central. Book 3 is
organized around the notion of human potentia agendi, power of acting. The
technical definition of virtue is power of acting, and the project of the Ethics
is its increase (E 3p11–​13, 3p15). How is this possible within his determin-
istic single-​substance metaphysics? In sketch, the solution is as follows.12
Only God is perfectly self-​caused. But amongst other things, despite being
entirely immanently caused by God’s power and entirely deterministically
integrated in the network of efficient causes of natura naturata, it is still pos-
sible to identify a thing’s own nature. Undisputably, anything an individual in
fact does is deterministically caused, ultimately by another. But proximately,
to what degree is it caused from the individual’s own nature, and to what

9 Descartes, ‘Passions of the Soul’, Part 1.

10 René Descartes, ‘Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking
the Truth in the Sciences’, in Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Part 5. Descartes allows that such
extended things might have power, understood as persistence in rest or motion (‘Principles of
Philosophy’, 2.43, 4.37). However, the term is not prominent in his works; furthermore, he is emphat-
ically opposed to attributing particular powers to gross individuals (stones, rocks, animals) as such
(ibid., 4.187).
11 The concept of ‘active power’ in Hobbes’s later work has no particular importance attached to

it. A thing’s active power is simply its efficient causality with respect to a particular effect; this power
itself is understood as the result of prior causes, without distinction as to whether those prior causes
are external or somehow internal (see Chapter 2, Section 2.5).
12 For more detailed and comprehensive reconstructions, see Matheron, Individu et communauté,

9–​24; Don Garrett, ‘Spinoza’s Conatus Argument’, in Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes, edited by Olli
Koistinen and J. I. Biro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 127–​156; Valtteri Viljanen, ‘Spinoza’s
Actualist Model of Power’, in The World as Active Power: Studies in the History of European Reason,
edited by Juhani Pietarinen and Valtteri Viljanen (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 213–​228. Garrett organizes
his exegesis around the concept of inherence, being ‘in se’, which characterizes substance abso-
lutely. Inherence is correlated with Spinozistic activity, adequacy, and freedom (’Spinoza’s Conatus
Argument’, 134–​141, 149–​150). Garrett shows that for Spinoza, finite individuals are conceived as
finite approximations to substance: ‘finite things can have, in varying degrees, characteristics that
only infinite substance possesses absolutely’ (139). See also Don Garrett, ‘Representation and
Consciousness in Spinoza’s Naturalistic Theory of the Imagination’, in Interpreting Spinoza: Critical
Essays, edited by Charles Huenemann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 10–​14.
180 Spinoza

degree from an external cause?13 Spinoza offers a technical language for this
distinction: adequate versus inadequate causation.

D1: I call that cause adequate whose effect can be clearly and distinctly per-
ceived through it. But I call it partial, or inadequate, if its effect cannot be
understood through it alone. (E 3d1)

Action is defined as adequate causation.

D2: I say that we act [agere] when something happens, in us or outside us, of
which we are the adequate cause, i.e. (by D1), when something in us or out-
side us follows from our nature, which can be clearly and distinctly under-
stood through it alone. On the other hand, I say that we are acted on [pati]
when something happens in us, or something follows from our nature, of
which we are only a partial cause. (E 3d2)

The distinction between causation from one’s own nature alone (adequate
causation) and causation with another (inadequate causation) recurs in
Spinoza’s so-​called conatus doctrine. Spinoza stipulates that an individual’s
own power of acting, its potentia agendi, is its striving (conatus) by which
it does something, either by itself or with another (E 3p7s). This scholium
allows us to articulate the connection between the adequacy of causation
and potentia agendi. If a thing is the adequate cause of an effect, the effect
is generated from its potentia agendi alone, and the thing is active; if a thing
is an inadequate cause of an effect, the effect is generated from its potentia
agendi, not taken alone, but only in combination with other powers, and to
that extent, the thing is passive. Note that despite the apparently binary cut
suggested by the opposed terms of action and passivity, in fact there is a con-
tinuum. Any causation of effects involves the causing individual’s own na-
ture; or in other words, even passivity involves some degree of active power.
The question will be merely how partial or complete that causality is.14
While Spinoza’s analysis is entirely general in its scope, it can be more
vividly illustrated by considering its application to human behaviour and
its bondage to the passions. In the face of an adverse event or loss, consider

13 Of course, the tricky thing will be characterizing what exactly is one’s own nature; I will return to

this in Chapter 8, Section 8.2.

14 Garrett, ‘Spinoza’s Conatus Argument’, 139–​ 140, 144–​ 145; Matheron, Individu et
communauté, 11–​24.
 The Power of Producing Effects 181

three kinds of human response. Some people may be devastated or enraged,

finding the event debilitating or lashing out. Intense affects (emotions) toss
them about ‘like waves on the sea, driven by contrary winds’ (E 3p59s). Other
people, with better emotional self-​regulation, will be able to weather the
event, still retaining their serenity and unswayed from their characteristic
temperament. Others again may maintain their serenity, but not through
their own self-​regulation. For instance, consider a child who is able to endure
a frightening event with equanimity, due to the support of a parent, blankie,
and pacifier; or the adult who can avoid exploding in rage only when their
partner is there to keep that rage in check. Now, a person acts insofar as they
are an adequate cause of effects, or in other words, insofar as the effects can be
understood through their own nature alone. I have not yet specified precisely
what this own nature might be, but already a rough intuitive contrast can be
made to plainly external forces. The sadness or anger of the first group can be
understood in relation to external events that trigger these passions; accord-
ingly, sadness and anger are passive undergoing (pati, or passion passio) and
are attributed partially to the power of those other things (E 3d3, 4p2–​4p6).
But not all human experience is equally captive to fate. The serenity of the
second group is more understood through their own nature than through
the external cause: thus, they are more active, they have greater potentia
agendi. Finally, the third group, the intermediate case, illustrates that it is not
the particular kind of conduct that constitutes activity, but its causality. For
in these cases, the outcome is qualitatively similar to the second group, but
with different causality. The individuals have been spared subjection to one
kind of external cause (the adverse event) through dependence on a different
one (their external resources for staying calm) (E 4p23–​4p24). Perhaps they
are more active than the first case of people overcome by passion, but they
still fall short of those who regulate their emotions for themselves (E 4p59d).
Spinoza stipulatively defines virtue as power of acting:

D8: By virtue and power [potentia] I understand the same thing, i.e. (by
IIIP7), virtue, insofar as it is related to man, is the very essence, or na-
ture, of man, insofar as he has the power of bringing about certain things
[potestatem habet, quædam efficiendi], which can be understood through
the laws of his nature alone [per solas ipsius naturæ leges]. (E 4d8)15

15 The definition does not explicitly include agere, but bringing things about through the ‘laws

of his nature alone’ clearly corresponds to adequate causation, or, in other words, action. See also
E 4p20. Spinoza’s understanding of power of acting as adequate causation is intertwined with his
182 Spinoza

While Spinoza’s overall ethical view is highly idiosyncratic, a virtuous

person in his technical sense of the word would conform to some degree to
common understandings: for they would not lash out in anger, nor hate an-
yone, and they would recognize the fundamental importance of bringing a
similar serenity to those human beings amongst whom they live (E 1p49s).
Furthermore, like some common-​sense accounts of virtue, Spinoza’s human
virtue is not something simply fully achieved or lost. For as I emphasized ear-
lier, there is not a binary division between activity and passivity; rather, ac-
tivity and virtue admit of degrees. The project of the Ethics is the increase of
this human virtue and power.
In commentators’ enthusiasm to grasp potentia agendi and virtue, less
discussed is a different way of analysing an individual finite mode’s con-
duct: answering the question, what kind of efficacy the individual has, what
sum of effects it produces, regardless of whether that efficacy is active or
passive (adequate or inadequate). Indeed, we already have the terminology
for this: it is the finite mode’s operation, or production of effects. The ter-
minology of operari is most prominent in Spinoza’s explanation of natura
naturata in Ethics 1, but it recurs subsequently. For instance, when specifi-
cally not discussing the essence of a body, but instead its duration, Spinoza
notes that the body is caused to exist and produce effects (ad existendum, &
operandum) by an infinite chain of other finite causes (E 2p30d, 2p31d).
I now raise the question: is power potentia associated with a singular
thing’s producing of effects? Is there such thing as potentia operandi? This
would be the power of a finite cause to produce effects, without regard to
whether those effects are fully understood through it: a power encompassing
adequate and inadequate causation. Or does a singular thing only have power
to the extent it is active?
In the Ethics, by and large, power is only attributed to a finite mode to
the degree it is an adequate cause; in other words, there is no such thing as
potentia operandi. Indeed, sometimes Spinoza associates inadequate cau-
sation not with power, but with lack of power impotentia (E 4App2). So, if
someone flies into a rage, this is an expression more of the power of other
things than of that person’s own power. Thus, they are better seen as power-
less than powerful, even if they successfully bring about many effects in their

understanding of reason as having adequate ideas; in the Ethics, the key threat to both is the affects
(emotions) (E 2p38–​40, 3p59s). However, as I will argue in Section 7.3.2, the threats to active power
cannot be managed by individual emotional self-​regulation alone without regard to broader external
political conditions.
 The Power of Producing Effects 183

rage (smashing things, pursuing a vendetta).16 Even where an individual’s

conduct is good, but understood through an external cause, on this analysis
we can deny that conduct is from the individual’s own power alone. Recall
the child or irascible adult who is calm through external supports: can we say
that they have the power to keep calm? It would appear that the answer is no,
not straightforwardly: they have power to do so only when their power com-
bined with that of others. The effect is not fully accounted for by their power,
because power is only potentia agendi.
But on one occasion, the Ethics uses the phrase potentia operandi. In a dif-
ficult passage answering the question of what can increase or decrease power
of acting, Spinoza distinguishes human potentia agendi from a different
power, human potentia operandi, or more precisely, ‘the power of each sin-
gular thing . . . by which he exists and produces an effect [potentia, quâ existit,
& operatur]’ (E 4p29d). The particular argument of this passage17 is not im-
portant at this point; I merely wish to draw attention to the fact that potentia
operandi is used in contrast to potentia agendi.
This concept of potentia operandi links neatly to Hobbes’s late conception
of power. Recall my exegesis and arguments from Chapter 2, Sections 2.3–​4.
For Hobbes, an act happens if and only if there is plenary power, or equiva-
lently, an effect happens if and only if there is an entire cause. Secondarily,
we can individuate actors and stipulate ‘their’ power to be a subset of the ple-
nary power, but this is done without any interest in connecting their power
to some conception of their nature. In particular, an entity’s power could very

16 The secondary literature commonly fails to take into account examples such as the one just

given, instead just equating the powerfulness of the Ethics (correlated with activity, rationality, and
freedom) with powerfulness in the sense of producing many effects. (See, for instance, Steinberg,
‘Spinoza on Being Sui Juris’, 34, 246–​248.) But people may successfully produce many effects without
any particular ethical or rational warrant, as becomes clear when considering human action in social
context. For a sharp example, consider the unethical official shielded from accountability within an
oligarchic regime. Chapter 8, Section 8.3 will offer a broader discussion of this point.
17 In brief, Spinoza is arguing that, because a person’s power of producing effects is determined by

other things, therefore the person’s power of acting (which is a component of this larger power of pro-
ducing effects) can be affected by other things; in particular, the power of acting may be increased or
decreased through external supports. This invites a prima facie objection: even if external forces can
render me more capable, can this really count as an increase in my own power? That is, in the case of
the person with the anger problem, when they become more capable insofar as their temper is kept
under control by another, is there any increase in their own power? E 4p59d and 5p39s suggest that
under some circumstances, there is an increase in power; similar ideas are developed in Steinberg’s
discussion of the role of the state in individual ethical development, and in Deleuze’s account of the
progress from joyful passions to active joys. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza,
translated by Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 239–​246, 257–​265, 273–​288; Justin
D. Steinberg, ‘Spinoza on Civil Liberation’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 47, no. 1 (2009): 35–​
58; Simon Duffy, ‘The Joyful Passions in Spinoza’s Theory of Relations’, in Spinoza Now, edited by
Dimitris Vardoulakis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 51–​64.
184 Spinoza

immediately be the result of the act of some other entity upon it. A white bil-
liard ball has power with respect to the act of hitting the red ball, even if that
power itself is merely the act with respect to the prior power of the cue stick.
Similarly, for Spinoza, an effect is produced when and only when the infi-
nite web of deterministically connected causes in nature combine to bring
it about. But secondarily, we can separate out a particular thing’s potentia
operandi, thereby naming its contribution to the effect, without reference to
whether the contribution flows from its own nature, or whether it is better
understood as the knock-​on effect of the impact of some other nature. The
child and the angry person whose passions are restrained do have the power
to remain calm, on equal footing with the sage (producing the same effects),
even though the causal pathways are different; the angry person flying into a
rage may be very powerful (causing many effects), even though the person is
dominated by the passions.
Despite the neat systematic fit of the concept of potentia operandi, if the
Ethics were Spinoza’s only text, I would have to admit that there is only a
slender textual basis for that particular terminology. But I will argue that this
category, not prominent in Ethics, becomes explicit in politics.

7.3. From Metaphysics to Politics

With the distinction between potentia agendi and potentia operandi in hand,
I turn to the politics. When Spinoza refers to power potentia in the political
texts, is it merely potentia agendi, or is it also sometimes potentia operandi?
Recall in Chapter 6, Section 6.3, I showed how both groups of commentators
find a way to account for the apparent combination of ethics and efficacy in
Spinoza’s politics. For both groups, this reading is supported, with greater or
lesser explicitness, by linking power in the Theological-​Political Treatise and
Political Treatise to human potentia in the Ethics, which (as I have shown)
is potentia agendi.18 For instance, Rosenthal appeals to the Ethics’ account

18 In what follows, I discuss Rosenthal and Melamed, but see also Barbone and Rice, ‘Introduction’,

12–​18; Barbone, ‘Power’, 91–​99; Negri, ‘The Political Treatise’, 14–​15; Negri, The Savage Anomaly,
157, 190; Della Rocca, Spinoza, 208–​209; Steinberg, ‘Spinoza on Being Sui Juris’, 247. On this point,
Curley is an outlier: he interprets Spinoza’s political power without any ethical grain (‘Kissinger,
Spinoza, and Genghis Khan’, 315–​342). Indeed, the turn to active power sometimes arises as an ex-
plicit critical response to Curley’s piece, for instance, Rosenthal, ‘Spinoza’s Political Philosophy’, 431;
Moira Gatens, ‘Spinoza’s Disturbing Thesis: Power, Norms and Fiction in the Tractatus Theologico-​
Politicus’, History of Political Thought 30, no. 3 (2009): 456.
 The Power of Producing Effects 185

of virtue as power potentia in order to understand the political texts’ iden-

tification of a thing’s power potentia with its right. He argues that the result
is normatively discriminating, and not some blunt view of ‘might is right’.19
Commentators often acknowledge that not all discussions of power in the
political texts fit perfectly with the concept from the Ethics, but they put
this down to the less precise and less philosophical nature of the political
texts. For instance, Melamed draws attention to Spinoza’s contrast between
a state with a skilled mercenary army and a state with a civilian army (TP
7.12, 7.17, 7.28): the key difference is that the former kind of state has greater
military prowess, but the latter kind of state is better at avoiding war in the
first place.20 For Melamed, there is some common-​sense ‘colloquial’ way of
talking about power according to which the state with a skilled mercenary
army is more powerful. But Melamed argues that Spinoza is able to deny the
mercenary state has the greater power by bringing in the more technical and
more philosophically significant notion of the state’s potentia agendi.21 This
exegetical strategy is fairly directly suggested by Spinoza’s own discussion in
Chapter 20 of the Theological-​Political Treatise: Spinoza initially asserts the
repressive state has great power (the colloquial sense), but then is quick to re-
vise his analysis to deny it holds genuine power (presumably potentia agendi)
(TTP 20.7, III/​240).
This account raises two sets of questions. First, what is this ‘colloquial
power’? Is there a technical or non-​colloquial analysis? Are interpreters right
to minimize its significance? Second, granting the existence of a distinct and
more normatively discriminating conception of political power in the texts,
how well does the political discussion fit with the metaphysics of potentia
agendi?

19 Rosenthal, ‘Spinoza’s Political Philosophy’, 409–​411, 418–​419, 428.

20 Yitzhak Y. Melamed, ‘When Having Too Much Power Is Harmful: Spinoza on Political Luck’,
in Spinoza’s ‘Political Treatise’: A Critical Guide, edited by Yitzhak Y. Melamed and Hasana Sharp
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 164–​167. The republican tradition also found other
reasons to worry about mercenaries: in war, a mercenary army lacks any patriotic commitment to the
republic, and can turn against it (TTP 17.74–​75, III.214; similarly Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses
on Livy, trans. Harvey Claflin Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996], II.20).
21 Melamed, ‘Having Too Much Power’, 171–​173; see also Mugnier-​Pollet, La philosophie politique

de Spinoza, 96. Della Rocca makes a similar move. Della Rocca accepts that, at first, right is equated
with power without qualification; but he claims that the more precise and accurate statement is that
right is equated with power in the long run (Della Rocca, Spinoza, 206–​208). He explicitly links (208–​
209) this claim to his earlier discussion (175–​205) of power of acting in the Ethics, associated with
essence and adequate causation. He grants that something wrong in the long term may be right in the
short term, but the privileged perspective is the long-​term one (222–​223).
186 Spinoza

7.3.1. ‘Colloquial’ Power as Potentia Operandi

In answer to the first question, I will argue that the ‘colloquial’ power is in
fact potentia operandi, readily and robustly grounded in Spinoza’s meta-
physics. Furthermore, this ‘colloquial’ power is of fundamental importance
in Spinoza’s politics: for it is this conception of power that is at stake in the
key passages establishing Spinoza’s doctrine of right.
In both the Theological-​Political Treatise and in the Political Treatise,
Spinoza begins his consideration of politics by laying out his doctrine of
right. Notoriously, he links right to power. But what power is at stake? In
both texts, right is explicitly connected, not to acting (agere), but to producing
effects (operari).

[E]‌ach individual has the supreme right [jus summum . . . habere] . . . to

exist and have effects as it is naturally determined to do [ad existendum &
operandum prout naturaliter determinatum est]. (TTP 16.4, III/​189)

[E]‌ach natural thing has as much right by nature as it has power to exist
and have effects [tantum juris ex naturâ habere, quantum potentiæ habet ad
existendum, & operandum]. (TP 2.3)

This terminological choice is repeated throughout the presentation of

the doctrine of rights (TTP 16.2, III/​189, 16.7, III/​190, 16.10, III/​191;
TP 2.2).
Beyond mere terminology, I claim that the substantive claims of the
passages also map onto the concept of potentia operandi as I sketched it in
Section 7.2. Admittedly, Spinoza’s discussion does appeal to the nature of the
individual.

By the right and established practice of nature I mean nothing but the rules
of nature of each individual. (TTP 16.1, III/​189)

This appeal to rules of nature might superficially be reminiscent of the Ethics’

notion of adequate causation and action: the production of effects that can
be understood through laws of an individual’s nature alone, or equivalently,
from the individual’s potentia agendi alone. Furthermore, the appeal to rules
suggests the possibility of violation: surely if right corresponds to rules of na-
ture of each individual, then when those rules are not observed, right is lost?
 The Power of Producing Effects 187

Such a reading of this passage finds apparent corroboration in Spinoza’s later

denial of right to sovereigns who govern in a way that contributes to their
own downfall (TTP 20.7, III/​240).
To the contrary, in the foundational passages laying out the doctrine of
right, it is clear that in fact the power to which right corresponds is potentia
operandi as I described it in the previous section. For nothing that actu-
ally occurs lacks right. Spinoza takes pains to insist that various wicked
and irrational human behaviours cannot be faulted from the point of view
of right.

[T]‌he Right and Established Practice of nature, under which all are born
and for the most part live, prohibits nothing except what no one desires and
what no one can do: not disputes, not hatreds, not anger, not deception.
Without exception, it is not averse to anything appetite urges. (TTP 16.9,
III/​190)22

Thus, right is not aligned exclusively with an individual’s active power and
adequate causation, but instead it is attributed to any production of effects
at all.23
In result, it is not acceptable to appeal to the Ethics’ potentia agendi to un-
derstand Spinoza’s political conception of right. In the Ethics, the very same
wicked and irrational human behaviours are considered exemplars of im-
potence, evidencing a subject overwhelmed by the power of other things (E
3Pref, E 4p20d). But ethically impotent behaviour can have an oversized im-
pact on human social existence. A person whose behaviour is understood
through the power of other things may be extremely effective and in this
sense may have very great power (potentia operandi): to return to my ear-
lier example, an angry person may bring about many effects (smash things,
pursue vendettas), even though only a very inadequate cause of those effects.
Spinoza contrasts the political and ethical ways of assessing behaviour: he
explicitly grants that problematic human behaviours may not properly count
as actions (actiones) (TP 2.5), but he asserts that this observation is irrelevant
to the question of right. All varieties of human behaviour without exception
are in accordance with the right of nature, because all arise as effects of nature

22 See also TTP 16.5–​11, III/​189–​191; TP 2.5–​8.

23 Matheron makes this claim very explicitly; however he also presumes that a regime (and its
right) will only be enduring if its power is active (Individu et communauté, 287–​289). For criticisms of
this presumption, see the discussion in Chapter 8, Section 8.3.
188 Spinoza

(effectûs naturæ) (TP 2.5). If I give rise to an effect that is not from my active
power alone, then it must have involved the active power of other things. But
Spinoza’s nature broaches no privilege for my active power over the powers
of other things.

Nature is not constrained by the laws of human reason, which aim only at
man's true advantage and preservation. It is governed by infinite other laws,
which look to the eternal order of the whole of nature, of which man is only
a small part. It is only by the necessity of this whole order that all individ-
uals are determined to exist and have effects [ad existendum & operandum]
in a definite way. (TTP 16.10, III/​190–​191)

The ‘rules of nature of each individual’ cited earlier (TTP 16.1, III/​189) can
be understood as local rules of the production of effects, within the totality
of the laws of nature as a whole; unlike laws of human advantage and pres-
ervation, they are never violated. This concurs with the initial claim in the
Theological-​Political Treatise, Chapter 20, where Spinoza asserts that. strictly
speaking, ‘by right sovereigns can rule with the utmost violence, and con-
demn citizens to death for the slightest of reasons’ (TTP 20.7, III/​240), even
though this is gravely unwise.
Perhaps Melamed is correct to identify a ‘colloquial’ sense of power in
Spinoza’s political texts. But this ‘colloquial’ sense also has a rigorous place
in Spinoza’s metaphysics as potentia operandi, and is critical for Spinoza’s
account of right. And furthermore, potentia operandi fits more closely with
prevalent contemporary uses of the word ‘power’ than does potentia agendi.
A powerful conqueror is said to be powerful even if that power is hardly at all
understood through their nature alone, but primarily in terms of the soldiers
and weapons that they can deploy. A church is said to be powerful even if its
power is not understood through its nature alone, but in virtue of its role in
harnessing wider economic and racial grievances. A wicked official can be
very powerful, even if their power is understood through the official’s place
in a corrupt oligarchic institutional system. To return to Melamed’s example
from the Political Treatise, a state with a mercenary army is said to be pow-
erful, productive of mass effects, even if it may destabilize itself in the long
term. This matches with Hobbes’s late treatment of power as purely a ques-
tion of effects; it is not important whether those effects are properly due to
the actor’s own nature alone.
 The Power of Producing Effects 189

7.3.2. Being Sui juris

I now turn to consider the second question, the question of the fit between
the normatively discriminating conception of power in the political writings
and the metaphysics of potentia agendi. Certainly, after getting past the in-
itial antinomian presentation of the doctrine of right as coextensive with
power, Spinoza’s political writings often appear to discuss political power
potentia with an ethical grain. Nature may not care about the preservation
and flourishing of any particular thing, but as humans, we must. As noted,
many commentators understand this ethical power in the politics as cor-
responding to potentia agendi.24 But against a uniform theory of ethical
power potentia agendi across Spinoza’s political writings, I will distinguish
two variants, representing two different attempts to translate power potentia
agendi into right. The translation is difficult because of the poor match be-
tween the structure of the respective concepts. I argue that the first attempt,
in the Theological-​Political Treatise, is problematic, because it relies on a
binary cut between having right and power and lacking right and power,
whereas the version in the Political Treatise fits better with Spinoza’s un-
derlying metaphysics, because it allows gradualism. The Political Treatise’s
translation of metaphysics into politics relabels the degree to which an entity
produces effects from its own active power alone as the degree to which it is
in control of its own right (sui juris). From this analytical frame, in principle
one can inquire separately into the sui juris status of the political order as a
whole versus that of the individual persons making up that order; in the pre-
sent chapter I do not establish the relationship between these statuses. It is
the Political Treatise’s analytical frame, centred on being sui juris, that I will
deploy in Chapters 8 and 9, to criticize the romanticism of extant interpret-
ations of Spinoza, and to put forward a new conception of popular power.
The much-​discussed Chapter 20 of the Theological-​Political Treatise gives
the most explicit statement of the first approach to translating potentia agendi
into politics. In that chapter, Spinoza initially asserts that whatever the sov-
ereign in fact does, it has the power and consequently the right to do. But
then Spinoza immediately retracts his initial assertion, denying that it makes
sense to attribute power to self-​destructive behaviour.

24 See footnotes 18–​21.

190 Spinoza

Indeed, because they can’t do these things25 without great danger to the
whole state, we can also deny that they have absolute power [absolutam
potentiam] to do such things. So we can deny also that they can do them
with absolute right [absolutum jus]. For we’ve shown that the right of the
supreme powers [jus ... summarum potestatum] is determined by their
power [potentia]. (TTP 20.7, III/​240)

Notwithstanding Spinoza’s reference back to his own earlier demonstration,

this passage clearly represents a shift of perspective. For as argued in Section
7.3.1, on the earlier analysis in Spinoza’s Chapter 16, all actual occurrences,
including the destruction of any particular thing, occur by right.
The shift of perspective involves Spinoza focussing his analysis on a partic-
ular thing’s own proper power, as opposed to the power of other things. The
idea that self-​destructive behaviour cannot flow from a thing’s own power is
certainly reminiscent of some propositions of the Ethics regarding potentia
agendi. In setting up his conatus doctrine (discussed in Section 7.2), Spinoza
asserts:

No thing can be destroyed except through an external cause. (E 3p4)

He goes on to connect a thing’s own power of acting with its perseverance: a

thing’s power is

the striving [conatus] by which [each thing] (either alone or with others)
does anything, or strives to do anything [agit, vel agere conatur]—​i.e. . . . the
power, or striving [potentia, sive conatus], by which it strives to persevere in
its being. (E 3p7d)

But I will now argue that despite the superficial compatibility, the analysis in
the politics does not fit well with this metaphysics.
As I argued in Section 7.2, in Spinoza’s metaphysics a thing entirely lacks
potentia agendi only insofar as it produces no effects whatsoever, or in other
words, insofar as it ceases to exist. Any effect that an individual is involved in
causing arises in part from its potentia agendi. Nor, at the other extreme, is it
possible for any finite thing to act fully and exclusively from its own nature

25 ‘These things’ being to ‘rule with utmost violence, and condemn citizens to death for the slightest

of reasons’ (TTP 20.7, III/​240).

 The Power of Producing Effects 191

(E 4p2–​4p4). Perfect activity is reserved for God alone. Thus, for finite ex-
isting things, activity is a matter of degree, and any classification of acts as
definitively active or passive, or as definitively possessing or lacking power,
will be irredeemably arbitrary. Notwithstanding his use of terminological
contrasts between activity and passivity, or between power and impotence,
Spinoza’s metaphysics does not support a sharp binary division amongst ac-
tually occurring behaviours.26
Turning to the Theological-​Political Treatise’s passage 20.7, what is at stake
is a certain imprudent mode of governance, where the self-​destructive ef-
fect is not instant. Accordingly, in denying right and power to this mode of
governance, the passage demands a sharp binary division amongst actually
existing behaviours—​precisely what Spinoza’s metaphysics does not support.
To be sure, if we were speaking of the instant a state ceases to exist, then at
that moment the state is entirely lacking in active power. But that is not what
is in question in the case at hand. The repressive state is said to lack power and
right because its mode of governance may undermine the state’s existence in
the longer term. But what exactly is the relevant timescale of destruction to
determine whether a policy is sufficiently imprudent to count as lacking in
right? What if in fact the regime manages to kick along for a fairly long time
despite its restrictions on speech? According to Spinoza’s metaphysics, in-
sofar as it doesn’t immediately collapse, it expresses some degree of its own
active power.27
The Theological-​Political Treatise’s attempt to relate right to active power
problematically collapses together two different questions: first, whether a
state continues to exist and cause effects; and second, how active it is. The first
question fits well with a binary cut of having or lacking right. But the second
would be served better by a gradual scale, recognizing (metaphysically) that

26 This is reflected in the prominent use of qualifiers in the conatus doctrine: ‘Each thing, insofar

as it is in itself [quantum in se est], strives to persevere in its being’ (E 3p5, translation modified). The
qualifier is necessary because nothing apart from God is ever fully ‘in itself ’ or active. When a thing
does something self-​destructive without actually ceasing to exist, this simply means that its active
power and striving were combined with other forces inimical to that striving. See Garrett, ‘Spinoza’s
Conatus Argument’, 139–​145.
27 Perhaps a student of the Ethics might hope to map the binary division from the politics onto a

different metaphysical distinction: the distinction between behaviour that increases the active power
of the state and behaviour that decreases it, or in Spinoza’s technical language, between its joyful and
sad affectations (E 3d3, E 3p11s). That is, might we attempt to gloss passage 20.7 as granting the state
a right to joyful but not sad governance? But such a proposal cannot succeed. Every single instance of
imprudent governance decreases the state’s active power, but Spinoza emphatically upholds the right
to moderately poor governance: he clearly states that citizens should continue to obey unreasonable
laws (TTP 20.15, III/​15).
192 Spinoza

activity is a matter of degree and (politically) that political decisions and gov-
ernance exist on a spectrum of prudence and imprudence. Indeed, in the
Political Treatise, Spinoza offers a new way of mapping active power onto
right, in which these two questions are sharply separated, offering an anal-
ysis of right and power that coheres much better with Spinoza’s underlying
metaphysics.
The first dimension of analysis of any political situation is the question
of possession of right. Early in the Political Treatise, Spinoza links pos-
session of right to potentia operandi, as I have argued. This is maintained
throughout the text. Whatever occurs, occurs by right; regarding what-
ever does not occur, right is lacking. Thus, any state, insofar as it exists
and produces effects, does so with full right. Attributing right to a state
does not involve any discrimination between better and worse ways in
which it might exist and produce effects. The name for the state’s right is
imperium (translated by Curley as sovereignty) (TP 2.17); Spinoza also
uses it to refer the entity unified by that right (TP 3.1 and passim). This
right is binary, in the sense that there either is imperium (the state exists
and produces effects) or there is not (the state has fallen apart and thus no
longer exists as such).
As an aside, let me draw attention to a striking feature of the Political
Treatise’s analysis of the production of political effects: its analytical privilege
to the political order as a whole. Imperium is defined by the power of the mul-
titude (TP 2.17); and the term is used more or less interchangeably with com-
monwealth, civitas, the ‘whole body’ of the state (TP 5.1–​2). By contrast, the
central term to analyse political order and its right in the earlier Theological-​
Political Treatise was summa potestas, which referred more narrowly to the
holder of sovereign power (whether a monarch or an assembly) (TTP 16.24–​
35, III/​193–​195 and passim). If (as Spinoza asserts) the power of rulers rests
on and emerges from the power of the populace, these two concepts turn out
to be coextensive: the right of the rulers must be understood in terms of the
power and right of the political order taken as a whole. Indeed, Spinoza tends
to equate the two quite freely (TP 3.1–​2). Nonetheless, imperium is a superior
analytical and explanatory term, because the conduct of the formal holder of
sovereignty is not free-​floating. Rather, it is itself generated within a network
of determinate causes, most centrally the social and institutional structures
of the polity.28

28 See also Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 69–​70.

 The Power of Producing Effects 193

The second dimension of analysis supplies normative discrimination. Just

as in Spinoza’s metaphysics, there is a question, for any thing’s causation of
effects (for any thing’s potentia operandi), to what degree is that causation
adequate (to what degree does it arise from its own potentia agendi alone);
so too in Spinoza’s politics, there is a question, for any right, to what degree
is this right the thing’s own right alone. Or, to introduce new equivalent ter-
minologies, to what extent is the thing sui juris, in control of its own right.29
The concept of being sui juris is laid out in two key textual passages in the
Political Treatise. First, Chapter 2 addresses individual right; then Chapter 5
addresses the state’s right. Loosely speaking, Spinoza’s normative criterion for
a good state is both that the state itself be sui juris, and also that the subjects
of the state within it be maximally sui juris. I will develop this claim in my
own Chapters 8 and 9, with various qualifications and caveats. For now, my
purpose is merely to characterize each of these conditions separately; in
Chapter 8 I will argue that they can readily come apart.
I start by characterizing what it is for an individual to be sui juris,
establishing an equivalence with the metaphysical concept of being active
or virtuous (producing effects more from one’s own potentia agendi than
from external causes); but equally with the more familiar political concept
of independence.30 The connection with independence has obvious textual
support. The idea of being sui juris is initially introduced in opposition to
potestas. Recall the analysis of potestas discussed in Chapter 5, Section 5.4: to
whatever extent a person is dependent on another, they are in that person’s
power, in/​sub potestate. Insofar as a person is in the power of another, they
are alterius juris, subject to another’s right. By contrast, to the extent a person
is not subjected to the potestas of another, or in other words, to the extent
they are independent, they are in control of their own right, sui juris (TP 2.9–​
11). At face value, there is also a patent connection between being sui juris
and the Ethics’ discussion of action and adequate causation, insofar as the
key passages use the exact same technical language.31 Being sui juris corres-
ponds to being adequate cause of one’s actions, with producing effects from
one’s potentia agendi alone, which amounts to rational self-​determination.32
29 I grant that the terminological distinction is not perfectly respected in the text. For instance,

consider the case of an individual in a collective, whose conduct is subject to the control of the col-
lective. Spinoza oscillates between saying that such conduct lacks right altogether, and saying that it
does have right, but that right is not its own (TP 2.16, 3.2).
30 Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 61.
31 See footnote 58 of Chapter 6.
32 The connection with the metaphysics of the Ethics suggests that the scope of dependency at stake

in being alterius juris encompasses non-​human dependencies.

194 Spinoza

Being alterius juris, by contrast, means that one’s conduct is understood not
through one’s nature alone, but through that nature in combination with the
nature of other things.33
However, this dual equivalence has troubled commentators, because they
do not see how ethical activity and political independence can be equated,
and they see textual suggestion that Spinoza himself does not make such an
equation. Steinberg articulates the puzzle as follows. The sage is said to be
most sui juris (TP 2.11), but any sage will also fully submit themselves to be
in potestate of the state (TP 3.5–​6): that is, they will simultaneously be not sui
juris.34 Steinberg’s solution is simply to separate the ethical-​metaphysical and
political meanings of being sui juris. The apparent contradiction of Spinoza’s
claim is dissolved: it reduces to the claim that a sage, sui juris in the meta-
physical sense, will not want to be sui juris in the political sense.35
Against Steinberg, distinguishing two separate and unrelated senses of
‘being sui juris’ is unnecessary and unhelpful. For being sui juris is a gradu-
alist concept, and it always makes reference to a relevant contrast class. These
two features of the concept allow it to encompass both of its supposedly dis-
tinct meanings of being sui juris in the case of Steinberg’s sage, but also allow
it to account for the ambivalent status of the mad person, which would re-
main unexplained on Steinberg’s account.
As argued in Chapter 6, Section 6.4, Spinoza’s analysis of being in potestate
/​ alterius juris is concerned to include all ways in which one’s conduct is de-
pendent on that of others, whether this is overwhelming or only slight. Thus,
being sui juris and being sub potestate /​alterius juris need to be understood
on a continuum, and Spinoza speaks of being more or less sui juris (TP 2.9–​
11, 3.7, and passim). The gradualist character of dependency necessitates
using these concepts with respect to particular contrast classes. For if de-
pendency is not total and exclusive but admits of degrees, then a given indi-
vidual may be dependent in different respects on different things.36 Spinoza’s

33 A similar idea can be seen already in the Theological-​Political Treatise’s discussion of obedi-

ence: ‘So whatever a subject does which answers to the commands of the supreme power—​whether
he’s been bound by love, or compelled by fear, or (as indeed is more frequent) by hope and fear to-
gether, whether he acts from reverence (a passion composed of fear and wonder) or is led by any
reason whatever—​he acts by the right of the state, not his own right [ex jure imperii, non autem suo
agit]’ (TTP 17.7, III/​202).
34 Steinberg, ‘Spinoza on Being Sui Juris’, 239–​240, 243–​244.
35 Ibid., 24–​248.
36 See footnote 57 in Chapter 6. This idea of differential and contextual dependency also allows

that a person might be both sub potestate of the state and also sub potestate of another individual or
group within the state; for instance, a servant is subject to both their master and the political order as
a whole.
 The Power of Producing Effects 195

use of the term reflects this contextual specificity, as is seen most sharply in
the case of the mad person (TP 3.8). Why is a mad person sui juris? They are
sui juris with respect to the state, for insofar as (eatenus) they are unrespon-
sive to the state’s incentives and punishments, their conduct cannot be un-
derstood through the power of the state.

[T]‌hose who neither fear nor hope for anything are to that extent their own
masters [eatenus sui juris sunt]. (TP 3.8)

But they are profoundly alterius juris to other human beings: the mad are
extremely vulnerable to others’ violence, exploitation, domination, insofar
as they are less able to navigate the social domain. Indeed, they also are para-
digmatically sub potestate of the state: for they are often captured, punished,
and constrained by the state. Steinberg’s distinction is inadequate to resolve
this paradox, because the mad are simultaneously sui juris and not sui juris in
Steinberg’s second (political) sense of the term.
With these considerations in hand, we can return to Steinberg's case of
the sage.

I call a man completely free just insofar as he is guided by reason, because

to that extent he is determined by causes which can be understood through
his own nature alone. (TP 2.11)

Is a sage (one who has approached intellectual perfection) completely free?

To be sure, their high degree of reason allows them optimally to negotiate the
predicaments they find themselves in, and to avoid some bad predicaments
altogether. A sage is sui juris with respect to other human beings, insofar as
the sage is not swayed by collective passions, and conducts themself as well
as possible to encourage virtuous and sociable conduct in others. But it does
not follow that they are perfectly sui juris, determined exclusively by causes
that can be understood through their own nature alone. Insofar as they can
be threatened by others, or insofar as they need material goods in order to
live, or need others not to steal their material goods or attack them, they are
still very much alterius juris and dependent on other human beings. Even the
hermitic sage is not sui juris: they are subject to famine and attack and are at
the mercy of nature should they fall ill (TP 3.11).37 The state has an important

37 Matheron, Individu et communauté, 282.

196 Spinoza

role in reducing these acute kinds of dependency, albeit in favour of a more

diffuse dependency on the political order as a whole (TP 3.3).38 In result, the
sage within a state is subject to the state’s power, just like any other member
of the political community. This framework of subjection to the state allows
the sage to remain sui juris with respect to their fellows (TP 3.5–​6). Thus, in
saying the sage is both sui juris and not sui juris, Spinoza is not making use
of two different conceptions of being sui juris. Rather, he is pointing to two
different contrast classes of dependency.39
The discussion in Chapter 2 of the Political Treatise concerns a human
individual’s status as sui juris, for which we have a series of Spinozist
equivalences: an individual is sui juris, or in control of their own right, to the de-
gree that they are active, or to the extent they produce effects from their potentia
agendi alone, which is the same as producing effects that can be understood
through their own nature alone. In Chapter 9, I will flesh out the broader polit-
ical import of this conception of individual sui juris status: I will characterize a
social order in which citizens are maximally sui juris, not as what would be im-
possible (a community of sages), but as a social order that simultaneously allows
individual ethical development and also eliminates overwhelming relations of
dependency between citizens. But for now, I turn to showing how the concept of
being sui juris can separately be applied to the political order as a whole.40
Whenever a state produces effects, then it has power (potentia operandi)
and right to do so. This right and power are defined by the power of the mul-
titude (multitudinis potentia) composing the state. But it is an open question,
is the state sui juris in the production of these effects? Indeed, throughout the
Political Treatise, the dominant concept for normatively evaluating the state
(imperium) is being sui juris; Spinoza explicitly contrasts this, the best way
for a state to run, with the merely rightful operation that characterizes any
state whatsoever (TP 5.1). Later in the Political Treatise, he redefines political
absoluteness as being maximally sui juris (TP 8.3–​7, also TP 5.2).

38 Ibid., 327. See also Balibar: ‘To be in the power of others, to depend upon their power, can also

constitute a positive condition through which one can, up to a point, preserve and affirm one’s own
individuality’ (Spinoza and Politics, 61).
39 This analysis is structurally similar to the late Hobbesian analysis from Chapter 5, Section 5.4: far

from individual freedom being intrinsically opposed to the state, individual freedom relies on a good
state as its condition of possibility (to eliminate private and informal domination).
40 Armstrong and Matheron usefully distinguish between active and passive power, mapping

onto my distinction between potentia agendi and potentia operandi. But whereas Armstrong applies
this analysis only to individual human subjects, Matheron also extends it to the state as a whole.
Armstrong, ‘Natural and Unnatural Communities’, 269–​299; Matheron, Individu et communauté,
330–​348.
 The Power of Producing Effects 197

One might have thought that a state sui juris just is one that maximally
secures the sui juris status of its subjects, but I emphasize that this needs to
be demonstrated and is not built into the concept of being sui juris itself. To
be sure, just as an individual human being is maximally sui juris when their
behaviour is determined by reason, so too is the state most sui juris when it
is founded on reason (TP 5.1). But being determined by reason is equiva-
lent to being determined by one’s own nature alone (producing effects that
can be understood through one’s own nature alone); thus a precise applica-
tion of the concept of being sui juris will need to wait until I have provided a
clear characterization of what the state’s nature might be (Chapter 8, Section
8.2). For now, I will merely sketch two paradigmatic and intuitive cases of a
state failing to be determined by its own nature alone and hence failing to be
maximally sui juris. The first is when the political unit as a whole finds itself
subjected to or dependent on a gross external force (TP 3.12): for instance,
in Melamed’s example of a bellicose state suffering counterattacks from its
neighbours;41 or states uneasily allied through royal marriage (TP 7.24); or a
small city requiring another’s protection (TP 7.16). The second case is where
there is some fragility internal to the state, such that the component parts do
not constitute a resilient whole: the effects produced by the state are under-
stood not through its unified nature, but through the natures of its disparate
parts. This could take the form of general lawlessness (TP 5.2); or more in-
terestingly, in a division between groups. If rulers (patricians, or the ruling
clique in a monarchy) are terrified of the masses, then their rule is not abso-
lute, even and especially if this terror is the result of their own tyrannical rule.

The greater reason for fear [the Commonwealth] has, the less it is its own
master [eò minùs sui juris]. (TP 3.9)

From this point of view, the apparently most absolute monarchy (in the
conventional/​Hobbesian meaning of absoluteness) is actually revealed to
be the least sui juris and the least absolute, because of the monarch’s fear of
the masses who resent the monarch’s formally unchallengeable supremacy
(TP 6.5–​8).42 But equally, other kinds of divisions are also possible, as, for

41 Melamed, ‘Having Too Much Power’, 164–​167.

42 Steinberg’s account of a state’s absoluteness has some similarities with mine: a state is absolute to
the extent ‘it will beget civic harmony, or establish a common ratio’. However, Steinberg emphasizes
the role of the holder of sovereignty: ‘The onus for maintaining order and indeed its own authority is
placed squarely on the sovereign’ (Steinberg, Spinoza’s Political Psychology, 172). In order to support
this claim, Steinberg interprets away Spinoza’s use of civitas rather than summa potestas at critical
198 Spinoza

instance, the hostility between the Levites and the other tribes of the ancient
Hebrew republic (TTP 17.3, III/​201, 17.13–​18, III/​203–​204, 17.96–​101, III/​
217–​218; TP 6.5–​8, 8.3–​7).

7.4. Conclusion

In this chapter, I have offered a new distinction between two senses of

power, potentia operandi and potentia agendi. I sketched it conceptually and
I grounded it textually in the Ethics. Translating these senses of power to pol-
itics, I have privileged the Political Treatise’s two-​dimensional account of
right as more faithful to the metaphysical frame than the more familiar one-​
dimensional account in the Theological-​Political Treatise.
Spinoza’s two-​dimensional account of right allows us to parse out various
critical distinctions in analysing political power. First, we can ask what right
a collectivity has, that is, how powerful it is in terms of exercising a capacity
to produce effects. But second, we can ask how much its effects can be under-
stood through its own nature alone, how much it acts by its own power, or
equivalently in Spinoza’s redefinition of the terms, how absolute or sui juris it
is. And third, we can ask whether the inner structure of the collective power
involves citizens being sui juris or being dependent on one another. With this
two-​dimensional analysis of right, I open the possibility of an interpretation
of Spinoza’s politics that emphasizes its antinomian themes: recognizing and
accommodating a possible gulf between political efficacy and ethics. Over
the next two chapters, I will deploy this analysis to characterize the Spinozist
response to the three Hobbesian problems outlined in Chapter 6, but also
to build a positive conception of popular power that escapes accusations of
political naivete or romanticism, and which has critical consequences for
how we view the democratic credentials of social movements and popular
plebiscites.

points in TP (ibid., 172 n. 36; TP 5.2–​3). But on my account, the focus on the determinate causes of
good or bad rulerly behaviour, reflected in the shift away from a focus on summa potestas, is a dis-
tinctive and appealing feature of the later text’s analysis. Already in the TTP, there is brief mention
of the need to constrain rulers (TTP 17.14, III/​203), but the theme is developed only in relation to
the Hebrew republic, not more generally. By contrast, TP makes explicit that it is no use simply to
stipulate correct rulerly behaviour outside of an account of its determinate causes: ‘[I]‌t’s necessary to
set up a state, so that everyone—​both those who rule and those who are ruled—​does what’s for the
common well-​being, whether they want to or not’ (TP 6.2). Undue focus on potestas inappropriately
narrows our focus onto the holder of power rather than the power-​holder’s function within the whole
ecology of the political body.
 8
Nature’s Indifference

8.1. Introduction

The larger purpose of the book is to understand popular power. Are radical
democrats correct to identify popular plebiscites or social movements as ex-
emplary expressions of popular power? If not, how should popular power
worthy of the name be conceived? In Part I of this book, I have used Hobbes
to construct a conception of popular power as the durable production of po-
litical effects not distorted by oligarchic private powers. I examined Hobbes’s
withering scepticism towards romantic conceptions of the spontaneous
equality and goodness of the popular multitude; on his view, democracy
tends to suffer from the political problem, and does so the more acutely, the
more open and participatory it is, due to the continuous oligarchic gener-
ation of power blocs within the multitude. Hobbes overcomes the political
problem through an institutional proposal that I have called repressive egali-
tarianism, a proposal that is highly ambivalent to contemporary sensibilities.
Now, in Part II, I have turned to Spinoza in pursuit of a more inspirational
vision of popular power. On the standard presentations, Spinoza offers a
view of politics that I have referred to in shorthand as the ‘combination of
ethics and efficacy’: for it holds that genuinely effective political power in fact
coincides with what is ethically desirable. In Chapter 6, I showed that this
optimism is shared by both camps of contemporary Spinoza interpreters: on
the one hand, the radical democratic interpreters, for whom popular power
is an underlying insurgent force disrupting unjust rule; but equally the more
mainstream ‘constitutionalist’ interpreters, who are less inclined to grant the
existence of a prepolitical popular power, but for whom nonetheless the only
possibility of a stable political order is one that meets the ethical desiderata
of equality and participation. This view needs to face a three-​part Hobbesian
accusation of naivete: the problem of the multitude’s inner oligarchy; the
problem of nonideal endurance; and the problem of democracy’s perverse
effects.

Potentia. Sandra Leonie Field, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197533864.001.0001
200 Spinoza

In Chapter 7, I offered a new interpretation of Spinoza’s political phi-

losophy, resting on the distinction between two fundamental concepts: on
the one hand, having right and power; on the other hand, being in control
of one’s right, and acting from one’s own proper power. Everything that
happens, happens by right, and there is no right to anything that does not
in fact occur; a thing’s right is coextensive with its potentia operandi. But
there remains an open question of whose right and power: are the effects
produced by a right and power that are properly that thing’s own, or in other
words from that thing’s nature and active power potentia agendi alone? Or
are the effects produced from its nature and active power only in combina-
tion with the nature and active power of another? If the effects are produced
from its own nature alone, then it is sui juris, and by a series of Spinozist
equivalences, it is free, absolute, active, and virtuous. The question of sui
juris status can be posed both to a political order and to the subjects who
make it up.
In the present chapter, I will use this framework to argue that there
is a separation between the ethics and the efficacy of popular power in
Spinoza’s politics, thereby relieving him of the accusation of naivete with
respect to the first and the second Hobbesian criticisms from Chapter 6
(I hold over the third for Chapter 9). First, I claim that Spinoza accepts
the problem of the multitude’s inner oligarchy. I establish a characteriza-
tion of being sui juris as homeostasis: thus, I argue that for any horizon-
tality of a collectivity’s inner structure to be attributed to the collectivity’s
own power, it needs to be established as a homeostatic self-​p erpetuating
feature of the collectivity over time. I show that for Spinoza any hori-
zontality of a collectivity’s inner structure is neither a natural ground
nor the telos of a natural tendency, but something that needs to be estab-
lished. The upshot is that oppositional social movements cannot con-
stitute exemplars of a multitude sui juris. Second, I claim that Spinoza
accepts the problem of nonideal endurance. Virtuous political organiza-
tion that cultivates individual human virtue, freedom, and equality may
conduce to stability, but stability is also possible in other ways, whether
from durable external causes, or from non-​ egalitarian homeostatic
forms of collective organization (whereby the state is itself sui juris, but
the subjects within it find themselves in hierarchical relations of de-
pendency or subjection).
This chapter underscores the deep antinomianism of Spinoza’s philos-
ophy. Spinoza insists that
 Nature’s Indifference 201

[n]‌ature is not constrained by the laws of human reason, which aim only
at man’s advantage and preservation. It is governed by infinite other laws,
which look to the eternal order of the whole of nature, of which man is only
a small part. (TTP 16.10, III/​190–​191)

The positive upshot of my analysis will be twofold. First, Spinoza’s analysis

poses an understanding of human collectivities as neither inherently popular
nor powerful. A good and strong horizontal multitude needs to be consti-
tuted, not merely through removing the obstacles of oppressive institutions,
but also through positive structuring of good civic institutions. Second, a
Spinozist analysis does not licence any democratic complacency that only
good states will endure; regimes may endure that bear little relation to any
appealing republican liberal-​democratic model.

8.2. Accepting the Problem of Inner Oligarchy

A goal of Spinoza’s politics is for a political community to be sui juris and ab-
solute. Paying attention to Spinoza’s grounding of state power (imperium) in
the power potentia of the multitude (TP 2.17), the goal of absoluteness then
amounts to the goal of a multitude sui juris, a multitude governed by its active
power alone. What is controversial is to understand what it takes to achieve a
multitude sui juris. In particular, supposing that a multitude sui juris displays
a horizontal equal shape internally,1 is this ‘natural’ and spontaneous, the re-
sult of removing bad institutions? Or does it require positive institutional
structure of its own? Radical democrats conceive of the multitude as natu-
rally good, but their view has already been amply criticized in the literature
for its romanticism;2 indeed, the group of commentators I designated ‘consti-
tutionalist’ is defined by their shared rejection of any natural goodness of the
multitude (see Chapter 6, Section 6.3). However, in this section, I consider

1 In Section 8.3, I will argue that there are also hierarchical multitudes sui juris, or in other words,

multitudes that are themselves sui juris, but whose internal structure features subjects who are not sui
juris with respect to each other. For now, I focus only on the standardly presumed horizontal multi-
tude sui juris.
2 Notably by Balibar. Balibar, ‘Spinoza, the Anti-​Orwell’, 123–​125; Balibar, Spinoza and Politics,

61–​70, 88; Étienne Balibar, ‘Potentia Multitudinis, Quae Una Veluti Mente Ducitur’, in Current
Continental Theory and Modern Philosophy, edited by Stephen H. Daniel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 2005), 92–​93. Matheron proposes that unmediated human relations, far from being
democratic and equal, resemble the anarchic inequality of medieval society (Individu et communauté,
158–​159).
202 Spinoza

a phenomenon that greatly interests proponents of the radical democratic

view, and which might appear to confound the constitutionalist commit-
ment to institutional mediation of mass power: namely, social movements.
Recall from Chapter 6, Section 6.3.1, that radical democratic readers
of Spinoza understand the multitude as a horizontal collection of
unhierarchized human singularities, opposed to the state. To be sure, some
actually existing multitudes are distorted from this natural shape, but this
is explained by pressure from state power potestas. (Or in some more cau-
tious formulations, the multitude has a tendency towards horizontality, a
tendency that can be temporarily thwarted by state power.) Such a view is
diametrically opposed to the late Hobbesian understanding of power devel-
oped in the first half of the book: as argued, in Hobbes’s later writings, there is
nothing naturally horizontal about the multitude, neither its actual state nor
its tendencies, even if state power is removed. Already in Chapter 6, Section
6.4, in my exegesis of Spinoza’s expansive conception of potestas, I provided a
preliminary argument that Spinoza would agree with Hobbes. Human social
existence is pervaded by microhierarchical relations that may tend to com-
pound to generate oligarchical power blocs in the multitude.3
I can imagine that my preliminary argument might be contested by rad-
ical democratic readers of Spinoza. For it is possible to grant that human re-
lations feature micro-​potestates, and yet deny that they tend to compound.
Indeed, Spinoza asserts that people hate inequality (TTP 5.23, III/​74; TP 7.5),
a claim that appears to corroborate the radical democratic view. While some-
times oligarchical power blocs emerge and compound themselves, we also
have striking real examples of the opposite. Negri celebrates ‘[c]‌enturies of
struggle by oppressed minorities, by the exploited proletariat’; he interprets
social movements as harbingers of the multitude’s constituent progress
towards equal combination.4 Social movements against state power are often
internally horizontal, equal, and plural; in them, the compounding tenden-
cies worried about in Chapter 6 do not eventuate. Furthermore, note the
distinctive thing about social movements: far from being part of the state

3 This argument departs from the more common characterization of the deficiencies of the

preinstitutional multitude. Most constitutionalist readers of Spinoza characterize the preinstitutional

multitude as pervasively unstable: although individuals attempt to establish hierarchical relations,
the larger problem is that nothing, neither these relations of domination nor any larger unity, can
have even mid-​range stability prior to the establishment of the state. In the terms of my discussion
from Chapters 2 through 4, the analysis remains early Hobbesian. This lack of consideration of stable
forms of emergent hierarchy and domination results in an inadequate understanding of domination
within the state; see my discussion in Section 8.3.
4 Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 221; Hardt and Negri, Multitude, xi–​xvi, 67–​88, 213–​222.
 Nature’s Indifference 203

apparatus, they are opposed to it. They appear to give grounds for reasserting
the natural democratic goodness of the multitude’s active power, its power
from its own nature as opposed to distortions from external causes.5 Negri
concludes The Savage Anomaly by prophesying the rise of an independent
multitude, ‘the independence of productive force,’ which has moved beyond
the antagonistic struggle between potentia and potestas.6 Other radical dem-
ocratic readers of Spinoza take a more tragic interpretation of the trajectory
of history: the multitude rises up to express its natural equality, but is regu-
larly crushed or co-​opted, without any necessary progressive increase in its
success over time. But even here, they still share Negri’s idea of equality as the
natural or authentic condition of the multitude.7
Might social movements be a manifestation in miniature of the entire
multitude’s active power, as radical democrats suggest? Are they exemplars
of a multitude sui juris? Do they support the radical democratic idea of a nat-
ural horizontal shape for the multitude? In this section, I will argue that so-
cial movements cannot be exemplary cases of a multitude sui juris. For just as
individual being sui juris is a relational concept (as I elaborated in Chapter 7,
Section 7.3.2), so too is a collectivity’s sui juris status relational, in a sense that
I will explain. Social movements ordinarily exist in relation to the source of
injustice that they oppose, and as such, they are deeply alterius juris and do
not act from their own active power alone; to understand them as sui juris
rests on an abstraction that is impermissible within Spinoza’s approach to
politics. The Spinozist challenge is to take these appealing features displayed
in collectivities when they are alterius juris, and find a way to sustain them in
a non-​oppositional situation. Only then can they be said to give rise to effects
from their own power alone. The challenge is a difficult one: but any suc-
cessful response will require collectivities to establish a positive institutional
structure of its own.

5 Negri’s reading of Spinoza echoes the autonomist Marxist insistence on the primacy of the power

of the working class. Tronti, ‘The Strategy of Refusal’, 28–​35; Weeks, The Problem with Work, 92–​96.
6 Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 229. Similarly, Montag celebrates the ‘politics of permanent rev-

olution’ (Bodies, Masses, Power, 84–​85). Dussel claims that his position is opposed to Negri’s, be-
cause Dussel holds that popular potentia must inevitably be expressed as potestas, not as pure
potentia (Twenty Theses on Politics, 16–​28). For Dussel, the critical question is whether the potestas
is ‘obediential’ (good, delegated) or ‘fetishistic’ (bad, alienated/​corrupted) (ibid., 26, 30–​31, 39–​41).
However, Dussel’s frame overall remains very similar to Negri’s. For first, he insists on popular power
potentia as a hidden ontological level of political life, linked to the common good (ibid., 14–​15, 20).
And second, he claims that excessively fetishistic potestas is inherently unstable and tends to be
disrupted by a democratic and egalitarian ‘hyperpotentia’ of the masses, expressed through social
movements (ibid., 54–​57, 78–​95, 135).
7 Holland, ‘Spinoza and Marx’, §§26–​29.
204 Spinoza

I prosecute this argument in several steps. First, I lay out Spinoza’s theory
of individuality, and I offer an account of what each individual’s nature is.
Second, I build on this theory of individuality to establish a clear account of
being sui juris, acting from one’s own nature alone, by appeal to the idea of
homeostasis. This provides a more precise analytical content to my prelimi-
nary discussions of being sui juris from Chapter 7. Finally, I apply this frame-
work to understand social movements opposed to the state, concluding that
the exemplary multitude sui juris is not an unstructured social movement,
but an institutionally structured collectivity.
Spinoza’s metaphysics involves a theory of weak individuality.8 Individuals
are not distinguished by difference of substance: for there is only one sub-
stance, the unique infinite substance of nature as a whole. Rather, all it is to
be an individual is to be a concrete entity composed of parts that maintain a
characteristic ratio of speed and slowness, motion and rest (Lemma 1 after
E 2p13). A set of parts constitute an individual over time to the extent they
‘keep the same ratio of motion and rest to each other’, even if particular parts
are substituted in or out (E 2p13d, Lemmata 4–​7 after 2p13). On this defi-
nition, a rock is an individual (with a very simple rigid characteristic ratio
of motion and rest); an animal is an individual (with a much more complex
and composite characteristic ratio of motion and rest), and remains the same
individual even as its body experiences cellular turnover. Furthermore, each
individual has its own active power. For Spinoza, the individual’s nature is
nothing other than its characteristic pattern of movement and rest. To the
extent that an individual maintains its characteristic ratio at all, it produces
effects that are at least to some degree understood through its own nature,
and that is what Spinoza means by power.9
On Spinoza’s account, individuality is emergent and nested.10 Individuality
is emergent: Positively, if a thing maintains a certain ratio, that is all that is

8 For detailed accounts, see Étienne Balibar, Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality

(Delft: Eburon, 1997), 6–​ 22; Matheron, Individu et communauté, 37–​ 71; Yitzhak Melamed,
‘Acosmism or Weak Individuals? Hegel, Spinoza, and the Reality of the Finite’, Journal of the History
of Philosophy 48, no. 1 (2010): 77–​92; Garrett, ‘Spinoza’s Conatus Argument’, 127–​156; Garrett,
‘Representation and Consciousness’, 10–​14; Daniel Garber, ‘Descartes and Spinoza on Persistence
and Conatus’, Studia Spinozana 10: Spinoza and Descartes (1994): 43–​67. For an account of the
Hobbesian origin of Spinoza’s physics, see Daniel Garber, ‘Natural Philosophy in Seventeenth-​
Century Context’, in The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, edited by A. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 107–​130.
9 Matheron, Individu et communauté, 43, 89. The only way that it would entirely lack active power

is if its nature did not figure in the causation of effects at all, but this could only be the case if its char-
acteristic ratio were lost, or in other words, the thing ceased to exist.
10 These two features loosely correspond to Matheron’s two dimensions of individuality: integra-

tion and complexity (Individu et communauté, 57–​58). See also Balibar’s discussion of complexity
 Nature’s Indifference 205

required for it to count as an individual with a certain nature. Negatively, if

it does not maintain such a ratio, then it is to that extent less individuated.11
Each thing may be more or less individuated, depending on how robustly it
maintains its characteristic ratio of motion: a clump of wet sand is less indi-
viduated than a rock. And individuality displays a nested structure: for the
parts of any given individual themselves are individuals,12 and any given
individuals may combine together to comprise a higher-​order, more com-
plex individual (Lemma 5s after E 2p13). It is possible to recognize indi-
viduals at one level without precluding that they should simultaneously
combine to form a genuine individual at a higher level, nor is there privilege
to any particular level in the nesting of individuals. Spinoza illustrates this
point by imagining ‘a little worm living in the blood’ (Ep 32, IV/​171a-​173a).
From my human point of view, the most crucial level of individuation is the
human level: I observe my own characteristic motions as they interact with
those of other humans. But from the point of view of a worm in my blood,
this greater individual hardly registers; the most salient individuals that it
observes are the clumps of chyle and lymph in the blood that float along with
it in the bloodstream.
Spinoza’s expansive view of individuality dissents in some crucial aspects
from the scholastic frame, and I claim that it is just these antischolastic
aspects that are missing from the radical democratic reading of his polit-
ical philosophy. First, recall that for the scholastics, only proper entities are
endowed with form, essence, or power; a mere accidental collocation or heap
of parts lacks any power of its own (Chapter 3, Section 3.3). This scholastic
attitude toward individuality is on display in the radical Spinozists. They up-
hold a restricted sense of what counts as a proper entity, refusing that a ju-
ridical union counts as a proper individual with its own nature, and on that

and the exchange of parts (Spinoza: from Individuality to Transindividuality, 21). See also Hasana
Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011),
35–​40; Hasana Sharp, ‘Spinoza’s Commonwealth and the Anthropomorphic Illusion’, Philosophy
Today 61, no. 4 (2017): 833–​846; Genevieve Lloyd, Part of Nature: Self-​Knowledge in Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 10–​16.

11 See Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 236–​239. Spinoza defines a ‘singular thing’ as any set

of parts that combines to cause an effect (E 2d7). On this definition, every individual is also a singular
thing, but a purely instantaneous singular thing without any durable characteristic motion would not
count as an individual (or would represent the limit case of individuality).
12 In Spinoza’s presentation, individuation bottoms out with ‘simplest bodies’, which have no fur-

ther parts and which are characterized by simple speed and slowness, motion and rest (E 2p13A″). It
is an open question in the literature whether Spinoza is asserting that such simple bodies exist or are
merely a theoretical heuristic. See Matheron, Individu et communauté, 25–​26, 51–​52.
206 Spinoza

basis denying a state has potentia. The radical liberals press this anti-​state
ontology most vigorously, especially Barbone.13 As indicated in Chapter 6,
Section 6.3.1, often the radical democrats find themselves in agreement
on this point: Negri characterizes state power potestas as ‘nonbeing’.14 But
strictly speaking, this anti-​state ontology is unsustainable. To be sure, jurid-
ical stipulation of authority alone will not constitute a Spinozist individual.
But regular patterns of behaviour do. Any actually existing state is a concrete
entity, comprising structured patterns of behaviour of its component human
parts. In other words, it has a characteristic ratio of motion and rest, and to
this extent it is a genuine individual and has some active power.15 Indeed,
this is reflected in Spinoza’s mature preference to conceive the state as the
whole social body, and not more narrowly as rulerly action and institutional
practices taken in abstraction from the social body in and on which they op-
erate (see Chapter 7, Section 7.3.2). Far from diminishing the concrete re-
ality of the state, Spinoza’s conception of individuality allows it to be robustly
acknowledged.
Second, recall the scholastic frame conceives potentia as potential, not
actual. When an individual displays nonideal behaviour (compared to
some qualitative standard), the individual’s full potentia exists but has been
thwarted. The rock has a potentia to fall, but may be thrown up; the seed has
a potentia to grow but withers instead. This conception is shared by the rad-
ical Spinozists: the multitude may manifest itself in a hierarchical way, but its
underlying nature and potentia is asserted to be equal combination of human
singularities.16 But to the contrary, for Spinoza there is no unactualized

13 Barbone, ‘Power’, 102. See also Den Uyl, Power, State, and Freedom, 115. In making his argument,

Barbone relies excessively on the Theological-​Political Treatise: he uses the absence of the phrase po-
tentia imperii in the Theological-​Political Treatise as evidence that the state does not have potentia of
its own, without remarking on the presence of that exact term in the Political Treatise (TP 7.18).
14 Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 226; see also Hardt and Negri, Empire, 76, 360–​369.
15 Matheron, Individu et communauté, 42, 58, and passim. Although Montag denies that the state

has power (Bodies, Masses, Power, 92), Montag’s account of collectivities as individuals (69) could be
extended to account for state power.
16 This is also commonplace amongst radical democrats more generally. For Dussel, potentia is

‘the ultimate foundation of all power’. But in a very Aristotelian analogy, he explains that it may be
unexpressed: ‘The merely feasible consensual will of the community remains initially indeterminate
and in-​itself, that is, it lacks roots, a main stem, branches, and fruit. It could have them, but as yet
it does not. The seed is a tree in-​itself, prior to having manifested itself, realized itself, grown, and
appeared in the light of day’. Just as a seed stands in relation to a future tree, Dussel claims, potentia
is the foundation of all politics, but needs to be actualized (Twenty Theses on Politics, 18). Within
the Spinoza scholarship, this conception of potentia as a non-​hierarchical potentiality is central to
the radical democratic interpretation, but it is also found more broadly, for instance, in Lazzeri,
whom I nonetheless counted as a constitutionalist because of his positive attitude towards the in-
stitutional facilitation of human potentia (Lazzeri, Droit, pouvoir et liberté, 276–​283). Some radical
democratic Spinozists take this view without drawing any conclusion about what actually is likely to
 Nature’s Indifference 207

potentia: each individual has precisely the degree of power that it displays.17
A potentia agendi that did not actually produce determinate effects is not con-
ceivable for Spinoza.18 Certainly, the determinate effects that an individual
causes sometimes may not be understood through that individual’s own po-
tentia agendi exclusively, but rather in combination with an external cause.
But such a situation merely attests to the individual’s low degree of potentia
agendi.19 Thus, an individual human being who is behaving irrationally is
not suffering the thwarting of a naturally given human power of rationality.
Rather, irrationality shows that nature did not sufficiently give such power
in that case: ‘[Not all men are naturally determined to operate according to
the rules and laws of reason . . . [Nature] has denied them the actual power

occur (see footnote 7). But Negri links the view to a further idea familiar from scholastic natural sci-
entific understandings of potentia: a tendency to actualize. Scholastic natural science holds that each
proper natural thing tends or strives to actualize its power, and this accounts for its behaviour for
the most part. In Negri’s hands, potentia (as an inner property of certain kinds of proper entities) is a
tendency that explains what happens for the most part, except when a violent external force thwarts
it. This idea of real tendency made especially clear in Negri’s rendering of the conatus doctrine.
Negri characterizes active (‘constitutive’ or ‘constituent’) power as something with a real tendency
to express itself. ‘Conatus tends to realise itself in adequacy (P9S)’ (Negri, The Savage Anomaly, 146).
Conatus is ‘fundamentally linear’ and ‘progressive’ (Negri, ‘The Political Treatise’, 12). Specifically, he
puts forward the idea that the multitude becomes more active over time, unless thwarted by the state
(Negri, ‘Reliqua Desiderantur’, 237–​238). This interpretation is unsustainable; the conatus doctrine
licences no presumption of increase in activity for the most part. I grant that the conatus doctrine
bears some similarities to scholastic teleology. See detailed discussion in Don Garrett, ‘Teleology in
Spinoza and Early Modern Rationalism’, in New Essays on the Rationalists, edited by Rocco J. Gennaro
and Charles Huenemann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 311–​312, 330. But I would make
two observations: First, there is nothing here about the increase of power, only about perseverance.
Second, even regarding perseverance, the doctrine includes a critical qualification: quantùm in se est
(E 3p6). As indicated in Chapter 7, Section 7.2, each thing strives to persevere in its being only to the
extent that it is in itself, that is, to the extent it produces effects that can be understood through its own
nature alone. But the striking feature of Spinoza’s metaphysics is that things are not fully ‘in them-
selves’ (see Garrett, ‘Spinoza’s Conatus Argument’, 144–​145). A finite thing generally causes effects
through its own power along with the power of other things, and depending on the character of those
others, it may or may not maintain its own activity, let alone increase it. There is no general tendency
of increase in activity. Nor is there any deficiency when activity does not persevere or increase: the
universe not ordered to human reason and human purposes, so nature does not privilege the striving
of human individuals or collectivities over that of any other thing in nature, nor does the thwarting of
human striving constitute a defect in nature (E 1App).

17 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 28; Viljanen, ‘Spinoza’s Actualist Model of Power’, 222–​

228. This feature is not unique to Spinoza: recall that Hobbes also offers a resolutely actual account
of power in his later works (see Chapter 2, Section 2.5), including a purely actualist conception of
conatus/​endeavour (DCo 15.2, 22.1, 25.12). The result, for both Hobbes and Spinoza, is a commit-
ment to understand power within a complex ecology of human relations, and a refusal to read polit-
ical power abstractly.
18 See an illuminating discussion in Garrett, ‘Spinoza’s Conatus Argument’.
19 Put into the language of the metaphysical terms of Chapter 7, potentia agendi is always part of

potentia operandi, not something opposed to it: a thing must first produce effects (express potentia
operandi) before the question can be asked to what degree these effects can be understood in terms of
its own nature alone (express potentia agendi).
208 Spinoza

[actualem potentiam] to live according to sound reason’ (TTP 16.7, III/​190).

Similarly, if in fact humans relate in hierarchical and dependent ways, rather
than independently and equally, this merely shows that they lack the power
to do otherwise. It follows that, as Balibar explains, human equality of rights
and power exists only when it is actually achieved.20
Can the radical democratic view of the natural goodness of the multitude
be redeemed in spite of these two points? The existence of social movements
might appear to offer a path, as I will now explain. In response to my first crit-
icism of radical democratic scholasticism, suppose it is acknowledged that
the state, when it is taken as a whole political body displaying a certain char-
acteristic ratio of speed and motion of parts, counts as an individual with
its own nature. In all cases, the nature of the state is defined by a particular
configuration of the multitude, as the entire actual population of the state.
Also, in response to my second criticism of radical democratic scholasticism,
suppose it is granted that the multitude has no counterfactual power or na-
ture; rather, its power must be understood from its actual manifestation. But
recall that individuality has a nested structure. It is possible that sometimes,
within the concrete body of the state, two distinct individuals can be identi-
fied: on the one hand, the rulers, on the other hand, the multitude conceived
in a narrow sense to exclude the rulers. This will be particularly clear when
the government is disliked: the multitude (in the narrow sense) understands
itself in opposition to the elite political class. Such a fractured state is not
very sui juris: it is understood through its disparate parts rather than through
the whole. Radical democratic readers of Spinoza are often interested in the
multitude in this narrower sense, and its possibilities as a political actor, for
instance, oppositional social movements displaying an appealing internal
structure (flat, equal, responsive).21 Such a social movement’s appealing
power structure is not counterfactual, but is actually displayed. The critical
question is: is such a social movement an exemplar of the free powerful mul-
titude, the multitude sui juris? Far from being part of the unified state, it is
defiantly insubordinate to the state. Might the state be removed, allowing this
multitude to flourish free and sui juris?

20 Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 62. What, then, is the status of ideals of equality? Rosenthal provides

a useful account of political ideals as fictions, enabling political agents to reflect upon how to behave.
Michael A. Rosenthal, ‘What Is Real about ‘Ideal Constitutions’? Spinoza on Political Explanation’, in
Melamed and Sharp, Spinoza’s ‘Political Treatise’, 12–​28.
21 See footnotes 4–​7. Indeed, Spinoza himself sometimes uses the term ‘multitude’ to refer to the

non-​ruling portion of the population in an aristocracy or a monarchy (TP 7.31, 8.4–​5).

 Nature’s Indifference 209

I now will argue that this manoeuvre is also impermissible from a

Spinozist point of view: for being active and being sui juris are not merely
qualitative but also relational terms. Thus, taking social movements
as exemplars of a multitude sui juris relies on an impermissible form of
abstraction.
Recall that being sui juris is equivalent to being active. Already in
Chapter 7, Section 7.2, I insisted on the relational character of Spinoza’s
active power. I offered an example to illustrate this point, of three kinds
of human response to an upsetting event. The latter two responses were
qualitatively similar: the serenity of the child with the blankie and parent,
or the serenity of the sage who has excellent autoregulation of passions.
But the two cases are not equally active. For activity is adequate causa-
tion: producing effects that can be understood from a thing’s own nature
alone, without others. The sage’s autoregulation is part of their own na-
ture, whereas the child’s blankie and parent are straightforwardly not part
of the child’s own nature. The relationality of Spinoza’s conceptual frame
is made even more patent in its political translation, in the discussion of
individuals and collectives sui juris. A person who relies on a patron for
their livelihood is to that extent alterius juris, whereas a person who does
not rely on the goodwill of any particular citizen or part of society is to
that extent sui juris (TTP 17.5–​7, III/​202; TP 2.9–​11; see discussion in
Chapter 7, Section 7.3.2). Imagine these two people undertaking quali-
tatively the same activities, say contributing to charity or helping out for
a good cause. Nonetheless, their behaviour may remain very unequally
sui juris, insofar as the former does so to curry favour or to avoid the dis-
pleasure of the patron.
However, at this stage the distinction between being sui juris and being
alterius juris remains undertheorized. For it remains unclear whether a
social movement does or does not act from its own nature. Suppose we
take the distinguishing principle to be the following: insofar as a thing
interacts only with hostile external causes, its endurance must be under-
stood through its own nature alone. On this principle, the child with re-
spect to their blankie or the client with respect to their patron will count
as alterius juris because they receive help, whereas the social movement
counts as sui juris because it does not receive any help from the state, only
hostility. However, this is not the correct distinguishing principle: for
Spinoza repeatedly analyses activity and being sui juris from the point of
view of what commentators have dubbed homeostasis, self-​correction, or
210 Spinoza

autoregulation.22 And as I will explain, a social movement opposed to an

oppressive state is not homeostatic.
Homeostasis is an individual’s maintenance of its characteristic ratio of
motion and rest across a wide range of external encounters. Homeostatic
bodies certainly rely on their external environment to persevere: but the key
point is that they are not dependent on any particular thing within that en-
vironment. By contrast, a non-​homeostatic body is one that maintains itself
only in relation to particular causes. It relies on particular external supports
without which it could not persevere, and it can be said to be dependent on
these supports. For instance, a heating system with thermostat is moderately
homeostatic: on the one hand, it can maintain its set temperature even as the
weather fluctuates warmer or colder, but on the other hand, it cannot if the
thermostat is blocked or if there is a power outage. Animate things display
a higher degree of homeostasis, insofar as they have even more resources to
deal with external pressures: they are able to register and identify external
sources of threat or assistance, and avoid them or seek them out accordingly.
The idea of activity as homeostasis is fairly directly supported by Spinoza’s
account of the highest form of human ethical development and control of the
passions. Spinoza is interested in the proportion to which ‘the actions of a
body depend more on itself alone, and . . . other bodies concur with it less in
acting’ (E 2p13s). Such a body can ‘be affected in a great many ways’ without
losing its own nature (E 4p38; see also E 5p39). This formulation focusses
on the diversity of affects that can be accommodated; elsewhere, Spinoza
emphasizes the diversity of action that can be undertaken: ‘He who has a
Body that is capable of doing a great many things is least troubled by evil
affects’ (E 5p39, see also E 2p13s). But this amounts to the same thing: being
capable of doing many things facilitates accommodating the blows of fortune
without being swayed.23

22 Matheron provides the classic development of these ideas. Matheron, Individu et communauté,

43–​51. See also Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 225; François Zourabichvili, Le conservatisme
paradoxal de Spinoza: Enfance et royauté (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002), 262; Garrett,
‘Representation and Consciousness’, 12–​13; Garber, ‘Descartes and Spinoza’, 43–​67. The concept is
most useful for complex individuals. Complex individuals interact with their environment in many
ways, and here the question of degrees of homeostasis, as a question of self-​maintenance in response
to diverse stimuli, seems appropriate. For low-​complexity things, it is still possible to answer the
question of self-​maintenance in response to diverse stimuli (a clump of sand is less good at it than a
rock). But the rock is so inert as to be homeostatic only in the most trivial sense of the word (Garrett,
‘Representation and Consciousness’, 11).
23 The concept of homeostasis helps to illuminate another aspect of the Spinozist conception of ac-

tive power: the impossibility of a finite thing being perfectly active, or equivalently, the impossibility
of being perfectly sui juris (see Chapter 7, Section 7.3.2). For similarly, nothing is perfectly home-
ostatic. There are always some impacts that cannot be accommodated. Even the most emotionally
 Nature’s Indifference 211

The physical characterization of activity and being sui juris as homeostasis

provides a sharp analytic frame for understanding the relationality of human
action. The question of whether a thing is dependent on external causes
amounts to the question of whether it concurs with particular things in acting
(E 2p13s). Here, the quality of that concurrence is not relevant. Certainly,
in my previous examples of human dependence, the dependency is made
clear by the positive contribution of the external cause (the parent and the
blankie are helpful to the child, and are intended as such; similarly the patron
is helpful to the client). But helpfulness is inessential to relationality: a thing
can have concurrence of movement even with a hostile external cause. For
instance, if people do community service for fear that their failure to do so
will give their enemies a pretext to denounce them, their behaviour concurs
or correlates with aspects of their enemies’ behaviour, rather than being in-
dependent of it. Their conduct is understood through the relation to those
enemies, and they are not homeostatic.
The general consequence of this discussion is that sometimes forms of
conduct can be held in place in relation to an external cause, and when that
external cause is removed, the forms of conduct find they do not have suf-
ficient internal structure to sustain themselves. Spinoza remarks ‘how im-
prudent many people are to try to remove a Tyrant from their midst, when
they can’t remove the causes of a prince’s being a Tyrant’ (TP 5.7; see also
TP 7.26). This concern about internal structure is evident in his discussion
of the English Revolution and the Restoration. Spinoza observes that the
English people rallied together to dethrone their king, but despite all the col-
lective effort to do so, they ended up reinstating a monarchy a short time
later (TTP 17.33, III/​227). On Spinoza’s analysis, this is because removing the
king revealed two weaknesses in the inner constitution of the English people,
weaknesses that were not concretely overcome. First, the people did not have
sufficient familiarity with democratic forms of relation, and still desired a
king above them (TTP 17.28, III/​226). Second, they lacked a total unanimity
of opinion in the community; there were still partisans of the old overthrown
regime amongst them (TTP 17.30–​33, III/​226–​227).
Let me apply this conceptual framework to oppositional social
movements. It may be true that protest movements against oppression often

stable person cannot persist in their characteristic motion without food or sleep, or when ill or griev-
ously injured. Nor are the limits on homeostasis merely grossly physical: the most emotionally stable
person may lose bearings if betrayed by someone trusted. And in a political vein, even the most
sagely individual cannot maintain serenity and characteristic motion once physical security is lost.
212 Spinoza

have an egalitarian and horizontal structure, of ‘free singularities’ on a plane

of equality. Unlike the English of the seventeenth century, social movements
may have a deep commitment to values of equality and democracy.
Nonetheless, often their structure is consolidated by the movement’s opposi-
tional status. Internally diverse coalitions may put aside their disagreements
for the sake of pursuing a shared cause, but if the oppressor is removed, these
disagreements then resurface. Social movements may have direct demo-
cratic internal organization, but the intense temporal and interpersonal
demands of this form of organization are sustained by the excitement of
a particular moment of struggle: in steady state, this commitment may be
eroded by members’ other extra-​political life obligations and aspirations.24
Furthermore, in most real political cases, the challenge is also not merely to
subtract the oppressor: for partisans of the oppressor do not disappear, but
need to be integrated into the new political order.25 In sum, the good shape
of social movements has to be understood in part through the power of the
oppressors that they oppose, and to this extent, these movements are alterius
juris with respect to their oppressor.
Other authors sympathetic to social movements come to a similar sceptical
assessment of the spontaneous goodness of popular association. Walzer’s
Spheres of Justice develops at length the idea that one must not be compla-
cent regarding the continued appeal of the inner character of oppositional
movements once the oppressor that they oppose is removed. Walzer argues
that a singular focus on destroying the monopoly on a society’s dominant
good can often merely facilitate the emergence of a new dominant good.26
For instance, a society might eviscerate religious power, only to find a new
elite formed by those with wealth; a society might equalize wealth, only to
find that a new elite is formed from those with political connections.

24 Hardt and Negri have been criticized for valorizing struggle, which is so often evanescent;

they make some belated recognition of this criticism in their most recent books. Hardt and Negri,
Commonwealth, 356–​374; Hardt and Negri, Assembly, xviii, 7, 233, 289. Their substantive response
appears to be support for a universal basic income (UBI) and direct democracy (Commonwealth,
310; Assembly, 288). However, for scepticism regarding the presumed radical egalitarian potential of
a UBI, see Elizabeth S. Anderson, ‘What Is the Point of Equality?’, Ethics 109, no. 2 (1999): 298–​299;
Alex Gourevitch and Lucas Stanczyk, ‘The Basic Income Illusion’, Catalyst 1, no. 4 (2017): 151–​178.
For scepticism regarding direct democracy, see my Chapter 9, Sections 9.3–​4.
25 Indeed, Hardt and Negri constantly talk of ‘enemies’ of the multitude; it is not clear how they fit

these enemies and their behaviour into their vision of the all-​inclusive multitude. Rather, they tend to
lapse into rather un-​Spinozistic moralism: ‘May the gods, wherever they are, curse and plague the sad
perpetrators of violence in all these hidden and overt forms! The racists, misogynists, transphobes,
destroyers of the earth, warmongers—​may the putrid rot of their souls gnaw at them from within!’
(Hardt and Negri, Assembly, 263; compare TP 1.1–​4).
26 Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 3–​30.
 Nature’s Indifference 213

The critical question regarding social movements is whether homeostasis

will be possible when they are not ranged against an oppressor. Is there tex-
tual evidence that Spinoza supports an intrinsic tendency of the non-​elite to
organize themselves democratically? Spinoza famously considers and rejects
commonplace accusations against the plebeians, such as the accusation that
‘there’s no moderation in the common people; that they’re terrifying, un-
less they themselves are cowed by fear’ (TP 7.27). However, rejecting these
common accusations does not entail that he believes the plebeians are spon-
taneously virtuous. Spinoza makes very clear that what worries him is the
attribution of vice exclusively to plebeians. His conclusion is not that these
commonplace accusations are untrue, but rather, that ‘everyone has the same
nature’ (TP 7.27): the plebeians are no worse than the patricians. The chal-
lenge is to determine institutional conditions under which vice is reduced.
Similarly, although Spinoza asserts that people desire equality, he equally
recognizes a range of non-​egalitarian desires, such as ambition, and hostility
to people with different customs and opinions.27
Indeed, Spinoza quite explicitly understands the quality of the multitude’s
conduct to be institutionally determined. ‘Men aren’t born civil; they become
civil’: subjects’ virtue or vice is attributed to the quality of the fundamental
laws (TP 5.2–​3). All virtue, including the virtue of relating to one another as
equals, has its determinate causes, which are best understood at the level of
the state. It is instructive to consider Spinoza’s own analysis of a very equal
society: the Hebrew republic. Spinoza introduces his analysis of the ancient
Hebrew republic as a response to the problem of how ‘to establish things so
that everyone, whatever his mentality, prefers public right to private advan-
tage’ (TTP 17.16, III/​203). Spinoza argues that the Israelites were brought
to uphold public advantage and the common good of their nation through
a mix of internal and external causes. An external cause of the internal
equality of the Hebrew political order was their religiously elevated hatred
of other nations, which was also reciprocated by those other nations (TTP
17.76–​82, III/​214–​215).28 But there was also comprehensive internal struc-
turing: Spinoza draws attention to the whole suite of regulations (agrarian,

27 As indicated in Chapter 6, Section 6.4; see further discussion in Chapter 9, Section 9.3. See also

Matheron, Individu et communauté, 150–​179.

28 There has been some controversy as to whether Spinoza’s portrayal of the ancient Hebrews is

antisemitic. See, for instance, Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘Le cas Spinoza’, Difficile liberté: Essais sur le
judaïsme (Paris: A. Michel, 1976), 142–​147. Without taking a view on that controversy, my point is
simply to draw attention to his analysis of the determinate causes of political order as illustrated by
this case.
214 Spinoza

economic, theological, political) that were also required in order to achieve

the internal, equal, flat structure (TTP 17.42–​92, III/​208–​217).
If the goal is the democratic self-​organization of the multitude, the chal-
lenge will be to understand and manage the determinate causes of non-​
egalitarian desire.29 Zourabichvili characterizes Spinoza’s focus on stability
as a paradoxical conservatism: the challenge is not to preserve what exists,
but to bring into existence what will be able to preserve itself.30 Often there
is a lament that bureaucratic structures re-​emerge even in initially pure pop-
ular movements, stifling the free spontaneity of the multitude. And certainly,
sometimes development of bureaucratic structures reflect a capture of power
by self-​serving elite. But from a Spinozist point of view, anyone claiming a
natural equality of human relations needs to supply an account of the deter-
minate causes of this mode of interaction in the first place.31 Perhaps enthu-
siasm and ideological commitment can do some work for some period of
time. But what could sustain this in the longer term?

It’s not enough to have shown what ought to be done; it’s necessary espe-
cially to show how it can be done in such a way that men may still have
firmly established rights and laws, whether they’re led by affect or reason.
(TP 7.2; see also TP 1.6)

The ancient Hebrew way is no longer possible,32 but a modern replacement

is required. In Chapter 9, I will offer a sketch of the institutional structure ap-
propriate to maintain a democratic multitude. But for now, the point is that
the good form of a social movement cannot serve as evidence for the claim
that the natural state of the multitude lacks the compounding power blocs
that worried me in Chapters 5 and 6; nor is it evidence for the claim that it is
the natural human condition to relate to one another as equals.

29 Hardt and Negri come to a belated recognition of the possibility of democratically unappealing

collective forms of the multitude, which they dub ‘corrupt love’ (Commonwealth, 167–​196). However,
they believe that contemporary changes in the mode of production—​the rise of ‘biopolitical’ labour,
which requires cooperation, autonomy, and networking—​will resolve the problem (ibid., 353). This
strikes me as extraordinary techno-​optimism; isn’t biopolitical labour entirely politically ambivalent,
equally capable of generating new forms of domination, division, and subordination? Indeed, the
effort to account for the determinate causes of ‘non-​corrupt love’ is somewhat in tension with Hardt
and Negri’s glee in identifying and condemning enemies: see footnote 25.
30 Zourabichvili, Le conservatisme paradoxal de Spinoza, 262.
31 Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 62.
32 Due to its reliance on the low degree of education and the isolation of the population (TTP

17.92, III/​217, 18.2, III/​221).

 Nature’s Indifference 215

In a way, left-​Schmittian readers of Spinoza embrace this point, and cor-

respondingly do not seek to eliminate the state. They recognize the mutual
determination between formal holders of political power and informal op-
positional forces. On their view, a good political order flourishes in conflic-
tual opposition between rulers and multitude. The locus classicus for this
view is Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy: Machiavelli diagnoses the inter-
minable conflict between the Roman plebs and patricians as the structural
guarantee of the goodness of the Roman republic.33 Spinoza was avowedly
influenced by Machiavellian republicanism. The left-​Schmittian reading of
Spinoza foregrounds the productive role of popular uprisings in keeping the
state on its toes, without making the mistake I criticized earlier of imagining
the multitude standing on its own.34
Nonetheless, in a different way Schmittians still romanticize the multi-
tude, insofar as they presume that conflict is always constructive. This pre-
sumption is not shared by Machiavelli. For Machiavelli, whether conflict is
good or bad depends on what kind of cleavage and what kind of conflict:

It is true that some divisions are harmful to republics and some are helpful.
Those are harmful that are accompanied by sects and partisans; those are
helpful that are maintained without sects and partisans.35

In his view, the Roman conflict was good, but the Florentine conflict was
simply destructive. Where conflict takes the form of power blocs vying
amongst themselves for supporters, harmful possible outcomes include
a breakdown of social trust, or an increase in oligarchy. For while popular
energies channel themselves into intergroup conflict, they can be distracted
away from checking the self-​aggrandizement of elites on all sides.36 I will re-
turn to consider different kinds of conflict in Chapter 9, Section 9.4.

33 Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, I.4–​ 6; John P. McCormick, ‘Machiavellian Democracy:

Controlling Elites with Ferocious Populism’, American Journal of Political Science 95, no. 2
(2001): 297–​313.
34 Del Lucchese, Conflict, Power, and Multitude, 109–​166; Filippo Del Lucchese, ‘The Revolutionary

Foundation of Political Modernity: Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Constituent Power’, in Melamed and
Sharp, Spinoza’s ‘Political Treatise’, 190–​203. Indeed, Hardt and Negri’s later work heads in this di-
rection, increasingly celebrating conflictual institutions (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 356–​374;
Hardt and Negri, Assembly, 258).
35 Niccolò Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, translated by Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C.

Mansfield (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 276. See also Machiavelli, Discourses on
Livy, I.17.2, I.55.2, I.58.2.
36 Consider the phenomenon of racialized anxieties undermining working-​class solidarity. On

Feuer’s telling, Spinoza became more cautious regarding popular movements between his two texts.
Early on, Spinoza was sympathetic to Masaniello, the fishman who led a popular uprising against
216 Spinoza

For Spinoza, it is necessary to understand the determinate causes of

human behaviour. There is no reason to think that spontaneous popular ex-
pression is of itself good, unless it is a community of sages, which is impos-
sible. Certainly, social movements can be powerful (producing many effects),
certainly they can display a spontaneous and unstructured horizontal form.
But this form is not understood from their own nature alone. Rather, it is
understood from their nature along with the nature of the state that they op-
pose.37 In result, the features that would characterize a multitude properly
sui juris cannot be read off the features of a multitude that actually exists in
opposition to the state, simply by abstracting from this opposition. For a so-
cial movement’s egalitarian structure may be a product of individuals’ shared
antipathy to the state, and may not be stable once it loses its target. When the
determinate causes of a social movement’s shape include its opposition to an
oppressor, it is counterproductive moralism to appeal to that shape as natural.
There needs to be a new account of the determinate supports of maintaining
that shape once the oppressor is removed. A multitude that exists sui juris
will require internal structuring; a multitude sui juris will be intertwined and
coextensive with an institutional form of its own. In Chapter 9, I will return
to consider what precise form this will need to take.

8.3. Accepting the Problem of Nonideal Endurance

Now I turn to the problem of nonideal endurance. Is Spinoza committed to the

claim that ethically unappealing regimes will not endure? The view finds ap-
parent support in the Political Treatise:

Hapsburg rule in Naples in 1647. However, later, having witnessed the mob ferocity of the lynching of
the Dutch republican leader Jan de Witt, Spinoza reportedly had to be restrained from posting a sign
ultimi barbarorum (worst of the barbarians) in the public square (Feuer, Rise of Liberalism, 38–​39,
119, 151–​152, 197).

37 To be clear, my point is not to argue that the real agency lies on the side of the state and to situate

social movements as merely and necessarily reactive. First, in all cases, for Spinoza each actually ex-
isting thing produces effects at least to some degree from its own power and nature; and second, in
the case of a state and a social movement opposed to one another, the two entities reciprocally deter-
mine one another’s action. Nor do I hold that oppositional social movements cannot increase their
activity, or even achieve sui juris status. Patently they can, as in the case of successful decolonization
movements. What I mean to stress is the conditions of possibility of such an achievement: it relies on
the movement developing the internal self-​regulation to maintain its structure once external pres-
sure is removed. I thank Hasana Sharp for pressing me on these two points.
 Nature’s Indifference 217

For the Right of a Commonwealth is determined by the power of a multi-

tude which is led as if by one mind. But there is no way this union of minds
can be conceived unless the Commonwealth aims most at what sound
reason teaches to be useful for all men. (TP 3.7)

But against this, I have already provided examples of nonideal enduring

regimes in Chapter 6, Section 6.4. Now I provide a philosophical analysis and
taxonomy of these same examples. In Chapter 7, Section 7.3.2, I established
the key Spinozist concept of being sui juris, equivalent to producing effects
from one’s own active power alone, and thus also equivalent for Spinoza to
being free and virtuous. I suggested that Spinoza’s normative ideal for politics
is that a commonwealth be itself maximally sui juris, as well as maintaining
the maximal sui juris status of its subjects. I defer a more precise and posi-
tive account of the second part of this condition until Chapter 9. But even
without a precise account in hand, it will already be possible to show that
durability and power of producing effects need not track this dual condition.
I claim that Spinoza’s politics accommodates the possibility that a common-
wealth may have great and durable potentia operandi without being sui juris;
furthermore, it accommodates the possibility that a commonwealth may be
sui juris without political participation, or the other desiderata of ethically
appealing free politics. That is, I will argue that Spinoza accepts the problem
of nonideal endurance. This brings out more sharply the antinomic aspect of
Spinoza’s politics that troubles Curley and which others are too swift to dis-
miss: Spinoza attributes right to ethically unappealing states, which may well
endure.
My interpretation of Spinoza’s politics rests on a distinction between
a state’s potentia operandi (its power of producing effects) and its potentia
agendi (its active power), or equivalently, between a state doing many
things by right and a state being in control of its right (being sui juris). It
is in principle possible to have potentia operandi extending far beyond po-
tentia agendi: a tyrannical state rules by right, but it may be very little in con-
trol of its right. In this case, the state perseveres through factors external to
its own nature. But as I indicated in my precis of the constitutionalist view
(Chapter 6, Section 6.3.2),38 it is common to presume that such a persever-
ance from external causes cannot endure for long. In the context of his dis-
cussion of politics, Della Rocca glosses active power as power (producing

38 See footnotes 47–​52 in Chapter 6.

218 Spinoza

effects) in the long run.39 Melamed provides a more precise gloss of potentia
agendi as causal self-​sufficiency. But when considering politics, just like Della
Rocca, he uses stability or endurance as a proxy.40 That is, on the common
view, a state’s endurance implies that it is sui juris and that the effects it
produces can be attributed to its own active power; furthermore, it is pre-
sumed that any state sui juris is also ethically appealing.41
This common view is strange and unjustified, both against a consideration
of historical examples (see my discussion of examples in Chapter 6, Section
6.4) but also against the background of the Spinozist metaphysics that I have
sketched. Let me first focus on the idea that a thing’s endurance testifies to
its own active power. Certainly, if something falls apart, then it is not active,
and its demise must be attributed to an external cause.42 But if a thing stays
together, it does not follow that this endurance is to be attributed to its own
nature.43 A thing’s endurance must be attributed to some degree to its own
nature, but this internal contribution to endurance could be low if there are
significant external causes holding it together. For external causation can
still be very stable. So long as the external cause persists, so too can the indi-
vidual, even if it is very poorly internally organized.44
To illustrate this metaphysical point, let me provide some examples. Recall
Spinoza’s worm in the blood. The worm may endure very well in its host. But
this endurance is not understood through its own nature alone, but through
its own nature in combination with that of the nature of its host: it will die
if it is extracted from the bloodstream. Think of a person with anger man-
agement problems, who is an exemplar of Spinozist passivity. Perhaps some-
times such a person may die as a consequence of poor emotional regulation

39 Della Rocca, Spinoza, 206–​209. Della Rocca is explicit that his political discussion of power is an

extension of his discussion of active power from the Ethics (ibid., 175–​205).
40 Melamed, ‘Having Too Much Power’, 172–​174 versus 162, 165. Similarly, Matheron is clear on

the distinction between active power and producing effects from an external cause, but he presumes
that external determination cannot be durable (Individu et communauté, 47). Steinberg is more cau-
tious, noting that a state’s endurance does not testify to its goodness (‘Spinoza on Civil Liberation’, 47–​
50). But he actually does not think corrupt endurance is a very real possibility (Steinberg, Spinoza’s
Political Psychology, 90, 159–​160, 177–​179).
41 Radicals also often take the view that tyrannies never last long, although as noted, their account

of the underlying metaphysics of potentia differs from the constitutionalists. See Chapter 6, Section
6.3.1; also Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power, 59.
42 Remembering that a cause external to a thing’s nature could be physically internal to it—​for in-

stance, a thing could have had an insufficiently integrated nature in the first place.
43 Indeed, this explains why ‘[n]‌o singular thing can be called more perfect for having persevered

in existing for a longer time’ (E 4Pref).

44 See also E 1p31: finite things are determined to exist and produce effects by the infinite web of

other things, so we can only have very inadequate knowledge of any given thing’s duration.
 Nature’s Indifference 219

(for instance, by getting into a fight). More frequently, though, such a person
may muddle through life in an unsatisfactory way, for approximately the
same duration as any other human being. And occasionally such a person
may be very successful in life, despite their lack of self-​regulation, through
one of two possible pathways. First, external causes might regulate their
emotions for them, for instance, if they have a partner who calms them. But
second, such a person could also be successful even without any emotional
regulation at all. Lashing out in anger is no obstacle to success if a person also
has a large inheritance, or lackeys, or other resources and supports that shield
them from bearing the consequences of their poor behaviour.45 We thus have
a variety of possibilities of endurance, where endurance is very little under-
stood through the person’s own nature.
These examples show that endurance has no particular relation to being
active, free, and in control of one’s right. This has important implications
for thinking about politics. As laid out in Chapter 7, Section 7.3.2, there are
two loose (and overlapping) classes of states not sui juris: those dependent
on a gross external cause; and those lacking sufficiently strong internal in-
tegration. The claim made by the many interpreters noted earlier is that any
state that is not sui juris will not endure in the long run. But what about sta-
bility through an external cause, where that external cause is itself enduring?
Possible external causes of political stability include fear of enemies, or fear
of war, or paternalistic foreign rule (TP 3.12).46 Recall the ancient Hebrew
republic: Spinoza thinks that its constitution was moderately well constituted
internally (TTP 17.62–​92, III/​212–​217), but as discussed earlier, it was held
in place by the Hebrews’ unifying, shared hatred of foreigners. Matheron
denies that it was truly stable, because it was in principle at the mercy of
circumstances (if there were a rise in commerce, then it would collapse).47
But the ‘in principle’ modality is not relevant here: for the point is that under
the prevailing circumstances—​circumstances that were themselves stable
and not likely to change for some time—​the state was also very stable.48

45 At the time of writing, the Harvey Weinstein scandal had just unfolded. Weinstein is alleged to

have practised systematic bullying, sexual harassment, and sexual assault, for decades; his capacity to
make or break careers in film bought him impunity for his conduct. To be sure, when the scandal was
broken, his career was ruined. But what is striking is how long his conduct went on unchecked; this
suggests that there may well be others who carry out their whole life in a similarly reprehensible way
and never face a comeuppance.
46 Matheron considers external pressures on states, but only as a source of instability, not a source

of stability (Individu et communauté, 350–​357).

47 In fact, he equivocates: at first he says it is very stable, but says it is in principle unstable (ibid.,

447–​460 versus 503).

48 See footnote 67 of Chapter 6.
220 Spinoza

Similarly, a state could endure through paternalistic colonial rule by a more

powerful imperial state.49 This externally achieved durability is not only a
possibility for well-​ordered states, and it does not rely on the benevolence of
the external rule: it is also possible for bad and fractious internal organiza-
tion to be held together by external force.50 One might think of the modern-​
day Israel and Palestine, and in particular the Israeli occupation of Palestine,
which is possible through foreign support for Israeli action.51
Prima facie, this argument sits uncomfortably with the claim made in
Political Treatise that the virtue of a state is its security (TP 1.6). Recall that
the technical meaning of having virtue is being active, producing effects from
one’s active power alone. If it is possible to equate virtue with security, surely
this requires that states driven by external causes, by definition not virtuous,
do not endure.52 How can Spinoza acknowledge the kind of unethical en-
durance just described (regimes that are stable and in that sense secure, but
which are not sui juris, active, or virtuous), and yet claim that the virtue of
a state is its security? However, this problem is only apparent. The virtue of
a state is its security, but it doesn’t follow that the robustly stable and secure
state is virtuous. I argued previously that sui juris status is relational and not
merely qualitative; the same holds for being virtuous. If the state’s security is
understood through its own nature, then the effects it produces are under-
stood through its own nature, and it is sui juris, active, and virtuous. But if
the state’s security is understood through another, then any security is not
attributable to its own virtue, but to the power and virtue of other things.
I grant that sometimes durable external determination is self-​effacing: and
when this is the case, the endurance of the state really does testify to the state’s
own power and virtue. For instance, hostile parties are sometimes forced to
reach a modus vivendi: their powers are so precisely balanced that they have
no choice but to cooperate with their enemies. In result, they reach some
pattern of characteristic behaviour and operation without being deeply uni-
fied: each side would take any opportunity to crush the other, should the
opportunity arise. But over time, they may come to endorse the terms of
their coexistence as inherently valuable. This is Rawls’s account of the emer-
gence of a value of liberal toleration from the European wars of religion: in

49 Spinoza does not consider this explicitly, but it has the same structure as his proposed rule of

greater cities over lesser cities (TP 9.2, 9.13).

50 See footnote 69 of Chapter 6 above.
51 Melamed observes that Israeli colonial rule over Palestine is bad for Israel’s power, but contra

Melamed, it is not for that reason any less enduring. See Melamed, ‘Having Too Much Power’, 172.
52 Rosenthal, ‘Spinoza’s Political Philosophy’, 431.
 Nature’s Indifference 221

his terms, a mere modus vivendi is transformed into an overlapping con-

sensus.53 This scenario may be plausible for some cases, where a state fails to
be sui juris not because of gross external pressure but because of an internal
lack of integration. But in the (more common?) cases where the failure to
be sui juris involves some degree of gross external pressure, there is ample
room for non-​self-​effacing external causation. For instance, colonial powers
often justify their external rule as part of a process of teaching those ruled
to become self-​organizing. But colonialism may entrench the colony’s de-
pendency on the imperial power, and may prop up bad internal governance
practices.54
So we have the first break between ethics and efficacy: enduring states
may nonetheless not be sui juris; instead, they can be sustained by a du-
rable external cause. Now consider the next class of dissonance between
ethics and efficacy: states that are sui juris and enduring, which fully inte-
grate their subjects’ desires, but which do not match with our image of a good
participatory state.
It is trivially true to say that a state sui juris is also a free state: Spinozist
metaphysics establishes a definitional equivalence between an entity being
sui juris, being active, and being free. But what about the subjects of that
state? Are they themselves sui juris and free? We cannot expect everybody in
a whole population to have reached the highest levels of human freedom (the
sage who is rationally self-​determining and therefore maximally sui juris).
But there are less exalted notions of freedom that might apply to the pop-
ulation of a state. In Chapter 9 I will reconstruct and defend a systematic
conception of maximal sui juris status for a population (combining the mu-
tual independence of citizens with the possibility of their individual ethical
development),55 but for now, I follow the various notions of freedom that
are to be found scattered throughout Spinoza’s political texts. Commentators

53 John Rawls, Political Liberalism, with a New Introduction and the ‘Reply to Habermas’

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xl–​xli. Thus, when a state is not under pressure from a
particular gross external cause, then its endurance may well be a good indicator of its being sui juris.
But more often, states do find themselves under such external pressure.
54 At the level of individual persons, the analogous good case would be the pedagogical process: a

child is subjected to a parent, only in order to build the child’s own capacities to be an independent
adult. The bad case is when the parent and child establish an enduring relation of domination or co-​
dependency. Perhaps there is greater likelihood of self-​effacing external dependency in the human
rather than the state case: for an individual can physically move away from a parent, whereas a state is
stuck with the geopolitical situation in which it finds itself.
55 It is not clear how strongly Spinoza himself is committed to achieving maximal sui juris status for

the entire population of a state: see my discussion of the limits of Spinozist democracy in Chapter 9,
Section 9.2, and of Spinoza’s celebration of aristocracy in Chapter 9, footnote 8.
222 Spinoza

variously seize upon five other meanings of freedom that can be located in
Spinoza’s political writings, although often not explicitly distinguishing
them. A state that is sui juris and enduring might also be a free state

(i) in the sense that it is a non-​slave state, where the distinguishing differ-
ence between free and slave is the dominant affect of its subjects (hope
versus fear) (TTP 5.22–​24, III/​74; TP 5.6);
(ii) in the sense that it permits free expression (TTP 20.7–​9, III/​240; TP
6.40, 8.46);
(iii) in the sense that it features extensive political participation from its
subjects (TTP 5.23–​25, III/​74, 16.25–​26, III/​193; TP 6.15–​16, 7.4);
(iv) in the sense that it supports the development of individual ethical
freedom (individual self-​determination by reason) of its subjects (non-​
slavery in a different sense than (i) above) (TTP 20.12, III/​241; TP
5.4–​5);
(v) in the sense that its governance is oriented to the common good (TTP
16.32–​34, III/​194–​195; TP 3.7).

Commentators often presume that states sui juris must be at least moderately
free in these five additional senses, and that a state’s degree of control of its
own right increases in proportion to the increase of these freedoms.56 But
I will now argue that there is such thing as a sui juris slave state (slave in sense
(i)); and that there can be a sui juris non-​slave state (free in sense (i)) that
lacks various of the freedoms (ii–​v). All these varieties of states sui juris are
stable and enduring, but they are not ethically appealing in the sense initially
promoted.
First, I will articulate more fully the criteria of and challenges for a state to
be sui juris. This builds upon the idea of homeostasis provisionally laid out
in Section 8.2. Just like any other actually existing individual, each state has
its own characteristic motion, or law of its own nature: if it did not, it would
be a fantasy, not a natural thing (TP 4.4). In a more political language, the

56 The idea of proportionality is used to accommodate Spinoza’s clear acceptance of virtuous ar-

istocracy: interpreters understand Spinoza’s call for broad councils as a reflection of the principle
that the less exclusionary and the more participatory the state becomes, the more sui juris it will
be; a virtuous aristocracy is acceptable because and insofar as it approaches democracy. Rosenthal,
‘Spinoza’s Political Philosophy’, 19; Steinberg, Spinoza’s Political Psychology, 184–​186; Mugnier-​
Pollet, La philosophie politique de Spinoza, 153; Lazzeri, Droit, pouvoir et liberté, 364. I criticize this
representation of the logic of aristocracy in Sandra Leonie Field, ‘Political Power and Depoliticised
Acquiescence: Spinoza and Aristocracy’, Constellations 27, no. 1 (2020), https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​
1467-​8675.12486.
 Nature’s Indifference 223

characteristic motion of a state is its fundamental law or fundamental princi-

ples (so long as we are careful to conceive these terms broadly)57 (TP 7.1–​2).
For the state to be sui juris, these laws must be maintained homeostatically.
The requirement for the state to be sui juris is a requirement to bring about a
cohesive self-​maintaining political order. A state that is maximally sui juris in
the Spinozist sense is a state whose Hobbesian power (potentia) is enduring,
not through external supports but through its own internal structure; in
other words, a state that has solved the Hobbesian political problem. The dif-
ficulty of achieving this lies in the fact that the state, as a complex individual,
has subparts: its human subjects. The integration of the state requires that its
laws continually generate and maintain in subjects the kinds of passions that
will tend to uphold its fundamental laws (TP 5.2–​3, 10.9).58 In Matheron’s
formulation, the criterion of a state enduring from its own nature alone is
that it inspires its subjects to patterns of conduct that reproduce the state in
perpetuity.59 But here lies the difficulty: individual human subjects each have
their own range of characteristic motions, which may not conform neatly
with this political project.
Spinoza is far from thinking that humans are unmalleable (TTP 17.5–​7,
III/​201, 20.4, III/​239; TP 2.16); and far from thinking that it is desirable for
the state to leave human conduct unshaped, given the imperfectly moral
character of human behaviour (TP 3.3–​4, 6.3). Nonetheless, Spinoza explains
the limits on state power through a memorable analogy:

If I say, for example, that I can rightly do whatever I wish concerning this
table, I surely don't mean that I have the right to make this table eat grass.
Similarly, even though we say that men are not their own masters, but are
subject to the Commonwealth, we don't mean that they lose their human
nature and take on a different nature. (TP 4.4)

57 The concept of the ‘fundamental law’ of a state is equivocal. At one point Spinoza makes the

equivocation explicit, contrasting fundamental law as jus civile, the explicit legal foundations of the
state, with fundamental law as jus naturale, its characteristic motion as an actually existing indi-
vidual (TP 4.4–​5). However, outside of this passage, only context reveals which sense of law jura is at
stake (TP 3.4–​6, 4.4, 7.1). It is the second sense of fundamental law that is at stake in my preceding
discussion.
58 Rawls similarly is concerned to account for the ‘stability’ or ‘equilibrium’ of the just society

that he models: for a conception of justice to meet the stability requirement, a society with its basic
structure conforming to that conception of justice ‘must engender in human beings the requisite
desire to act upon it [the conception of justice]’. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 398. He argues that his own conception of justice meets this criterion
better than other conceptions (ibid., §§75–​76, 81).
59 Matheron, Individu et communauté, 460; Lazzeri, Droit, pouvoir et liberté, 10, 388.
224 Spinoza

Balibar dubs this the ‘incompressibility’ of human nature,60 and it can be

analysed into two categories. First, some kinds of conformity are impossible
to obtain: it is not possible61 to make human subjects torture themselves, or
not strive to avoid death, or kill their parents (TTP 17.2, III/​201; TP 3.8).
Second and more interestingly, some kinds of conformity can be superfi-
cially obtained, but they are poorly integrated with the rest of the character-
istic motions of the individual human subjects. For instance, a state may use
threats of harm to bring subjects to act against their better judgement. If a
state relies on too much of this superficial conformity, the state itself is poorly
integrated. For if such a state suffers a shock and is no longer able to enforce
conformity so vigorously, its subjects may cease to coordinate in the required
way, or may even coordinate in a way hostile to the state.
The question will be, how far does this ‘incompressibility of human nature’
constrain the possible forms of states sui juris? The standard view is that this
‘incompressibility’ is significant, such that for a state sui juris to be achieved,
it is necessary to accommodate human characteristic motion via the five
types of freedom articulated previously.62 Rosenthal explains that even the
most public-​minded citizens

will not identify their goods exclusively with those that the state can pro-
vide. . . . The fact that the scope of individual goods exceeds the scope of the
political constitutes an important check on state power.

In result, ‘[P]‌rivate virtue expressed as individual freedom . . . serves as the

natural check on the excesses of state power’.63 Or in other words, the view
is that Spinoza shows the Hobbesian political problem can only be solved
by an ethically appealing regime (Chapter 6, Sections 6.2 and 6.3). The key
mechanism underpinning the instability (and a fortiori, non-​sui juris status)
of states lacking these freedom is indignation (TP 4.4).64 Recall the earlier
example of a state using threat of harm to make subjects act against their
better judgement. Spinoza claims that instability tends to befall states that try

60 Balibar, ‘Spinoza, the Anti-​Orwell’, 137; Balibar, ‘Potentia Multitudinis’, 91.

61 Beyond isolated extreme cases.
62 Rosenthal, ‘Spinoza’s Political Philosophy’, 430; Matheron, Individu et communauté, 504;

Steinberg, Spinoza’s Political Psychology, 90, 159–​160.

63 Rosenthal, ‘Spinoza’s Political Philosophy’, 431.
64 This idea has a Machiavellian filiation: Machiavelli views fear as politically efficacious only

if hatred can be avoided. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, translated by Harvey C. Mansfield
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 67.
 Nature’s Indifference 225

to control whole populations through fear, even if it is successful for a short

period.

Because the Commonwealth’s Right is defined by the common power of a

multitude, it’s certain that its power and Right are diminished to the extent that
it provides many people with reasons to conspire against it. (TP 3.9)

When subjects are indignant at or resentful of the rulers’ command, they may
superficially be brought to comply with governmental dictates, but much against
their better judgement. Thus, they constantly look out for emergent weakness in
the government, for an opportunity to overthrow it (TTP 17.3, III/​201; TP 4.4,
5.2). When subjects are indignant in this way, they oppose themselves to their
rulers, and the state does not act ‘as if with one mind’ (TP 2.16). The problem is
self-​intensifying: as rulers fear overthrow, they rule in an even more oppressive
way, seeking to cripple popular opposition but equally contributing to further
rises in indignation.65
I now scrutinize this conclusion regarding the possibilities of regime orga-
nization sui juris. First, I consider slave states (lacking freedom (i.)). Spinoza
distinguishes between free and slave states, according to whether the predomi-
nant affect of the state’s subjects is hope or fear. (TP 5.6)

For a free multitude is guided by hope more than by fear, whereas a multitude
which has been subjugated is more guided by fear than by hope. The first want
to cultivate life; the second care only to avoid death. The first are eager to live
for themselves; the second are forced to belong to the victor. So we may say
that the second are slaves, and the first are free. (TP 5.6)

It is common to claim that a state can only be sui juris if it is based more on hope
than on fear in the sense just specified. For in the slave state, the people are not
content with their lot, and their indignation constitutes a source of disruption
and instability (TP 5.7).
But are state mechanisms of fear always subject to this instability?
To the contrary, consider Spinoza’s treatment of Turkish despotism.
Spinoza conceives the Turkish state as a slave state, and he characterizes its

65 Here I discuss the destabilizing function of indignation. Indignation can also under some

circumstances have a stabilizing function, as I will discuss in Chapter 9, Section 9.3.

226 Spinoza

population as motivated by fear (TTP Pref.9–​10, III/​7; TP 6.4).66 Matheron

claims that the Turkish state is not truly stable or durable: it could readily
be overwhelmed, because its subjects have no patriotism and would not de-
fend it in case of attack.67 A fortiori, it is not sui juris and does not display a
high level of activity. But this reading does not fit well with Spinoza’s own
discussion: he considers the Turkish state to be remarkably durable.68 Can
we say it is only durable from an external cause, not from its own nature?
This would require that the state is not strongly self-​reproducing, and in par-
ticular, that it fails to bring about the passions and conduct in its subjects
that would tend to its own perseverance. Other slave states fail this criterion
because they generate indignation. But what is so shocking to Spinoza about
the Turkish case is precisely the lack of indignation. He remarks the subjects
‘lack spirit’; they are ‘led like sheep, and know only how to be slaves’ (TP 5.4).
In other words, unlike the case of the unstable slave state discussed previ-
ously, the population is said to have a properly internalized fear; hence, the
state endures from its own nature.
Commentators have argued that the Turkish state is not stable and that it
is not characterized by the active power and virtue of a state sui juris, by ap-
peal to Spinoza’s assertion that slave states are not at peace.69 Slave states are
said to be ‘without war, but not at peace. Peace isn’t the privation of war, but
a virtue which arises from strength of mind’ (TP 5.4). But I claim that this
passage (TP 5.2–​5.5) has been misread.70 Spinoza’s point in this discussion is
precisely that he does recognize the Turkish state to be sui juris.

66 I take it that TP 5.4, 5.6 also refer to the Turkish state. It bears repeating that this discussion

concerns Spinoza’s conception of the possibility of a slave state, rather than the historical reality of
the Turks. Spinoza simply presents standard orientalist accounts of the Turkish state; see a revisionist
discussion in Springborg, Western Republicanism.
67 Matheron, Individu et communauté, 419–​420. Referring to the same passages, Balibar argues that

in such regimes ‘any apparent unanimity cannot long survive so much latent antagonism’ (Spinoza
and Politics, 95).
68 In his argument, Matheron appeals to an ‘in principle’ source of instability. But this ‘in prin-

ciple’ modality is problematic (see also footnote 47). Spinoza states baldly that the Turkish state was
extraordinarily stable over a long period of time: surely if it is stable under a broad range of external
conditions, it cannot count as relevantly unstable.
69 Mugnier-​Pollet, La philosophie politique de Spinoza, 152.
70 Indeed, neither of the pieces of textual evidence that Matheron provides to support his reading

relate to the case at hand: his citation about lack of virtue is part of Spinoza’s opposition to sump-
tuary laws in a commercial republic; his quotation that ‘tyrannies never last long’ only features in the
Theological-​Political Treatise and is not repeated in the Political Treatise, where Spinoza’s most explicit
discussion of the Turkish regime as a lasting tyranny occurs (Matheron, Individu et communauté,
419–​420).
 Nature’s Indifference 227

When we attend to the general right of each state [of free and slave states],
there is no essential difference between one created by a free multitude, and
one acquired by the right of war. (TP 5.6; emphasis added)

And this poses a problem: for in order to determine the best state, it is not suf-
ficient to determine which states solve the Hobbesian political problem and
achieve sui juris status. For not all states sui juris are humanly desirable: there
are both slave and free states sui juris. Spinoza’s purpose is to distinguish be-
tween these categories.

When we say, then, that the best state is one where men pass their lives har-
moniously, I mean that they pass a human life, one defined not merely by
the circulation of the blood, and other things common to all animals, but
mostly by reason, the true virtue and life of the Mind. (TP 5.5)

The standard of the best state is not merely a state sui juris, but a state sui
juris built with the possibility of human development. Thus, the lack of virtue
relating to the slave state, cited earlier, concerns not the state itself, but the
individuals who compose the state: subjects in a slave state, preoccupied by
the threat of death, cannot develop virtue and strength of mind, and for this
reason the state is humanly undesirable. Indeed, when Spinoza asserts that
such a slave commonwealth ‘would more properly be called a wasteland’
(TP 5.4), it is because of the passivity of its subjects (the absence of freedom
(iv)), not because of the passivity’s fearful genesis (TP 5.4). Could a state be
a wasteland in this sense even without being driven primarily by fear? I will
return to this later.
Perhaps a regime like the Turkish despotism is not possible anymore,
for perhaps modern levels of education prevent such a total and stultifying
fearful convergence of desire (TP 17.24, III/​205). Perhaps any contemporary
slave regime would either conform to the picture Spinoza paints of a fickle
population pinning their hopes on one false prophet after another, pinning
their blame on one false enemy after another; or alternatively, they would
achieve stability only through external causes, for instance, colonial domi-
nation. Either way, perhaps modern slave states (in the sense (i)) are not sui
juris.71

71 Matheron, Individu et communauté, 447–​466; Steinberg, Spinoza’s Political Psychology, 159–​160.

228 Spinoza

Consider now non-​slave states: that is, states in which subjects are moti-
vated more by hope of living than by fear of dying. There will still be some
fear: for that is true in some degree of all political orders whatsoever (TP
4.4). But the category I am interested in is regimes that are simultaneously
built around facilitating behaviour of individuals who are ‘eager to live for
themselves’ (TP 5.6). It is commonly presumed that only when such a state
features all the other ethically appealing elements (free in the remaining four
senses) can it effectively channel subjects’ passions to uphold the state. But
now I will show that various kinds of unfreedom are possible in a modern
state sui juris. I will not exhaustively consider all possible permutations and
combinations of features, but content myself with two cases: Hobbesian re-
pressive egalitarianism and La Boétie’s voluntary servitude. They operate
through a comprehensive harnessing of the desires of subjects, and as such,
they can be enduring, and I propose that they count as sui juris.
First, consider Hobbesian repressive egalitarianism.72 As I characterized it
in Chapter 5, it is far from the standard caricature of a Hobbesian regime as a
regime governed by fear alone. To the contrary, it is organized for the sake of
the flourishing of the people. However, it is certainly repressive: incipient col-
lective formations in the multitude are to be minimized and disempowered,
such that the possibility of resistance to sovereign rule (whether the sov-
ereign is an assembly or a monarch) is minimized. Accordingly, there is
not robust political participation, especially in Hobbes’s preferred non-​
democratic regimes. Also, both democratic and non-​democratic forms are
sharply hostile to public expression of political views contrary to sovereign
determination. According to the standard Spinozist criticism, this repressive
Hobbesian regime should face difficulty. To start, there is Rosenthal’s obser-
vation that humans will always resent state intrusions on their freedoms be-
cause they care about goods that the state cannot provide (relevantly for this
case, friendship and truth). But beyond this, there is also the problem of di-
versity. Each individual human has an ingenium (‘mentality’, or character)
that is peculiar to that person alone (TP 10.8). If a regime does not allow
political participation and free expression, it will have to push against this di-
versity in its population, and can only ever have superficial success.
Against this criticism, I suggest that these potential sources of instability
can be contained within Hobbes’s model, consistent with his prohibition on

72 In terms of my earlier taxonomy, such a regime has freedoms ((i), (iv), (v)), lacks freedom (ii),

and in Hobbes’s preferred form, lacks freedom (iii).

 Nature’s Indifference 229

political participation and free expression. Recall that Hobbesian repres-

sive egalitarianism conceives the safety of the public expansively, and seeks
to support a rich and contented life to subjects of the state, including their
own pursuit of individual goals and individual ethical and intellectual de-
velopment.73 That is, it accommodates and permits many human desires
and endeavours. The limit is simply that these are not to be pursued col-
lectively. To be clear, I am not assessing the question of whether this is the
optimal regime for individual development, only whether it is sui juris qua
political order. And on this score, it seems to succeed. In Chapter 5, Section
5.5, I characterized the regime as reasonably robust through its own internal
self-​reproducing mechanisms. Although the state is repressive of groups, so
long as the sovereign takes wise counsel and attends to the complaints of its
populace, it is not experienced as grossly oppressive, and it largely avoids
widespread indignation. At the same time, even if it should stray towards
self-​serving rule, this is not too grievous for its stability, so long as the popu-
lace lacks inner collective organization. Accordingly, it should count as rea-
sonably sui juris in the Spinozist sense.
Second, consider political orders featuring a pyramid structure of vol-
untary servitude, as analysed by La Boétie.74 I gave two examples ear-
lier: La Boétie’s own tiered political regime in which individuals at each
level of responsibility are provided positive incentives to conform them-
selves and others below them with state narratives and rulings; and Lordon’s
Spinozist, neoliberal, industrial model in which each level’s pursuit of pos-
itive incentives leads them to enforce their own and others’ conformity
with corporate goals.75 What is striking is the degree to which such regimes

73 It might be puzzling how freedom of speech and the possibility of ethical development can come

apart. Perhaps there cannot be ethical development in the total absence of free speech: but recall, re-
striction of speech admits of degrees. Speech is far from unfettered even in Spinoza’s own preferred
regimes (TTP Ch 20).
74 In terms of my taxonomy above, such a regime has freedoms ((i), (ii)), and may or may not

have freedoms ((iii), (iv), and (v)). Steinberg briefly acknowledges the possibility of Lordon’s re-
gime (Steinberg, Spinoza’s Political Psychology, 99). But he mischaracterizes its structure: Steinberg
takes it that unless systematically duped, people will not willingly uphold laws contrary to their own
long-​term interests (Steinberg, ‘Spinoza on Civil Liberation’, 54); hence people in Lordon’s regime
must have been brainwashed to cooperate with their own self-​destruction. To the contrary, for a
well-​calibrated system of voluntary servitude, the key is breaking down any connection between
individual and collective self-​interest. With the narrow parameters afforded to them, each subject
pursues their own individual interest, even when the collective result is regrettable. To be sure, the
systematic result is often to discourage critical reflection on the entire structure, in favour of focus-
sing each individual on their own immediate incentives. But this does not amount to brainwashing or
duping.
75 A third example, from Spinoza himself, is a king currying favour with his military, in order for

the military to control the masses (TP 7.12). However, it appears Spinoza anticipates this form would
230 Spinoza

can be organized around hopeful desires, yet simultaneously depart from

the common good.76 Indeed, Lordon explicitly takes the point that is cen-
tral to Rosenthal’s argument—​the supposed impossibility of merging indi-
vidual and collective goals and desires—​and argues that this convergence is
achieved in contemporary corporate pyramids of voluntary servitude, to a
previously unimaginable degree. From a Spinozist point of view, the diffi-
culty posed by such regimes is not only their failure to promote the common
good, although that certainly is a central concern.77 The problem is also
that they inculcate individual ethical slavishness (unfreedom in the sense
(iv)): turning people into ‘beasts or automata’ (TTP 20.12, III/​241) who do
not cultivate their own independent judgement. Sometimes ethical slavish-
ness is associated with the overwhelming domination by fear, as in the case
of the Turkish despotism already discussed. But Spinoza himself freely grants
the possibility of a hopeful but slavish existence. The ancient Israelites under-
went an ‘extreme training in obedience’:

To those who had become completely accustomed to it, this regime must have
seemed no longer bondage, but freedom. The inevitable result was that no one
desired what was denied, but only what was commanded. (TTP 17.88, III/​216)

While a regime like the ancient Hebrew republic may no longer be possible,
perhaps Lordon’s layered corporate incentive structures provides a modern
institutional matrix within which ethical slavishness can be cultivated.78
Now I turn to the final set of cases breaking down the presumed impossi-
bility of enduring but ethically unappealing regimes. This is the case of en-
during regimes with a division of political status.79 First, consider societies
in which a sizeable part of the population, perhaps even a majority, have un-
equal political status: for instance, women, servants, or foreigners. Certainly,

not be stable, because it is prone to embroil itself in unnecessary foreign combat, and because the loy-
alty of the military is limited.

76 The pyramidical regime does not necessarily depart from the common good: it would be pos-

sible to make use of a pyramidical structure precisely in order to achieve the common good (to over-
come principal-​agent problems). Rather, my point is that the robust self-​reproduction of such a
regime is not dependent on this connection to the common good.
77 See footnote 76.
78 This appears to be Arendt’s view: the failure to think and to take responsibility for one’s actions is

facilitated within modern bureaucratic structures. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report
on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006).
79 Steinberg denies divided hierarchical regimes can be stable (Steinberg, Spinoza’s Political

Psychology, 90, 177–​179). One piece of evidence is Spinoza’s treatment of Spanish Jews, which on
Steinberg’s gloss, shows that exclusion of a group generates resentment. However, Spinoza’s own
 Nature’s Indifference 231

if the subordinate group protests and resists its inferior status, then the state
will not count as sui juris, because the state will be divided. But sometimes
the subordinate group is so dominated that they are resigned to their status,
or even affirm it. For example, consider any European state in Spinoza’s pe-
riod or earlier: in all cases, women were subordinated. But these women
broadly and for the most part performed their roles and did not anticipate
the possibility of equality, far less organize effectively to demand it.80 For an-
other example, household servants’ personal dependency undermines any
effective solidarity, removing hope of successful revolt. These subordinate
subjects accept their status, or even if they are unhappy about it, they do not
make any politically efficacious expression of their indignation. I claim that a
state featuring such inequality can count as sui juris: it does not feature an in-
ternal division of parts that threatens its own self-​perpetuation.81 The desire
of the population is effectively channelled into one unified mind, even when
portions of the population are neither politically participating nor free to de-
velop their own individuality.
Second, consider societies where a small part of the population has une-
qual political status: for instance, an ethnic or religious minority. Such a state
may be politically stable even as it metes out intense oppression on the mi-
nority group. Indeed, such oppression may be used to shore up the unity of
the rest of the population: the minority may be used as a scapegoat, channel-
ling and discharging the sad passions of the population. Minority groups
in such a position may resist and protest, expressing their indignation; or

point is somewhat different: that the Jews’ social exclusion sustained their distinct communal iden-
tity and non-​assimilation, without any suggestion that this is an unstable arrangement (TTP 3.54, III/​
56).

80 This is not to deny that some individuals actively protested their subordination. In six-

teenth century Venice, a city state that was an exemplar of republican virtue and unity, there was
a lively literature defending the nobility and excellence of women. See Virginia Cox, ‘The Single
Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice’, Renaissance Quarterly 48,
no. 3 (1995): 513–​581. My point is that historically, such dissent remained entirely unthreatening to
the existing political system. Gatens provides a contemporary Spinozist account of the domination
of men over women in terms of the mutual support of social imaginaries and real subordination.
Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality (New York: Routledge, 1996), 108–​
145; see also Susan James, ‘Democracy and the Good Life in Spinoza’s Philosophy’, in Huenemann,
Interpreting Spinoza, 128–​146.
81 It is common to claim that such regimes have democracy as their inner truth, meaning that if

they are to retain stability, they will tend towards greater inclusion. The history of the expansion of
franchise over the past three centuries is cited in support of this view. However, I have argued else-
where that the democratizing tendency does not universally hold, and that the reverse process of
exclusion is equally possible. See Field, ‘Political Power’. See also Susan James, ‘Politically Mediated
Affects: Envy in Spinoza’s “Tractatus Politicus” ’, in Melamed and Sharp, Spinoza’s ‘Political Treatise’,
61–​77, for an account of the elimination of envy.
232 Spinoza

alternatively they may accede to their unequal lot in society (out of a lack
of hope for anything better, or from fear of the extreme penalties resistance
would incur?). But in neither case does this situation necessarily impugn the
state’s status as moderately sui juris. For it is not difference or even conflict
alone that prevents a state from being sui juris, only when division generates
passions tending to interrupt the characteristic motion of the state.82
I discussed earlier how indignation can destabilize regimes. But indignation
is a double-​edged sword: it can also be a force of consolidation and stabili-
zation. For the most sui juris regime is one where its fundamental law ‘can’t
be undermined without arousing the indignation of the greater part of an
armed multitude’ (TP 7.2). In the case at hand, an unequal society, the greater
part of the armed multitude may well be opposed to, rather than supportive
of, the minority.83
In conclusion, I have argued, against the constitutionalists, that the endur-
ance of a state is not always matched with ethical appeal, and I have shown
that this is readily accommodated within Spinoza’s metaphysics. The point
is not that Spinoza doesn’t value the five kinds of freedom previously articu-
lated: to the contrary, he evidently does; and he thinks they are important for
a fully flourishing human collective life.84 The question is rather whether the
desiderata of political endurance or (even more demandingly) political ho-
meostasis can be achieved in the absence of the full complement of the five.
I have argued that they can. I have schematized three cases: states durable but
not sui juris (durable through an external cause); states that are durable and
sui juris, but which lack various of the other desiderata of political freedom
(durable through thoroughly integrating the desires of their subjects); and
finally states that are durable despite internal inequality of political status
(durable through subordinate groups not having hope of success). Thus,
Spinoza’s metaphysics upholds the problem of nonideal endurance introduced
in Chapter 6, Section 6.4. Political endurance is possible without being sui

82 Certainly, such a society is not necessarily sui juris. For it depends on how strategically the

scapegoating is performed. If scapegoating of a minority served to unify the majority population

only superficially, and allowed underlying grievances within the majority population to remain un-
addressed, then the state would not count as sui juris. But is scapegoating part of a broader repertoire
of effective (albeit morally regrettable) rule? Consider Spinoza’s suggestive discussion of one kind of
minority: he claims that just because a few devotees of a particular religion are opposed to the state,
the laws of the state are not thereby undermined because most citizens abide by them. Those who do
not respect the laws of the state count as enemies of the state (TP 3.8). Spinoza does not spell it out,
but I take it that this state counts as reasonably (albeit not maximally) sui juris.
83 See for instance TTP 20.31, III/​244.
84 Steinberg offers a comprehensive argument for the connection between Spinoza’s substantive

ethical goals and his political goals (Spinoza’s Political Psychology, 101–​128, 190–​216).
 Nature’s Indifference 233

juris, and being sui juris possible without wide political participation and
orientation to the common good. This conclusion underscores the antinomi-
anism of Spinoza’s system, which so often is downplayed in his discussions of
politics: nature is not ordered to human purposes.
I can imagine a possible response to my argument that ethically unap-
pealing regimes may endure and consequently have right. My objector
could grant that any regime, no matter how bad, has right to the extent that
it endures. But my objector might claim that this need not be troubling, be-
cause it is always true that the oppressed multitude can rise up against the
state; and when it does so, it will have the right!85 This is La Boétie’s own
conclusion to his analysis of voluntary servitude;86 and a similar move often
crops up in discussions of popular power beyond Spinoza studies: for in-
stance, Gandhi claims that people always have the power to resist oppression
if only they make the decision to do so, through the collective exercise of
satyagraha (truth force, or equivalently, passive resistance).87 However, for
Spinoza, this cannot really be any consolation. For what is the modality of
this claim? In a logical sense, it is always possible that a multitude might rise
up and refuse to be oppressed any more. But this is the wrong modality for
considering human affairs (or indeed, nature more generally). Spinoza has
no sympathy for voluntarist accounts of human agency, considering them
(at best) misleading, or (at worst) pernicious vehicles for philosophers to feel
superior to the masses. Spinoza complains that philosophers ‘conceive men
not as they are, but as they want them to be’ (TP 1.1). Rather, it is essential to
grasp the determinate causes of human behaviour. There will be determinate
conditions that lead to the formation of collective resistance, and determi-
nate causes that dissipate any such formation. Gandhi conceives the moti-
vation to stake everything on the joint effort to overcome injustice as merely
a moral choice that ought to be taken. But the real question is conditions
under which such motivation can arise. Certainly sometimes in history it has
been sufficiently achieved (for instance, in union organizing, or in the Indian
struggle against the British). But these are particular situations, rather than
the underlying tendency of human collective power.88 The opposite situation

85 See, for instance, Matheron, ‘Le “droit du plus fort” ’, 153–​154; Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 103;

Hardt and Negri, Empire, 204.

86 La Boétie, ‘Discourse on Voluntary Servitude’, 287–​289.
87 M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, Centenary Edition, edited by Anthony J. Parel

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 91–​97.

88 Indeed, even in the most propitious cases, there are considerable contrary pressures: Gandhi

notes that people with families cannot be effective satyagrahis because their particular attachments
interfere with their commitment to the cause (ibid., 95). But most of the population in any society will
234 Spinoza

just as common. The point of the discussion of ethically unappealing regimes

above is that these are regimes in which a robust determination of desires can
be achieved such that an uprising of the multitude does not occur, despite the
unappealing features of the regime.

8.4. Conclusion

My arguments in this chapter have sought to undermine the romance of

popular power in Spinoza’s political philosophy. It is common to interpret
Spinoza’s political philosophy as putting forward an idea of collective power
that is both efficacious and ethical. But to the contrary, I have used a sys-
tematic understanding of Spinoza’s philosophy of power to demonstrate how
and why Spinoza accepts the Hobbesian criticisms of any naive celebration
of popular power. Accepting the problem of the multitude’s inner oligarchy,
I show that Spinoza views the multitude’s horizontal form as an institutional
achievement rather than an essential starting point. Accepting the problem
of nonideal endurance, I show that Spinoza can and does accept that there
can be enduring power out of proportion to normative appeal. There is no
salvation from scorning the state and turning to prepolitical constituent
power. Collective power as it actually exists is entirely ethically ambivalent,
just as for Hobbes. Nor is there any room for a democratic complacency that
only democratic regimes will endure. Virtuous political organization lends
to endurance, but endurance is also possible from other means. In c­ hapter 9,
I will answer the remaining Hobbesian criticism: the problem of democracy’s
perverse effects. I lay out explicitly a neo-​Spinozist criterion of popular
power, and I sketch a complex vision of democracy capable of meeting this
criterion and overcoming the Hobbesian worry.

feel the pull of such attachments. After the mass arrest of Singaporean opposition parliamentarians
in the 1963 Operation Coldstore, the few prisoners without families refused to sign confessions that
they were communists and instead maintained their innocence, even at cost of decades of impris-
onment. But those with families could not afford this choice. Thum Ping Tjin, ‘Living in a Time of
Deception’, The History of Singapore, http://​thehistoryofsingapore.com, Podcast Episode 23 (2016),
accessed 19 November 2018.
 9
Civic Strengthening

9.1. Introduction

This chapter will present Spinoza’s own positive vision of popular power: both
a new criterion to determine whether political phenomena express popular
power, and also a set of institutional proposals to meet this criterion.
In the first half of this book, I discussed Hobbes, proposing that the sa-
lient and illuminating question of power in politics lies not in the consider-
ation of juridical authority and potestas, but in the consideration of concrete
power potentia (Chapter 2). This focus on concrete power brought into view
‘the political problem’: how is the cohesion of the political order concretely
and durably to be achieved, and more particularly, how are subjects to be
brought to comply with rulerly commands (Chapters 3–​4). For spontaneous
social dynamics can generate oligarchic power blocs; Hobbes worries about
the tendency of such power blocs to destabilize the state. However, even if
stability is not threatened, these informal oligarchic power blocs distort pol-
itics from the common good and the flourishing of the people, because of
their capacity to capture and influence sovereign deliberation. In this light,
any meaningful definition of popular power must recognize and address the
problem of informal oligarchic power; indeed, I propose a thin Hobbesian
conception of popular power as the power manifested by a political order
that eliminates such oligarchy. On my interpretation, Hobbes himself shows
some commitment to such a conception, insofar as he determinedly works
to eviscerate informal powers in the multitude, in favour of a fragmented
equality of individual power blocs, unified only through their representation
by the sovereign. Once informal powers have been crushed, the sovereign
can wisely and freely choose to serve the common good. I have labelled this
model of politics ‘repressive egalitarianism’ (Chapter 5). In principle, repres-
sive egalitarian sovereignty can take monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic
form. However, Hobbes argues that democracy has perverse effects: the very
structures of democratic decision-​making encourage the flourishing of in-
formal oligarchic power and its striving to capture sovereign power. Thus,

Potentia. Sandra Leonie Field, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197533864.001.0001
236 Spinoza

counterintuitively, Hobbes holds that democracy will remain more prone to

distortion than monarchy or aristocracy. As I noted in concluding my dis-
cussion of Hobbes in Chapter 5, even if we do not share Hobbes’s optimism
for non-​democratic forms upholding the common good, he sharply identi-
fies a difficulty for democracies.
In the second half of the book, turning to Spinoza, I raised three Hobbesian
criticisms of the celebration of popular power common in the Spinozist liter-
ature: the problem of the multitude’s inner oligarchy; the problem of nonideal
endurance; and the problem of democracy’s perverse effects (Chapter 6). On
the basis of a new interpretation of Spinoza’s concept of potentia (Chapter 7),
I have argued that Spinoza acknowledges the first and second problems: that
the power of the people does not automatically take horizontal shape, that
any such shape is an achievement rather than an underlying natural ten-
dency; and that it is not exclusively ethically appealing regimes that can be
stable (Chapter 8).
Now in this final chapter, I build a positive Spinozist understanding of
popular power capable of addressing the Hobbesian problem of democracy’s
perverse effects. First, I establish a Spinozist criterion of popular power: to
express popular power worthy of the name, the basic structure of a state must
feature and sustain equality and participation. In more technical language,
the state must itself be sui juris, but at the same time, its structure must pre-
serve its citizens’ sui juris status with respect to each other. I show that this is
not so distant from the Hobbesian conception of popular power established
in the first half of the book. Second, I consider what might meet this crite-
rion, and it is here that Spinoza’s differences from Hobbes become apparent.
I argue that Spinoza acknowledges many elements of the Hobbesian analysis
of democracy, and in consequence, he would view his own early unqualified
generic support for democratic forms in the Theological-​Political Treatise as
naive.1 But I argue that he offers a different solution than does Hobbes: not
repressive egalitarianism, but what I will call civic strengthening. Hobbes
hopes to secure the common good by removing any pressure on the holder
of sovereignty, presuming that such pressure can only be dangerous, oli-
garchic, and partisan in the pejorative sense; and he does so by individual-
izing and atomizing subjects. By contrast Spinoza explores the determinate

1 The privileging of Spinoza’s later account of democracy is common amongst both radical and

constitutionalist interpreters. See, for instance, Justin D. Steinberg, ‘Benedict Spinoza: Epistemic
Democrat’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 27, no. 2 (2010): 148; Negri, ‘Reliqua Desiderantur’,
220–​224.
 Civic Strengthening 237

causes of constructive non-​oligarchic forms of citizenly collective action. He

applies these considerations both to design the inner structure of the institu-
tional holder of democratic sovereignty, and also to establish counterpowers
ranged against the holder of sovereignty.
In making this argument, I face a textual difficulty: Spinoza’s final view of
the institutional form of a democracy of the multitude cannot be determined
directly from his texts, because the Political Treatise was incomplete at his
death, with only a few initial introductory paragraphs on the question of de-
mocracy. This means that the theory of democracy needs to be reconstructed
somewhat speculatively. To defend my view I draw both on my systematic
reconstruction of his political philosophy and on aspects of the Political
Treatise’s direct institutional proposals for monarchy and aristocracy.

9.2. A Criterion of Popular Power

I start by establishing a Spinozist criterion for judging which political phe-

nomena count as expressions of popular power. At the very outset of the book,
I considered two prevalent conceptions of popular power: popular power as
that which is expressed in plebiscitary decisions; or as that which is expressed
in mass movements. I posed a set of questions to these conceptions: Is such
popular power inherently virtuous? Is it inherently democratic? And what
is its relation to the state? On both prevalent conceptions, popular power
is essentially and definitionally distinct from the ordinary institutional
structures of governance; through the course of the book, I have put forward
Hobbesian and Spinozist arguments that popular power so conceived is not
necessarily virtuous, nor necessarily meaningfully democratic. But concep-
tually prior to the question of the allegedly good and popular quality of this
power is the question of its status as ‘power’ at all. Power, from the Hobbesian
and Spinozist perspective of potentia, is the actual determination of effects;
as such, it should be judged by effects. In human society, effects are contin-
ually produced as the complex emergent result of microrelations amongst
individuals throughout the entire social body. Thus, several times in the
course of my arguments I have suggested that it is a category mistake to look
to punctual or partial phenomena such as social movements or plebiscites
as an index of popular power. I will now give this suggestion a clearer the-
oretical form through a Spinozist conceptual frame. In this section, I move
beyond received conceptions and propose a new conception of what, from a
238 Spinoza

Spinozist point of view, ought properly to be understood as popular power.

Admittedly, the term ‘popular power’ is not Spinoza’s own; but the proposal
I advance makes heavy use of Spinozist analytical frames.
I propose that the political phenomenon that expresses popular power
is a state sui juris whose fundamental laws feature equality and partici-
pation, where the relevant conception of equality is cashed out in terms
of the independence of citizens (or sui juris status) with respect to each
other.2 I defend this proposal first positively, by showing how it emerges
out of Spinoza’s general approach to analysing politics; then negatively, by
showing its superior fit with an intuitively appealing notion of equality,
compared to its rivals.
Despite the prominence of the phrase potentia multitudinis (the power of
the multitude) in Spinoza’s political writings, it is not actually immediately
straightforward to establish a concept of popular power supplying the desired
connection to equality and participation. The power of the multitude is cer-
tainly central to Spinoza’s understanding of politics, but this is a general point
about political analysis, not a criterion distinguishing between states. For the
state is a complex individual composed of a multitude of human parts; as
such, all states, whether tyrannical or free, unequal or equal, are grounded
in the power of the multitude. The multitude’s power in this sense is equiva-
lent to state power, because state power refers to the systematic production of
effects, not to the power of the ruling element taken alone.3 Rather, to answer
the question of whether popular power is expressed in a given political for-
mation, it is necessary to consider the particular character of the multitude’s
power in that case.
For Spinoza, any individual’s power can be analysed in two dimensions:
qualitatively (what are the individual’s characteristic motions, what effects
does it characteristically produce); and relationally (can its effects be un-
derstood through its own nature alone, or only through its own nature in
combination with others). Equivalently, in the political case, a state’s power
can be analysed in terms of its fundamental principles or laws (where law is

2 In my earlier discussion of individual sui juris status, I emphasized its dual aspect: not only in-

dependence from determination by others, but also self-​determination by reason (see especially
Chapter 7, Section 7.3). I do not deny the significance of the second aspect: indeed, Spinoza insists
that the good state is one in which subjects live ‘a human life, one defined not merely by the circula-
tion of the blood, and other things common to all animals, but mostly by reason, the true virtue, and
the life of the Mind’ (TP 5.5). However, this is amply discussed by the existing literature; by contrast,
my contribution is to elaborate the first, more political, aspect of individual sui juris status.
3 See Chapter 7, Section 7.3.2 and Chapter 8, Section 8.2.
 Civic Strengthening 239

expansively understood as the regime’s basic structure); and in terms of how

much it is in control of its own right (how sui juris it is).4
A state sui juris, in control of its own right, is one that tends to reproduce
its fundamental laws homeostatically: in particular, it is one that tends to gen-
erate in subjects the passions and motivations that will lead them to uphold
the political order (TP 4.4–​5, 7.1–​2, 10.9). Thus, a state sui juris is a state that
has answered Hobbes’s political problem: it has achieved concrete durable
unity. Such a state, in Spinozist terms, acts from its own power (its potentia
agendi) alone; its Spinozist potentia agendi corresponds to its Hobbesian
potentia. I propose that a state expressing popular power must be sui juris
in this sense. For if a state is not sui juris, it is instead either expressing the
power of a gross external entity, such as a colonial power, or it is suffering in-
ternal conflict so destabilizing that it is better understood as merely the result
of conflicting parts.5
When I say popular power, I start with an intuitive sense that any idea
of popular power worthy of the name should have some connection with
equality and participation. Contrary to a common view in the Spinozist liter-
ature, I have argued that equality and participation may still fail to be secured
within a state sui juris.6 For instance, Hobbesian repressive egalitarianism, in
its monarchical or aristocratic form, counts as sui juris;7 and Spinoza him-
self considers his own proposed virtuous aristocracy as very sui juris.8 For
a state to express neo-​Spinozist popular power, I propose that it must fulfil
the following compound criterion: the state must be sui juris and organized
around a fundamental law that enshrines equality and participation for citi-
zens, where citizenship is not restricted by occupation or gender.9

4 Although superficially a state being in control of its own right concerns its right and not its power,

in Spinoza’s metaphysics, being sui juris, is equivalent to acting from one’s own active power (potentia
agendi). See Chapter 7, Section 7.3.2.
5 As I will emphasize in Section 9.4, some forms of conflict are consistent with being sui juris;

the question is the character of the conflict. Recall the Machiavellian distinction between Rome and
Florence, discussed in Chapter 8, Section 8.2.
6 See Chapter 8, Section 8.3; see also footnotes 47–​52 in Chapter 6.
7 In Chapter 5, Section 5.4, I characterized these regimes as displaying a certain commitment

to popular power, albeit a very thin one: negatively, a hostility to informal oligarchic powers, but
without positive political participation or formal political equality.
8 It is a common mistake to interpret Spinoza’s aristocracy as sui juris only to the extent it

approximates democracy. But Spinozist monarchy is more equal and participatory than aristocracy,
which by contrast entrenches the exclusion of the commoners. Nonetheless Spinoza views aristoc-
racy as more sui juris than monarchy, the more so the more effectively it prevents commoners from
engaging in politics (TP 7.3–​4, 8.3–​5). See Field, ‘Political Power’.
9 It is an important question whether migrants can be excluded from citizenship. However, I put

this aside for the purposes of the present argument.

240 Spinoza

Note that on this definition, Spinoza’s own democracy does not count as
an expression of popular power. For it notoriously involves extensive polit-
ical exclusions. At minimum, Spinoza excludes all women and servants (TP
11.3). There is a debate as to whether these exclusions are consistent with the
structure of his political philosophy.10 To understand what is at stake, it is
useful to recall Zourabichvili’s dictum: Spinoza’s ‘paradoxical conservatism’
poses the challenge not to preserve what exists, but to bring into existence
what will be able to preserve itself.11 A state that can preserve itself is one with
a fundamental law that maintains itself homeostatically. Spinoza appears to
take it for granted that certain forms of intense personal dependency are ine-
liminable: in his view, there is no foreseeable social order in which women are
not dependent on men, nor where there will be no personal servants.12 And
insofar as women and servants are subject to this intense personal depend-
ency, they are not equal in power to independent males.13 If individuals in
positions of dependency are treated as if they are equal, then they will distort
popular equality. Matheron reconstructs the mechanics of this distortion: the
man with many servants ends up with de facto more voting power, but for
his own oligarchic benefit, not for the common good:14 in this way the fun-
damental law of equality amongst citizens would constantly corrupt itself.15

10 Montag and Sharp deny that it is coherent; Matheron argues that it is. Montag, Bodies, Masses,

Power, 84–​89; Hasana Sharp, ‘Eve’s Perfection: Spinoza on Sexual (In)Equality’, Journal of the
History of Philosophy 50, no. 4 (2012): 559–​580; Alexandre Matheron, ‘Femmes et serviteurs dans
la démocratie spinoziste’, Études sur Spinoza et les philosophies de l’âge classique (Lyon: ENS Éditions,
2011), 287–​304. In brief, it seems to me to be entirely possible that such a regime could be sui juris,
for the reasons laid out in Chapter 8, Section 8.3. However, it is unclear whether it should count as
a state satisfying Spinoza’s requirement to provide for a properly human life in the sense of footnote
2. For in it, intense personal dependency precludes many subjects from developing virtue.
11 Zourabichvili, Le conservatisme paradoxal de Spinoza, 262.
12 Spinoza’s confidence on this point is supported by his cyclical understanding of history: ‘I am

fully persuaded that experience has shown all the kinds of State which might conceivably enable men
to live in harmony’ (TP 1.3). A more open view, whereby the future may contain new possibilities of
human collective existence, only strongly emerges with thinkers in later centuries.
13 James, ‘Politically Mediated Affects’, 61–​77.
14 Spinoza makes an analogous argument in the case of a state composed of cities unequal in

power: he denies that having a fundamental law that treats these cities as if they were equal would be
sustainable (TP 6.9, 9.4). To see a contemporary example of such distortion, consider the phenom-
enon of impoverished nations voting in accord with the desires of the United States in the United
Nations General Assembly: for instance, the 2017 Resolution of the General Assembly of the United
Nations (ES-​10/​19), condemning US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The only coun-
tries joining the United States and Israel to vote no were seven poor nations: Guatemala, Honduras,
Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and Togo and Tonga.
15 Matheron, ‘Femmes et serviteurs’, 296. The alleged mechanism of distortion is rather more com-

pelling in relation to servants than women (presuming polygamy is not permitted) (ibid., 301); and
it is rather more compelling in relation to non-​secret voting. However, my purpose here is not to de-
fend these exclusions, so much as to argue that they relate to seventeenth-​century exigencies and can
be put aside for the purposes of thinking about twenty-​first-​century popular power.
 Civic Strengthening 241

By contrast, in our contemporary age, the idea of a society of equal citizens

without any classes of gross personal dependents16 is readily conceivable and
is sometimes approximately achieved. In this context, it becomes interesting
to investigate the conditions of perpetuation of such a society.
At this point, the idea of equality remains underspecified. Already in my
discussion of Hobbes in Chapter 5, I offered a preliminary negative speci-
fication of equality as the elimination of oligarchic dependencies amongst
subjects; the above discussion suggests equality as the absence of gross per-
sonal dependency. But these accounts remain ad hoc and unsystematic, and
the effort to be more systematic faces a problem: how can a conception of
equality be specified, when each individual’s power is qualitatively distinct,
meaning that power is not a straightforwardly comparable quantitative pro-
perty? However, for both later Hobbes and Spinoza,17 power is always deter-
mined in an actual social ecology with other humans. The relevant metric
for comparing power is how individual powers relate in combinations: the
question of equality amounts to the question of dependency. At minimum,
equality must involve not being legally dependent. But recall my discussion
of potestas and being sui juris in Chapter 6, Section 6.4 and Chapter 7, Section
7.3.2: legal status is just one of many and diverse forms, of varying degrees of
intensity, that dependency can take.18 In light of this broader conception of
dependency, equality cannot require what would be impossible, eliminating
human dependency altogether, and making everyone in a society absolutely
independent. Rather, I propose that democratic equality demands pluralized
and cross-​cutting dependency: no individual or group should find them-
selves overwhelmingly subjected to any other single individual or group,
short of the political order as a whole.19 This amounts to saying that citizens
should be maximally sui juris with respect to one another.20 To achieve this
16 Except children.
17 See Chapter 2, Section 2.4; Chapter 7, Sections 7.2 and 7.3.2.
18 Lord’s recent articles rely variously on intuitive, juridical, and economic accounts of political

equality; I suggest that the concept of dependency might provide a more general theoretical frame.
Beth Lord, ‘The Concept of Equality in Spinoza’s Theological-​Political Treatise’, Epoché 20, no. 2
(2016): 367–​386; Beth Lord, ‘Spinoza, Equality, and Hierarchy’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 31,
no. 1 (2014): 59–​77.
19 This criterion is demanding, but not deeply original. Walzer offers a contemporary development

of the idea of pluralizing dependencies, in order to avoid dominance of any particular one (Spheres of
Justice, 3–​30). Anderson offers a contemporary development of the idea of equality as undominated
status: no one needs to ‘bow and scrape’ to any other. Elizabeth S. Anderson, ‘What Is the Point of
Equality?’, Ethics 109, no. 2 (1999): 313–​314.
20 The claim in the Ethics that acting by reason is the greatest human good and can be shared by all

equally is suggestive of such a criterion (E 4p36–​37). However, as discussed previously, Spinoza him-
self takes for granted the necessity of personal dependents. For reflection on the status of impossible
ideals, see Field, ‘Political Power’.
242 Spinoza

standard of equality, equal rights of formal political participation may be

necessary, but as we will see, they are by themselves insufficient.
I will now clarify how my neo-​Spinozist criterion for deciding what po-
litical phenomena express popular power differs from the criteria under-
lying prevalent celebrations of popular power. First, on my criterion, popular
power can only be expressed by a state sui juris. A consequence of this view,
which is perhaps counterintuitive but nonetheless that I wish to defend, is
that forms of popular political disruption such as social movements do not
count as expressions of popular power. To be clear, my criterion does not in
any way rule out the causal role of popular movements in bringing such a
popular regime into existence (we need not share Spinoza’s own scepticism
on this point).21 Nor does it rule out the ongoing role of popular movements
in keeping the regime honest and non-​corrupt (to the contrary, this role will
be essential, as I will discuss in Section 9.4). But my criterion does refuse to
acknowledge the moment of protest as the paradigmatic expression of pop-
ular power. Instead I take the proof of popular power to lie in an ongoing state
of affairs.22 If an oppressed people rise up and overthrow their oppressors,
but are unable to establish a continuing political order that speaks to their
needs and aspirations, I take it that this indicates a deficiency of popular
power in the Spinozist sense.
Second, on my criterion, while in any state expressing popular power there
will be some role for the expressed will of the people, being governed by this
will is insufficient to establish popular power. To explain why this is the case,
I turn to Spinoza’s reflections on the role of rulerly will in the context of mon-
archy. There is an apparent conflict of political authority in his account. In ge-
neral, Spinoza insists that subjects must defer to the determinations of their
sovereign, for without this, the political order collapses (TTP 16.25–​27, III/​

21 As discussed in Chapter 8, Section 8.2, Spinoza thinks that revolutions tend not to achieve their

aims. The English attempted a change of regime through civil war, but ended up with only a more
corrupt version of their initial regime: Spinoza takes this experience as paradigmatic. Instead, he
thinks regimes should only seek to optimize their current form. However, subsequent centuries have
provided many examples of revolutions that did achieve a fundamental change of political struc-
ture, especially where underlying social and economic change lays the groundwork for the new polit-
ical form. For a discussion of successful revolutionary change in Spinoza’s own time, see Michael A.
Rosenthal, ‘The Siren Song of Revolution: Spinoza on the Art of Political Change’, Graduate Faculty
Philosophy Journal 34, no. 1 (2013): 111–​132.
22 Would Negri oppose this criterion? Sometimes Negri valorizes protest itself, but in the more

subtle presentation in ‘Reliqua Desiderantur’, he takes the fundamental definition of absolute democ-
racy to be ‘the political process in its complexity’ (‘Reliqua Desiderantur’, 240–​241). I understand this
to mean that popular power is expressed in the continual readjustment of institutions to the ever-​
varying needs of the multitude. This is closer to my definition, with the difference that Negri holds
that in fact there is an ontological tendency to the increase of popular power over time.
 Civic Strengthening 243

193; TP 3.2–​5). But as argued, the defining feature of any regime is its fun-
damental law, and sometimes the explicit expressions of the sovereign’s will
do not uphold the fundamental law. For it is readily possible that a short-​
sighted king might make decisions that erode the homeostatic functioning
of the state. Spinoza resolves the conflict by reinterpreting what counts as the
monarch’s will in the relevant sense. He asserts that ministers should regard
the fundamental laws of the state as the king’s eternal decree: just as Ulysses
was bound to the ship’s mast for his own good, so too will a wise king subject
himself to these laws (TP 7.1). The explicit will of the king is affirmed only
secondarily. In Spinoza’s preferred model of monarchy, the king cannot put
forward any policy proposals of his own, but he is empowered to make a final
and binding decision between the possibilities laid before him by his advi-
sory council (TP 6.25). Thus the king’s decisions are authoritative, but only
within the broader remit defined by the state’s fundamental laws.
From this point of view, it should be clear that having a state governed
by expressed popular will (regardless of whether it is expressed through
equal vote in a plebiscite, in a direct democratic assembly, or in a repre-
sentative assembly of elected representatives) does not necessarily guar-
antee that it counts as an expression of popular power.23 For even though
such expressions of popular will rest on formal equality and participation,
whether they in fact express popular power depends on whether this institu-
tional form of decision-​making sustains the fundamental law of the regime.24
If formal equality and participation in voting somehow generates substantive
inequality (increasing dependency, or generating legislation for sectional

23 I grant that Spinoza does make a distinction between individual will and the will of a large as-

sembly: whereas not everything a king wills should be law, by contrast whatever an assembly decides
should be law (TP 8.3). However, recall from Chapter 8, footnote 57, Spinoza distinguishes two senses
of law: civil (law as express legal provisions) versus natural (the laws of the state’s nature as a natural
thing, its characteristic motion or fundamental principles) (TP 4.4–​5). I understand Spinoza’s claim
in TP 8.3 to be that in an aristocracy, whatever the assembly wills should become civil law (unlike in
the case of monarchy). However, that does not guarantee that the civil law so produced conforms to
the state’s fundamental law, as will be discussed in detail later: a major and non-​trivial task is to struc-
ture the assembly and surrounding institutional forms such that the desired uniformity is achieved.
Spinoza’s discussion of the ‘mind’ of the multitude follows a similar dual structure. The power of the
state is determined by ‘the power of a multitude, led as if by one mind [una veluti mente]’, where that
mind is the ‘mind of the whole state’ (TP 3.2). Sometimes the ‘mind’ of the state refers to the express
commands of the holder of sovereignty; other times it refers to the actually achieved and durably
reproduced affective coordination of the multitude (the whole population being disposed to act in
a way that maintains the state’s fundamental principles) (TP 2.16–​17, 3.2, 3.5, 3.7, 3.9, 4.1). It is pos-
sible for these to come apart; a sovereign’s commands might be obeyed even as they contribute in the
longer term to undermining the state’s fundamental principles.
24 This approach, focussing on effects, echoes Spinoza’s account of divine law and faith. The crite-

rion of obedience to divine law and of faith is good works and ethical action, not compliance with
particular dictates or profession of particular doctrines (TTP 5.50, III/​80; 14.39, III/​180).
244 Spinoza

benefit, not the common good), then it wouldn’t count as an expression of

popular power. So on my account, it is an open question whether any partic-
ular regime directed by popular will expressed through voting does or does
not maintain the fundamental laws of a state expressing of popular power.
I have already argued that plebiscitary voting generally does not: both be-
cause a plebiscite has too little influence on everyday operations of govern-
ance (Chapter 4, Section 4.3), and also because it is too readily captured by
oligarchic interests (Chapter 5, Section 5.4).25 Now in the next section, I set
up the question of the two other forms of mass voting.

9.3. Accepting the Problem of Democracy’s

Perverse Effects

In his earlier Theological-​Political Treatise, Spinoza expresses optimism for

democratic institutions as inherently and robustly equalizing without the
need for further institutional specification (TTP 5.23–​25, III/​74, 16.36, III/​
195, 20.37–​38, III/​245). It is not clear whether he has in mind representa-
tive or direct democracy; I will now consider each of them as important
contending institutional proposals, to be measured against my criterion of
popular power. I will argue that both these proposals incur Hobbesian scep-
ticism, a scepticism which Spinoza endorses and even amplifies.
As a first plausible proposal, consider a stylized model of liberal represen-
tative democracy as it is commonly conceived: that is, decisions are made
by the vote of representatives who in turn are elected by popular vote, and
these decisions are constrained by some legal protection of citizens’ liber-
ties.26 I put this forward because, substantially, this book’s ambition to speak
to the contemporary question of popular power makes it relevant to consider

25 The considerations raised in earlier chapters do not entirely rule out some secondary role for

plebiscites, within a broader institutional scheme. But this underscores my point: whether a plebi-
scite expresses popular power must be judged by how it functions within an actual political milieu.
This framework gives voice to the intuitive sense that some plebiscites are more meaningful than
others, and that some kinds of questions are more suitable for plebiscites than others. See footnote 59.
26 Many constitutionalist interpreters of Hobbes make generic mention of liberalism and de-

mocracy, but beyond this, they offer scant institutional details. Rocca, Spinoza, 219–​221; Balibar,
‘Spinoza, the Anti-​Orwell’, 124; Armstrong, ‘Natural and Unnatural Communities’, 301–​305; Steven
B. Smith, ‘What Kind of Democrat Was Spinoza?’, Political Theory 33, no. 1 (2005): 24–​25; Alexandre
Matheron, ‘The Theoretical Function of Democracy in Spinoza and Hobbes’, in Montag and Stolze,
The New Spinoza, 207–​217; James, ‘Democracy and the Good Life’, 137–​140; Kisner, Spinoza on
Human Freedom, 215–​229. For the few notable exceptions, see footnote 37 and the footnotes to
Section 9.4.
 Civic Strengthening 245

whether the familiar institutions of twenty-​first-​century liberal representa-

tive democracy might fit with Spinozist requirements; and because textu-
ally, Spinoza himself relies on representation in the popular assembly of his
favoured model of monarchy.
As a second plausible proposal, consider direct mass participatory de-
mocracy. The idea that direct participatory democracy might provide an ap-
propriate expression of popular power is a widespread one, and it also has
some currency in Spinoza studies. Although Negri’s conception of Spinozist
radical democracy is often avowedly anti-​institutional,27 at other points he
allows certain institutions so long as they ‘flatten onto the multitude’:28 and
for him, this means the institutions of direct participatory democracy.29
Democracy is ‘a council composed of the multitude as a whole’, democracy
as the totality of citizens assembled together.30 There are three features of
this conception to highlight. First, it is anti-​representative. Representative
democracy alienates the multitude’s power to an assembly who can police
their conduct. Second, and for the same reasons, it is against institutional
delegation. And third, it is vehemently opposed to formal constitutions; it
views any constraint of democratic expression as an illegitimate defence of
the privileged status quo against the claims of the masses.31
Negri does not merely propose this form of democracy; he also claims
that it is Spinoza’s own view. Such a claim faces a textual hurdle: it jars with
Spinoza’s evident interest in representative, delegated, and constrained in-
stitutional forms. In discussion of aristocratic and monarchical regimes, as
well as the theocracy of the ancient Hebrew republic, Spinoza devotes great
attention to meticulously engineered rules of selection of representatives and
officers, a proliferation of assemblies checking one another, and constantly
invokes fundamental laws (TTP 17.16–​115, III/​203–​221; TP 6–​10). But on

27 See Chapter 6, Section 6.3.1.

28 I do not accept Negri’s analytical characterization of the status of these institutions. I have argued
that the power of the multitude is not conceptually prior to institutions; rather, it is inseparable from
the institutions through which it is expressed (Chapter 6, Section 6.4 and Chapter 8, Section 8.2).
Hence, I would say the institutions of direct participatory democracy shape the multitude rather than
flattening onto it.
29 In his subsequent collaborations with Hardt, Negri has developed a model of democracy of the

multitude that goes beyond simple direct participation, also promoting an open network structure
and facilitating internal conflict (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 356–​374).
30 Antonio Negri, ‘Democracy and Eternity in Spinoza’, in Murphy, Subversive Spinoza, 102, 111;

see also Negri, ‘The Political Treatise’, 19–​21. A similar idea is promoted in Holland, ‘Spinoza and
Marx’, §26.
31 Negri, The Savage Anomaly, xxii, 196; Negri, ‘Reliqua Desiderantur’, 222, 234–​235; Negri, ‘The

Political Treatise’, 14, 24.

246 Spinoza

Negri’s interpretation, these are remedial measures only relevant for non-​
democratic polities, with no corollary or lesson for democracy. He anticipates
that the Political Treatise’s chapter on democracy, had it been completed,
would have eliminated this institutional complexity.32 Even though Negri
concedes the need for ‘functions of control’ and even though he thinks that
democracy should be animated by tolerance and respect for conscience,33 he
attributes to Spinoza the view that these are self-​generated by the multitude.
In particular, there is no role for the philosopher to propose any forms of lim-
itation or constraint: the power of the multitude inherently has its own limits,
in the sense that oppressive laws will provoke revolt and will thus undermine
themselves.34 In other words, Negri thinks that his preferred direct demo-
cratic order, without representation, institutional delegation, or formal con-
stitution, will self-​regulate to maintain the desired equality amongst citizens.
Let me start by sketching why, on Spinozist grounds, democracy (on ei-
ther of these two institutional models) might be a promising institutional
model. The first reason is self-​interest. The general challenge for all politics
is ‘to establish things so that everyone, no matter what his mentality, prefers
the public right to private advantage’ (TTP 17.16, III/​203). Reason gener-
ated by pure philosophical reflection is in principle sufficient to lead to this
public-​spirited political virtue, but ‘the path reason teaches to follow is very
difficult’ (TP 1.5). For Spinoza, humans are often driven not by reason, but
by various passions and desires. The only mass basis for overcoming selfish
motivations is an institutional order that generates the required virtue (TP
1.6, 5.3).35 In this human condition, democracy appears to offer a neat solu-
tion. If all are prone to pursue their self-​interest, then any form of rule resting
on a ruling class will end up privileging that ruling class and not the common
good. By contrast, in a democracy, a plurality of self-​interested actors with
formal equality in voting may generate policy decisions that fairly balance

32 Negri, ‘The Political Treatise’, 20–​21.

33 Negri, ‘Reliqua Desiderantur’, 227–​228, 235.
34 Negri, ‘The Political Treatise’, 18. Montag similarly celebrates a ‘politics of permanent revolution’

and perpetual mass mobilization (Bodies, Masses, Power, 84).

35 Armstrong claims that Spinoza advances an ideal of democracy as a community of perfectly

rational humans, and she criticizes this view as inconsistent with his broader philosophical system,
recommending that he should rather advocate a system of good laws and institutions (Armstrong,
‘Natural and Unnatural Communities’, 301–​305). My argument in here and in Section 9.4 supports
her recommendation. However, she errs in offering this as a point against Spinoza. For when Spinoza
asserts that people in a democracy obey ‘not simply by reason of the authority of a ruler’, he does not
(contra Armstrong) mean that their obedience is from reason. Rather, it is ‘by hope of some good that
they urgently desire’ (TTP 5.24–​25, III/​74).
 Civic Strengthening 247

individual needs and generate an outcome for the common good (TTP 5.25,
III/​74, 16.36, III/​195, 20.38, III/​246; TP 7.4).
The second reason is collective rationality. Quite apart from questions
of the proper alignment of interests, there is the question of wise decision-​
making. Just as an individual may ardently desire to advance their own in-
terest, yet unwittingly make decisions that contradict it, the same risk faces
a political assembly even with the perfect alignment of interests with the
common good. However, Spinoza expresses confidence that the assembly
form itself can help to insulate against this problem: he claims that larger
assemblies are less likely to agree on folly. When diverse ways of thinking
about a problem are brought into conversation, a good decision is more likely
(TTP 16.30, III/​194; TP 7.5).
Commentators all observe Spinoza’s explicit expression of concern about
democracy: no states ‘have proved so short-​lived as popular or democratic
states, nor have any been so liable to frequent rebellion’ (TP 6.4). However,
the comment occurs in the context of Spinoza’s criticisms of despotic mon-
archy: it is often taken to be merely a statement of the risk of any form of non-​
slavish collective life, a risk that nonetheless is worth taking. But the comment
also has implications for democracy. As I flagged in Chapter 6, Section 6.4,
there is cause for concern: for democracy seem to face a Hobbesian problem
of perverse effects. Now I lay out the Hobbesian concern, and show how and
why Spinoza shares this concern; then I indicate two further distinctively
Spinozist worries about democracy.
The fundamental lesson of the first half of this book is that informal
powers existing beneath the juridical holder of authority can disrupt
and distort that authority’s function. Recall the logic of informal power.
Individuals seek to safeguard their capacity to pursue their ends, now and in
the future; consequently, they act so as to placate and propitiate others who
might be in a position to harm or benefit them (Chapter 2, Section 2.4). The
resultant forms of deference and allegiance constitute power and tend to
cumulate individuals into power blocs. Deference and allegiance are gen-
erated and magnified in a heavily self-​referential web of appearances: I see
A and B offering allegiance to X; that constitutes power for X, so I offer al-
legiance also, hoping to benefit from the association. As I argued at length,
the power blocs so formed are not horizontal associations of equals. To the
contrary, the informal accumulation of power is highly unequal: the more
needy the individual is, the more cheaply their allegiance can be secured
(Chapter 4, Section 4.2).
248 Spinoza

In Chapter 5, I presented Hobbes’s argument that this mechanism of accu-

mulation of and competition for power, far from being disrupted by formal
democratic procedures, actually captures democratic institutions and thrives
within them. First, it is often those successful at garnering informal power
(wealth, popularity) who secure election into the democratic assembly in the
first place; second, powerful actors outside of the assembly seek to leverage
compliance of those within; and third, members of the assembly constantly
jockey for power amongst themselves, achieving the patronage of the pow-
erful in return for servicing their needs.36
The result is that both of the supposed virtues of democratic organization
are corrupted. First, regarding self-​interest, the formal equality of a demo-
cratic institutional form does not break down unequal power in the social
body, but expresses it, ruining the required alignment of interests with the
common good. Second, regarding collective rationality, the assembly form
also ruins the capacity to make wise decisions. The pursuit of truth and good
policy is confused and derailed by individual assembly members’ desire to
maintain their status: speaking truth to power comes at a personal cost, for it
runs contrary to efforts to flatter and not to incur the hostility of those with
higher status, and contrary to efforts not to be on the wrong side of a debate
(in modern terms, ‘groupthink’). The more polemical the message, the easier
it is for an individual to capture the disaffection of the masses to advance
their own status. This has the routine result of unwise policy, sometimes to
no one’s advantage, but more often to the advantage of the oligarchic powers
within the society.
Due to the continued influence of such oligarchic power blocs, formal
democracy often becomes a confused and fractious crypto-​aristocracy, in-
ferior (in Hobbes’s view) in its capacity to serve the common good than
monarchy or a restricted aristocracy that is properly set up in the first place
(Chapter 5, Sections 5.3–​4). I offered a preliminary argument in Chapter 6,
Section 6.4, that Spinoza acknowledges this concern: the accumulation of
power may occur, and mass desire may vent itself on minorities. Steinberg
astutely observes that for Spinoza, good government is not secured by the
bare requirement of decision-​making by democratic voting. Rather, the suc-
cess of democracy is conditional on having a political structure that ensures
the management of self-​interest and ensures ‘good epistemic conditions’ for

36 While the first is specific to representative forms of democracy, the other two apply equally to

direct democracy.
 Civic Strengthening 249

good decisions.37 In his discussion of superstition, Spinoza sharply identifies

the mass effects of feelings of insecurity:

If men could manage all their affairs by a definite plan, or if fortune were
always favourable to them, no one would be in the grip of superstition. But
they are often in such a tight spot that they cannot decide on any plan. Then
they usually vacillate wretchedly between hope and fear, desiring immod-
erately certain goods of fortune, and ready to believe anything whatever.
(TTP Pref.1, III/​5)

In Spinoza’s analysis, this has two interconnected consequences. First,

the popular capacity for judgement is directly reduced (TTP Pref.2–​4, III/​
5). Second, false prophets, schismatics, and charlatans thrive as the masses
throw themselves into their hands (TTP Pref.6, III/​6); and the intensity of
mass allegiance to these groups is intensified by the elation individuals feel
in crushing their perceived enemies (E 4p58s, TP 1.5). This analysis of su-
perstition can readily be translated to the democratic context. Mass desire
can ruin both Steinberg’s management of self-​interest and his ‘good epi-
stemic conditions’. It distorts the composition of interests in the assembly, as
people may well support the candidacy and policy proposals of the popular
and charismatic candidates who make unambiguous bold promises, without
a critical eye to the capacity to deliver on those promises; and it undermines
the quality of debate, both in public and in the democratic assembly, as po-
litical success comes to those willing to inflame these mass passions and cap-
ture them to their own advantage.
Let me pile on two further Spinozist worries.
First, Spinoza accepts Machiavelli’s dictum: regimes do not tend to main-
tain themselves; in every day that passes, a regime accumulates defects (TP
10.1). Does this apply to democracy? Given the incompletion of Spinoza’s
discussion of democracy, I will consider his analysis of aristocracy. Two key
threats to the fundamental laws of an aristocracy are the narrowing of its
broad-​based patriciate, and a rise of inequality amongst patricians. Indeed,
the decline of Venice in Spinoza’s time, from being the historical exemplar
of the virtuous aristocratic republic, was the result of an increasingly closed
and nepotistic patriciate.38 This is driven by a collective solidarity against

37 Steinberg, ‘Benedict Spinoza’, 147, 158. Specifically, fear, manipulation, and pressure for con-

formity need to be eliminated (ibid., 154).

38 Haitsma Mulier, Myth of Venice, 201.
250 Spinoza

outsiders and by the desire to benefit one’s own. For the citizenry conceives
itself as a community imbued with moral significance from its shared his-
tory and experience, and does not want to extend benefits to outsiders (TP
8.2, 8.11–​12). Furthermore, within the patriciate, inequality tends to arise,
driven not only by the more narrow desire to benefit one’s own, but also by
laziness: ‘All men, whether they rule or are ruled, tend to prefer pleasure to
difficult work’ (TTP 17.14, III/​203). This can lead to patricians disengaging
politically and not participating in the assembly. Those who do attend have
disproportionate influence, ruining the mechanism of equal interests (TP
8.16). Is democracy somehow immune to this kind of degeneration? To the
contrary, the problems of aristocracy are understood as part of a larger pro-
cess of political shrinkage: even if democracies are not overcome by rebellion
or war, they tend incrementally to degenerate into aristocracies and thence
into monarchies (TP 8.12). Extrapolating the analysis of aristocracy to the
case of democracy, the diminishing size of a citizenry compared to the total
population and the diminishing of political engagement within the citizenry
are perennial temptations for a democratic community, in tension with its
fundamental principle of equality and participation.
Second, one of the appealing features of Spinoza’s analysis of human mo-
tivation is that it goes beyond mere rational strategy to encompass the full
gamut of passional drives. On Spinoza’s analysis, simple desires for imme-
diate material benefits do drive human action; but so also do more complex
feelings of joy and sadness that are sparked by social life.39 In particular,
Spinoza analyses the striving to have others share our likes and dislikes, and
our discomfort with those who manifest a way of thinking or living different
from our own (E 3p31, 3p45–​46, 4p37s1).40 ‘[E]‌veryone wants others to live
according to his mentality, so that they approve what he approves, and reject
what he rejects’ (TP 1.5; see also TTP 17.15, III/​203; E 5p4s). This can man-
ifest itself both in illiberality of legislation, and hostility towards minorities
in a democratic community; as such, it again can threaten a departure from
substantive equal status within the community.
In sum, a system of democratic voting can generate inequality and exclu-
sion. As noted earlier, Negri takes the view that the multitude has its own
inherent limits: any bad decisions will be contested and overthrown by the

39 Indeed, even the parallel Spinozist account I provided earlier of Hobbesian power-​ blocs in
assemblies is not so narrowly rational-​strategic as Hobbes’s. See also Chapter 6, footnote 60.
40 See discussion in Steinberg, Spinoza’s Political Psychology, 139–​142.
 Civic Strengthening 251

multitude itself. But this is an inadequate response: as argued at length in

Chapter 8, there are many ways in which human power can stably configure
itself, and not all of them are morally appealing. Furthermore, even if they
are unstable, there is no guarantee that the instability leads to improvement
rather than to installation of an even more corrupt regime, or to a corrosive
cycle of conflict.
These observations regarding the characteristic perversions of democratic
processes are echoed three centuries later by Schumpeter. Schumpeter anal-
yses the strategic capture of democracy by political entrepreneurs and other
private interests; he observes the weakness and irresponsibility of democratic
debate.41 But his response is to offer a more ‘realistic’ minimalist definition of
democracy:

[T]‌he democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving

at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by
means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.42

Schumpeter is in favour of democracy so conceived, and he believes it is a

virtue of his account that it assiduously refuses to judge whether particular
democracies count as more or less genuinely popular.43 In his view, not only
is there no coherent meaning to terms such as ‘popular power’, ‘popular will’,
or ‘common good’, but worse, the appeal to such terms is the hallmark of the
worst and most dangerous politics. Politicians take advantage of this

phraseology that flatters the masses and offers an excellent opportunity not
only for evading responsibility but also for crushing opponents in the name
of the people.44

Schumpeter accepts that in his democracy, citizens do not have equal power;
and he accepts that the democratic process of competing for votes could

41 Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 256–​264.

42 Ibid., 269.
43 Schumpeter does concern himself with assessing the conditions under which democracy as he
defines it might be self-​sustaining (ibid., 290 n. 5; his criterion of being self-​sustaining echoes the
Spinozist criterion of being sui juris). He concludes that there are various presuppositions, including
tolerance, non-​sectarianism, and the willingness of the masses to defer to the organs of government
and not to attempt political action on their own (ibid., 290–​296). He identifies various historical
places and times where these conditions may have been met, but he does not (as Spinoza might) con-
sider the role of the institutional scheme itself in maintaining or eroding these presuppositions.
44 Ibid., 268.
252 Spinoza

reasonably be characterized as one of manipulation and fraud.45 However, he

views his minimalist definition as superior to non-​democratic socialism, the
major perceived alternative against which he inveighs.46
My Hobbesian and Spinozist analysis throughout this book supports
Schumpeter’s scepticism regarding appeals to expressed popular will; how-
ever, in this chapter I have offered a neo-​Spinozist criterion of popular power
that can be deployed notwithstanding Schumpeterian concerns. My criterion
for political phenomena to count as expressing popular power is that there be
a system of government that enduringly generates equality and participation.
But can there be a state expressing popular power in my neo-​Spinozist sense?
The possibility of a regime meeting this criterion is peremptorily excluded
by Schumpeter’s stark dichotomy between bourgeois minimalist democracy
and non-​democratic socialism. But even putting aside his dichotomy, the
possibility is not straightforward to establish.47 Steinberg identifies necessary
good epistemic conditions for Spinozist democracy; but on Hobbes’s anal-
ysis, democracy itself erodes these very same conditions, and consequently
it is not an optimal regime form. In Hobbes’s view, for democracy even to be
barely acceptable, it needs to take a ‘repressive egalitarian’ form and minimize
collective formations within society. The critical question now becomes, are
there other, less repressive, institutional and organizational possibilities to
express a popular power worthy of the name?

9.4. Schematic Elements for a Political Order Expressing

Popular Power

Spinoza claims that a democratic state has the potential to be the most ab-
solute and free of all regimes (TP 11.1). But I have argued that this is far
from the automatic result of formally democratic procedures. In this sec-
tion, I schematize three elements of a Spinozist institutional proposal to
bring a democratic regime to express popular power. This does not represent
a complete institutional portrait of Spinoza’s own political vision,48 nor do
45 Ibid., 271–​272. He remarks that everyone is free to compete for political office ‘in the same sense

in which everyone is free to start another textile mill’ (ibid., 272 n. 6).
46 Ibid., 297.
47 Indeed, Feuer argues that Spinoza supported democracy and liberalism at the time of the

Theological-​Political Treatise (Feuer, Rise of Liberalism, 65–​69), despite underlying difficulties with
the model (ibid., 69, 106–​107). However, by the time of the Political Treatise, Spinoza moved to
supporting commercial aristocracy (ibid., 158–​175).
48 For a fuller discussion, see Lazzeri, Droit, pouvoir et liberté, 331–​388.
 Civic Strengthening 253

I propose that seventeenth-​century institutions are directly translatable to

twenty-​first-​century needs. Rather, I hope to articulate three general kinds
of mechanisms of autoregulation that a state might require for it to be said to
express popular power.49
The first consideration is eliminating bad oligarchic pressure within for-
mally democratic decision-​making institutions. To start with, it is neces-
sary to consider the relative credentials of direct democracy compared to
representative democracy. Certainly, many of the problems outlined in the
previous section arise equally in direct or representative democracy. But
one might suspect, with Negri, that direct democracy is superior because it
removes one possible mechanism of oligarchic capture. As Spinoza acknow-
ledges, spending time in a position of political power leads decision-​makers
to be ‘corrupted by gifts and favours’ (TP 7.13). To be sure, there are grave
problems with representative forms of democracy, as I will discuss, but for
now I consider the conditions of success of direct democracy.
Spinoza himself is not in principle averse to direct non-​representative
assemblies: indeed, in an aristocracy, all patricians participate in the pa-
trician assembly (TP 8.16). By contrast, selected representatives form the
membership of the popular council in his favoured model of monarchy (TP
7.15). While Spinoza does not make the logic of the distinction explicit,
I claim that the distinction supports the need for representation in a demo-
cratic assembly. Within an aristocracy, the fundamental principle is equality
amongst patricians, and inequality between patricians and commoners (TP
8.47). The mere fact of having a non-​representative patrician assembly does
not adequately secure patrician equality. Unless all take their political duties
seriously, some will reap informal advantages from the laziness and disen-
gagement of others. For this reason, Spinoza proposes imposing fines on
patricians who fail to participate in the assembly (TP 8.16). Such fines can
be borne and can be viewed as reasonable because the main obstacle to po-
litical participation is mere laziness. The patricians are a leisured class whose
ability to participate is supported by the commoners carrying out the pro-
ductive and caring labour of society. Nor is the duty of participation without
its perquisites: in return for participation, patricians are entitled to wear ‘a
certain decoration, granted only to them, by which they may be recognized
and held in honor by everyone else’ (TP 8.25).

49 I conceive the status of these ideas as action-​

guiding fictions. See Rosenthal, ‘What Is
Real’, 12–​28.
254 Spinoza

Consider now what happens when the need for an assembly is transposed
from the patriciate in an aristocracy onto the mass, as in Spinoza’s mon-
archy: can a non-​representative assembly be maintained? The obstacles for
the mass to participate politically are much greater. Many people have jobs to
keep and caring responsibilities to uphold: not all would simultaneously be
able to fulfil the time commitment of participation in assembly. To overcome
this difficulty but retain direct democracy, two responses are possible: make
participation voluntary; or retain compulsory participation but with lesser
demand for engagement (this latter option amounts to continuous plebis-
citary government, not merely for occasional constitutional matters as per
Tuck’s proposal but for everyday legislative decisions).50 In monarchy as in
democracy, the goal is equality amongst the mass (TP 7.18–​20); but both
solutions to mass participation run contrary to this goal: we have already
seen that self-​selection of participants is directly distorting; and the vote of
an unattentive public is sharply vulnerable to Schumpeterian capture by ol-
igarchic power blocs and political entrepreneurs. Spinoza’s own preferred
route is to maintain compulsory participation and high demands for engage-
ment, but only for representatives and not for the entire mass (TP 6.22, 6.28).
Now I turn to consider representative assemblies. Hobbes worries about
power blocs of wealth, charisma, and sectarian allegiance perverting repre-
sentative institutions; his response is to avoid democracy where possible, but
if there is to be democracy, it is critical to eviscerate the distorting power of
informal collectivities within the society. Spinoza does not have any naive
faith in the good function of representative democracy, but his solution is
different, as is shown by his proposals for the structure of the council in a
well-​ordered monarchy. Spinoza seeks not to destroy informal power blocs,
but to mechanically eliminate the link between informal power blocs and the
operation of the assembly.51
Spinoza stipulates that the king should choose the counsellors for his as-
sembly (TP 6.16). This might sound like a form of royal prerogative, which
would provide an open channel for power blocs in society to consolidate
themselves: surely the king, mindful of the need to overcome the political
problem, will be careful to curry favour with the powerful by honouring them

50 Perhaps this was not feasible in Spinoza’s time, but it is now, through internet technology. A thor-

oughgoing commitment to online plebiscitary decision-​making on all issues constitutes the entire
policy platform of a registered political party in Australia, Online Direct Democracy (https://​www.
onlinedirectdemocracy.org, accessed 29 May 2018).
51 See also Mugnier-​Pollet, La philosophie politique de Spinoza, 243–​249.
 Civic Strengthening 255

with selection to the representative assembly. But to the contrary, I argue that
what Spinoza proposes is essentially a process of sortition (lottery).
Spinoza proposes that the citizenry of the state should be divided into
equal clans, and that the council should comprise an equal number of repre-
sentatives from each clan: approximately five representatives (one of whom
will be a jurist) from each of six hundred clans (TP 6.11, 6.15, 7.18). The king
selects his councillors from lists of candidates provided by each clan. For
each clan’s five representatives, two should be replaced each year, except in
the year when the sole jurist is replaced. Each representative can serve for no
longer than four years; representatives cannot be immediately reselected; and
they cannot even be placed back on the clan’s list of candidates for five years
after their term ends (TP 6.15–​16, 7.13–​14, 7.21). Thus, in effect, Spinoza
recommends that each year, the king should choose one thousand distinct
representatives.52 Combined with the restriction on reselection, Spinoza in
effect is proposing that the monarchical council should feature a rotating
roster of at least eight thousand representatives, selected from the pool of
male citizens over the age of fifty (TP 6.21).53 As Spinoza observes, the result
is that all men can reasonably hope to hold office at some point (TP 7.10).54
The sheer volume of representatives to be chosen means that the king
implements what is effectively a system of broad-​based sortition. This system
attacks oligarchic power both in entry to and in the operation of the as-
sembly. Prior to entry to the assembly, the perverse incentive for the powerful
to build up their entourage is eliminated. There is no electoral mechanism by
which individuals can leverage their following for votes; and the king cannot
be influenced by offers of allegiance when he is required to select so many
councillors. Furthermore, the perverse incentives to form power blocs once
in the assembly are minimized: the short non-​repeating terms in office pre-
vent accumulation of power.55 There are also elements of randomization
in the assembly’s procedures: clans take turns in leading the sessions of the

52 In a given year, two-​thirds of clans will replace two representatives, and one-​third of clans will

replace their jurist.

53 Presuming each representative serves for three years. Textually, it is not clear whether the five-​

year restriction on reselection applies only to jurists or to all representatives. Even if it only applies to
jurists, and other representatives only require a one-​year break, the result is still an impressive forty-​
eight hundred minimum roster.
54 Elsewhere, Spinoza indicates that a state of ‘moderate size’ would have resident population of

approximately 250,000 men over the age of thirty, including all foreigners, servants, and disreputable
occupations (TP 8.2, 8.13, 8.15). This is perhaps comparable with Holland, which in 1680 had a total
population—​inclusive of women and youth—​of 883,000 (Price, Dutch Republic, 40).
55 In addition to the term limits for representatives mentioned previously, military commanders

and judges also have short terms (TP 7.17, 7.21).

256 Spinoza

assembly; and each session is led by the first-​selected of the representatives of

that clan (TP 8.23).56 In this way, equality is maintained in the ongoing oper-
ations of the assembly.
The idea of sortition has garnered great interest within recent mainstream
democratic theory. James Fishkin has identified a pathology of contemporary
democracy: the pressure to win electoral contests makes serious discussion of
certain difficult social problems off-​limits; encourages the oversimplification
of complex issues to the public; rewards the inflaming of existing prejudices
and divisions; and rewards short-​termism in policy. A party may put forward
a robust policy platform, but then cut-​throat political competition punishes
nuance and rewards those that compete for power as such. Because of public
inattention, any principled policy platform tends to be distorted, and there is
little pressure to rule in accord with it in any case.57 Fishkin’s solution is what
he calls ‘deliberative polling’, to operate in parallel with the standard elec-
toral mechanisms of democracy: citizens are randomly selected by sortition,
then brought together for in-​depth discussion of policy issues. This removes
perverse electoral incentives and overcomes inattention. Why should a pop-
ulation respect the outcomes of such deliberative publics? It depends how
they are formed. Recently, Ireland has established a Citizens’ Assembly, com-
prising ninety-​nine members selected at random, to consider various long-​
term challenges facing Irish society.58 It is endowed with official status from
the state, and it enjoys popular legitimacy precisely because it overcomes the
widely accepted perversities of electoral politics as normal.59
Now I move on to the second consideration for institutional design
expressing the power of the people: addressing the gradual erosion of the

56 Within aristocracy, Spinoza offers further mechanisms to reduce oligarchic power blocs: se-

cret ballotting of officials (meaning the powerful cannot reward or punish allegiance, eliminating
any perverse incentive to support the powerful) (TP 8.27); also secret accusations and complaints
(TP 8.28).
57 James S. Fishkin, When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–​28.

58 https://​www.citizensassembly.ie/​en/​Home/​. See also Michael K. MacKenzie, ‘A General-​

Purpose, Randomly Selected Chamber’, in Institutions for Future Generations, edited by Iñigo
González-​Ricoy and Axel Gosseries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 282–​298.
59 Indeed, the existence of such an assembly by sortition opens the possibility of less flawed plebis-

citary procedures. When a plebiscite is set up by elected officials, it can be captured to those officials’
particular agenda. Tactical considerations of the sitting government were widely viewed as shaping
the format of both the 1999 Australian Republican Referendum and the 2017 Australian Same-​Sex
Marriage Postal Survey. See Chapter 5, footnote 61. This form of distortion is eliminated when a pleb-
iscite is set up by an assembly by sortition: for instance, the 2018 Irish Abortion Referendum, estab-
lished by the Irish Citizens’ Assembly, retained much higher public confidence than the Australian
plebiscites, even as it dealt with an intensely controversial issue.
 Civic Strengthening 257

state’s fundamental principles. As outlined in Section 9.3, Spinoza takes

the Machiavellian view that a state starts to degenerate from the moment
it is established. In the case of the democratic order, this degeneration had
three components: the tendency for a demos to shrink itself by excluding
newcomers; the tendency for a demos to repress and oppress its internal
forms of difference; and the tendency for political disengagement.
Analogous problems face the patriciate in an aristocratic order, and
Spinoza is quite clear that the patrician assembly cannot rely on itself, as
the very same body that makes the law, to uphold and maintain it (TP 8.19).
His solution is to establish a permanent separate body for the purpose of
maintaining the fundamental laws: a subcouncil of syndics (TP 8.20–​28).
This proposal raises questions: how can a separate council serve to con-
solidate the basic law rather than undermine it? Hobbes holds that formal
institutional divisions fracture the state and lead to war. What incentive is
there for syndics to focus on the common good and the state’s fundamental
principles where patricians fail? If they do not perform their duties, they
are useless; and if they do perform their duties, disciplining and correcting
patricians, why will they not rouse the patricians’ ire?
Spinoza addresses these concerns in detail, through careful structuring
of institutional incentives. He proposes that the syndics’ duties should be
very clearly defined and limited, including enforcing political participa-
tion; enforcing the induction of new members into the patriciate in order
to maintain its size; and ensuring this induction is not nepotistic (TP 8.11,
8.13–​16). They are motivated to perform their duties because their pay is tied
to performance: they are paid such that ‘they cannot maladminister affairs
of state without great loss to themselves’ (TP 8.24–​25). They are insulated
from needing to worry about displeasing powerful patrons in the course of
disciplining and correcting them: their appointment for life means that they
do not need to build support to be re-​elected; and they present their (inter-
nally voted) decisions as the decision of the whole body, thereby protecting
themselves from being pressured individually by the powerful who want to
buy them off (TP 8.28, 10.2). They are limited from going beyond the proper
scope of their duties: they are elderly, meaning that they do not have time to
build a personal empire even if they wanted to; and in any case, at that age
they are likely to be less ambitious (TP 10.2). In turn, Spinoza argues that the
patricians will be disposed to support their work. The syndics’ close adher-
ence to their well-​defined duties means that they ‘can’t be a terror to good
men, but only to bad men’ (TP 10.2); and every patrician has a fair chance
258 Spinoza

one day to become a syndic (TP 8.28, 8.30). In sum, the syndics do their job;
patricians support them; and any disagreements between them do not de-
generate into hostile conflict. The result is that a delegated institutional body
maintains the fundamental principles of its aristocratic form and thereby
improves the credentials of the state in expressing the patriciate’s power.
By analogy, I propose that in a popular state, delegated bodies may fur-
ther the expression of popular power, insofar as they contribute to the ho-
meostasis of a political system of equality and participation. They might be
described as counterpowers, insofar as they seek to discipline the assembly.
Contemporary institutions that might be understood in this way include ap-
pointed human rights, anti-​discrimination, or equal opportunity bodies; and
independent electoral commissions to determine electoral districting or to
enforce voting.60 Of course, there is always the risk that such independent
bodies might become sites of oligarchic capture of power: the challenge is to
monitor for this eventuality and to design them well to avoid it. The estab-
lishment of intermediate and semi-​independent bodies need not be seen as
a counterweight to popular power, but rather, an element of its expression,
insofar as these bodies effectively serve to limit the counterproductive and
self-​corrupting tendencies of mass democracy.
The third and final consideration for the institutional design of a state
expressing popular power is the role of informal collectivities. To this point,
I have sketched a model of representative democracy including elements of
sortition and delegation. But my discussion so far has focussed on formal
institutions. What about the informal structure of society beneath these
institutions? Both Hobbes and Spinoza hope for the holder of sovereignty
(whether individual or assembly) to work for the common good and main-
tain equality, through their institutional structure of decision. But they dis-
agree on the role of counterpower. Hobbes not only rules out any formal
counterpower (such as Spinoza’s syndics) within a good state’s constitutional
structure; he also holds that it is necessary to crush informal powers in so-
ciety. Is Hobbes correct to think crushing informal power is necessary or
desirable?
Left Schmittians assert that conflict between the popular mass and the
state generates good results. But there are multiple reasons to doubt this as

60 Australia has an independent electoral commission that both determines electoral boundaries

and enforces compulsory voting; unlike the United States, for instance, where voting is not compul-
sory and in most states electoral boundaries are controlled by the elected politicians themselves.
 Civic Strengthening 259

a universal claim. First, there is no guarantee that informal pressure corres-

ponds to the common good (think of the oligarchic power of the wealthy).
Second, even if there is some more egalitarian popular sentiment under-
lying informal pressure against the sovereign, it is much easier for a sov-
ereign to buy off leaders rather than address underlying grievances (see
Chapter 5, Section 5.3). Third, sometimes the presence of informal power
blocs resisting sovereign rule leads to political collapse and civil war, and the
corresponding total destruction of the social fabric of society. In Hobbes’s
view, the better way for a sovereign to serve the public good should be to
make good decisions based on extensive consultation and wise counsel, but
without having to deal with any informal pressures at all. Informal pressure is
eliminated in his repressive egalitarian state by sharply limiting forms of col-
lective organization. But a repressive egalitarian democracy risks becoming
a crypto-​aristocracy, because should the sovereign depart from the common
good, the populace has no effective constraint on it: for even if subjects feel
indignant, they are individually too weak to contest state power. For Hobbes,
this is an unavoidable inconvenience of the human condition, and better
than any alternative (L 282–​283, 18.20).
As I argued earlier, Spinoza certainly accepts the deep ethical ambivalence
of informal power: informal power can be oligarchic, and sometimes indig-
nation can destabilize equality and consolidate inequality (TTP 20.31, III/​
244). Even social movements of a more egalitarian aspiration (such as the
English effort to eliminate the monarchy) can be destructive and ineffica-
cious (Chapter 8, Section 8.2). Nonetheless, from a Spinozist perspective, if a
sovereign is unconstrained except by its own good judgement, then the risk
of its rule straying from the state’s fundamental principles is very troubling.61
As he asserts, it is necessary

to set up a state, so that everyone—​both those who rule and those who are
ruled—​does what’s for the common well-​being, whether they want to or
not. That is, it’s been necessary to set it up so that everyone is compelled to

61 Equally, consider La Boétie’s pyramidical structure. La Boétie himself is interested in tyrannical

states (states not oriented to the common good), but it is entirely conceivable that his pyramidical
structure could be deployed for the sake of the common good. For instance, in the face of principal-​
agent problems, some bureaucratic structures institute a chain of command, in which each indi-
vidual is answerable to a superior who enforces the conduct of that individual, through motivation of
the incentives that the individual faces. In such a model, the direction of action is determined from
the top, and collective pressure on the pyramidical structure is viewed as negative and distorting.
From my Spinozist point of view, the concern is that the decision-​maker at the top will face difficulty
in staying focussed on common good when not constrained to do so.
260 Spinoza

live according to the prescription of reason, whether of his own accord, or

by force, or by necessity. (TP 6.3; see also 1.6)

The force and necessity in question are not merely the pressure of formal
institutions such as the body of syndics: the possibility of parts of the pop-
ulace rising up is a key limit to the discretion of rulers.62 If the fundamental
laws of a monarchy ‘can’t be undermined without arousing the indignation
of the greatest part of an armed multitude’ (TP 7.2), this makes them firm
and secure. However, given the normative ambivalence of mass indigna-
tion, it is a non-​trivial question how to ensure that popular indignation is
well directed.
To answer this question, I develop a distinction between two kinds
of informal collectivities. The first kind finds its exemplar in Hobbes. In
Hobbes’s model, power blocs are generated by everyone seeking to pla-
cate and propitiate the more powerful, for hope of benefit or avoidance
of harm, resulting in pervasive hierarchical dependency. That is, people
pursue patronage of the powerful for the pure reason of their apparent
power. Power blocs so formed certainly distort both the equality of
interests and everyone’s good judgement. However, from a Spinozist point
of view, Hobbes’s model is not universal. Rather, it is a form of association
generated by pervasive fear and insecurity. When Hobbes himself identi-
fies a ‘perpetuall and restless desire of Power after power [Potentiam unam
post aliam]’ as a ‘generall inclination of all mankind’, he analyses its basis
as follows:

[T]‌he cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive
delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with
a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means
to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. (L
150–​151, 11.2)

62 See Hasana Sharp, ‘Family Quarrels and Mental Harmony: Spinoza’s Oikos-​Polis Analogy’,

in Spinoza’s ‘Political Treatise’: A Critical Guide, edited by Yitzhak Melamed and Hasana Sharp
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 93–​110; Saar, ‘The Immanence of Power’, 19–​21.
Interestingly, the positive role for informal resistance does not apply to all regimes: Spinoza is very
hostile to guild activity and mass assembly within aristocracies (TP 8.4–​5, 8.46). For the funda-
mental laws of aristocracy include the total political disempowerment of the commoners, in con-
trast to Spinoza’s monarchy, which is essentially a system of democratic equality. Popular resistance
supports only an egalitarian fundamental law, not an aristocratic one. Within an aristocratic regime,
informal resistance and indignation are only welcomed from within the ranks of the patriciate. See
Field, ‘Political Power’.
 Civic Strengthening 261

But in Spinoza’s view, anxiety is a feature of certain institutional orders, and

not an existential condition of humanity. A good political structure (such
as the good monarchy and aristocracy discussed previously) achieves gross
political stability, but just as important, it secures equality amongst its cit-
izens by blocking oligarchic influences from policy decisions. Living in
such a state, subjects can be confident that their community will be ruled
more or less for the public good, and need not be so anxious for the future.
Consequently, they are less driven to affiliate with power blocs for their own
sake. From a rational-​strategic point of view, there is less to gain by currying
favour with oligarchs; and affectively, the disabling epistemic effects of fear
are reduced, diminishing subjects’ tendency to throw themselves into the
hands of charismatic saviours.63
This is not to say that a secure society lacks inner collective structure.
Humans always depend on one another and tend to associate together. When
groupings are not driven by Hobbesian anxiety for the future, but rather,
emerge within a secure equal social order, then we have the second kind of
informal collectivity: rooted less in instrumental relations of oligarchic de-
pendency and more in deeper forms of human connection. Groups form
amongst those with common interests, common faith, geographical prox-
imity, or shared difficulties in life. Such groups, should they see problems
with the political decisions being made, have power to put pressure on the
holder of sovereignty. But because the perverse incentives for groups to build
up beyond their ‘natural’ shape for the sake of capturing political power are
eliminated, and because group members by and large recognize the role of
the state in providing their security, there can be greater confidence that
the pressure of such groups will constitute a legitimate constraint to sov-
ereign power rather than an oligarchic threat of capturing it. Oligarchy is
avoided not, as Hobbes recommends, by attacking collective power per se,
but by undercutting its pernicious forms. This is reflected in Spinoza’s pos-
itive attitude towards the very same power blocs in society that for Hobbes
are deeply troublesome. So long as the citizens are confident the state serves
the common good, and so long as religious groupings do not have access to
governmental power, they can be allowed to flourish (TTP 18.22–​26, III/​

63 Steinberg emphasizes the ethically rich meaning of securitas in Spinoza’s politics (Spinoza’s

Political Psychology, 74–​92). Rosenthal provides a Spinozist reconstruction of how affects of fear and
ambition combine to generate intolerance, and how fear provides a fertile ground for the formation
of power blocs (Rosenthal, ‘Spinoza’s Republican Argument’, 321–​326). Sharp argues that political
fear erodes democracy. Hasana Sharp, ‘Why Spinoza Today? or, ‘a Strategy of Anti-​Fear,’’ Rethinking
Marxism 17, no. 4 (2005): 591–​608).
262 Spinoza

225–​226, 20.40–​41, III/​246; TP 6.40; contrast L 732–​735, 39.5); so long as

citizens are confident that the state serves the common good, the power of
cities can be viewed not as a threat but as a guard of freedom (TP 7.16–​17,
6.9; contrast L 516–​517, 29.21).
To be clear, the distinction between good and bad informal pressure on
sovereign decision is not a distinction of politeness or civility. The criterion
is whether the effects of the pressure support the fundamental principles
of popular power. As Machiavelli insists, it may be that riotous and unruly
forms of collective action sometimes serve this purpose well; as Spinoza
remarks, democracies, like families, can be marked by frequent and bitter
quarrels (TP 6.4). My point is that it is important to be alert in case conflict is
not having this good effect, and to ascertain what the determinate causes of
this failure might be.
In sum, a state expressing neo-​Spinozist popular power is one that
maintains its fundamental principle of political equality and participation.
Achieving this outcome will require careful institutional design to eliminate
creeping oligarchy and exclusionary tendencies. My Spinozist model of civic
strengthening achieves these goals by embracing and cultivating the collec-
tive capacity of subjects to raise civic resistance to governmental plans, both
through formal and informal channels. For counterpowers help to ensure
that the democratic representative assembly more reliably maintains funda-
mental principles of popular power.

9.5. Conclusion

I opened this book by laying out two prevalent conceptions of popular power,
both trying to give expression to a ‘constituent power’, conceived as the
ground of legitimacy of the constituted forms of established institutional pol-
itics. Whether celebrating the neo-​Hobbesian sleeping sovereign of plebisci-
tary democracy, or the neo-​Spinozist free multitude of social movements,
contemporary thinkers of constituent power oppose the oligarchic capture of
this power by the state. However, I have argued that this emphatic opposition
to the state comes at the cost of failing to recognize the non-​state sources of
oligarchy and domination, including their capture of plebiscitary votes and
their spontaneous emergence within human social life, and the possible role
of the state in mitigating these problems.
 Civic Strengthening 263

I have argued that whether and to what degree political phenomena ex-
press popular power must be judged at the level of the characteristic effects of
a given political system. The determinate causes of these characteristic effects
includes the full gamut of institutional and organizational structures, in-
cluding both the formal and informal human collectivities that dwell within
them. Plebiscites and social movements may play a positive role, but they are
not in themselves the exemplary expression of popular power. Rather, the ex-
emplar of popular power is a political system, taken as a whole, that durably
achieves equality and participation for its citizens.
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 Index

An ‘n.’ following a page number indicates a footnote

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on
occasion, appear on only one of those pages.

Abizadeh, Arash, 39–​40n.45, 100n.50, acting agere, 178, 180, 181n.15, 186, 190.
118n.20, 131n.44 See also causality from own nature;
absolutism, Hobbesian. See also causes, adequate and inadequate
counsellors; monarchy; oppression; action (agency). See also causes and
‘the political problem’; repressive effects (efficacy); free will; potentia
egalitarianism; tyranny and tyrants agendi (power of acting); power
churches and, 129–​33 of producing effects (potentia
counsellors and, 123 operandi); power of producing
democracy and, 6, 9, 147, 160 effects, Hobbesian; individual power,
education and, 116–​66, 127 Spinozist
equality and, 132–​33 actual versus potential, 13
Hobbesian civil science and, 127–​28 of associations, 58–​59, 79–​80
hope of success in rebelling and, 115 collective, 135–​36
overviews, 4, 5–​8, 64n.14 duties and, 109
popular political agent and, 79–​80 Hobbesian substances and, 36–​37n.31
potestas versus potentia and, 9, 108 motion and, 51
power of the people and, 147 multitude and, 127–​28, 160, 161n.32
right of rebellion and, 99 normativity and, 37
scholarship and, 11–​12 personation of sovereign and, 127–​28
sovereign authority and, 64, 64n.14 plenary power and, 53–​54
Spinozist compared, 9, 11–​12, ‘the political problem’ and, 105
152, 153–​55 potentia and, 13, 178
war and, 108 power and, 30–​31n.14, 35–​36, 51, 96–​97
absolutism, Spinozist power of the people and, 73–​77,
civic harmony and, 197–​98n.42 79–​80, 96n.41
democracy and, 242n.22 problematic human behaviors and, 187
Hobbesian compared, 9, 11–​12, producing effects versus, 178–​80
152, 153–​55 scholasticism and, 35–​36, 37
self-​destructive behaviour and, social context and, 53–​54
189–​90, 191 social movements and, 216n.37
sui juris status and, 196, 197–​98, of sovereigns, 89
200, 201–​2 substances and, 36–​37n.31, 178, 204
abstractions, 46, 48, 53–​54, 84–​85, 166–​67 ‘action-​guiding fictions,’ 252–​53n.49
accidents, 50–​51, 52 adulation, 59–​60n.3
act (actus), 96 advertising, 1–​2
278 Index

affects, 168–​69n.60, 173–​74, 181n.15, Anderson, Elizabeth S., 241–​42n.19

191n.27 anger and rage, 180–​81, 182, 183n.17,
affinity, 168–​69n.60 183–​84, 187, 218–​19
afterlife, 70–​71n.29, 100–​1n.51, 110–​11n.5, animals, 37, 66, 176–​77, 178–​79,
114n.11. See also ‘survival’ versus 178–​79n.10, 204
‘salvation’ anti-​discrimination, 258
age, 257–​58 antinomianism, 17–​18, 176, 189, 198, 200,
agency. See action 217, 233–​34
allegiance. See also loyalty antipathy, 49n.69
durability and, 87 anti-​peristasis, 49n.69
educated elites and, 109–​10 antisemitism, 213–​14n.28
effectiveness and, 48 Anti-​White (Hobbes). See also Hobbes’s
false prophets and, 249 early texts
individual power and, 87–​88 on deeds and faculties, 30–​31n.14
internal motivation of subjects on friends, 30n.12
and, 109–​10 Hobbes’s natural science and,
liberality and, 47–​48 35–​36n.29
obedience and, 102–​3 on honour, 43–​44n.55
‘the political problem’ and, 57, 79–​80 on mechanical explanation, 36–​37n.30
power and, 131–​32 on natural science, 49n.65
relational power and, 46 potentia and, 27n.4
riches and, 84 on secondary powers, 42n.52
as secondary power, 44–​45, 59–​60n.3 appealing/​unappealing regimes. See
sortition and, 255–​56 also ethics and efficacy; ethics and
sovereign potentia and, 97–​98 endurance (nature’s indifference);
sovereign’s poor rule and, 120 nepotism; ‘the political problem’;
alms-​giving, 71 tyranny and tyrants; wicked rule
alterius juris status (in/​sub-​ potestate) collective forms of multitude and,
(subject to another’s right), 167, 193–​ 214n.29
94n.32, 193–​96, 202, 203, 209–​12 durable versus fragile, 165–​74
Althusser, Louis, 8–​9n.20 endurance and, 201
ambition and ambitious men ethics and efficacy and, 169–​70
age and, 257–​58 ethics and endurance, 221–​32
disagreement and, 100n.50 free will and, 16–​17
egalitarianism and, 213 multitude and, 214n.29
intolerance and, 261n.63 potestas and potentia compared,
oratory of, 75 158, 165–​66
punishment and, 102, 119 appeasement, 102–​3, 140n.65
religious leaders and, 168–​69 Aquinas, Thomas
sedition and, 101, 119–​20 on causes, 35
sovereign potentia and, 102 on free will, 39–​40, 68–​69
American constitutional plebiscites, 7–​8, on knowledge, 38n.38
11–​12, 55–​56 on natural bodies, 37, 38, 68–​69
American direct democratic voice, 13–​14 on natural law, 38, 66
American public law tradition, 5, 7–​8, 55–​ normativity and, 69, 70
56. See also democratic theory; Tuck, overview, 70
Richard potestas/​potentia compared, 32–​33,
American right-​libertarians, 17–​18n.40 38n.38, 69, 70, 71–​72, 176–​77
 Index 279

on substances, 176–​77 sortition and, 255–​56, 256n.59

on substantial forms, 34–​35 Spinoza and Hobbes compared, 152
Arab Spring, 104n.58 Spinozist power of the people
Arendt, Hannah, 230n.78 and, 244–​45
aristocracy. See also oligarchy and elites will of, 243–​44n.23
assemblies and, 125, 243–​44n.23, 257, assistance, 44–​45, 46
260n.62 associations (informal collectivities).
counsel and, 125, 253 See also collectivities and collective
decentralized, 164–​65n.51 power; fragmentation; oligarchy
democracy and, 5–​6, and elites; power blocs; religion and
164–​65n.51, 248–​50 churches
endurance and, 261 actions and, 58–​59, 79–​80
fundamental principles of state and, collective power and, 58
249–​50, 257, 260n.62 common ends and, 58, 59–​60
Hobbes on, 5–​6 common good and, 258–​61
inequality amongst patricians conflict and, 105–​6
and, 249–​50 cooperation and, 59
monarchy compared, 239n.8 division between, 197
multitude and, 151n.5, 208n.21 endurance and, 59, 80–​82, 84–​85, 87,
power of the people and, 6–​7, 239n.7 91–​93, 100–​1
representative democracy and, 245–​46 equality and, 59, 132–​33, 135–​36
repressive egalitarianism and, 138–​39, hierarchy and, 59–​60, 85–​86, 85–​86n.13
235–​36, 258–​59 Hobbes’s early and late texts
sortition and, 255–​56n.56 compared, 86n.16
sui juris status and, 239n.8 Hobbes’s early texts and, 15–​16, 58
virtue and, 222n.56 Hobbes’s late texts and, 80–​88
Aristotle, 33–​34, 35, 38n.41, 49, 206–​8n.16 horizontal, 59–​60nn.2–​3
Armstrong, Aurelia, 196n.40, 246–​47n.35 individual independence and, 80–​82
army commander example, 103 individual power and, 15–​16, 87–​88
assemblies. See also democracy; oligarchy; inequality and, 86
syndics instability and, 59
aristocracy and elites and, 140, 260n.62 Leviathan and, 80–​91, 83–​84n.11
constituent power and, 7 as means of sedition, 101
corruption of, 248 motivations for forming, 10, 80–​83,
as counsellors, 125–​26 80–​82n.5
fundamental principles of state and, oligarchy and, 26, 258–​62
257, 262 oligarchy 26, 85, 106, 249–​50, 258–​62
Hobbes on, 126–​27 overviews, 58, 262
informal power and, 248 ‘the political problem’ and, 80–​88
laziness and, 249–​50 potentia and, 79–​80, 87–​88
personal interests and, 94–​95 potestas/​potentia compared,
‘the political problem’ and, 173–​74 56–​57, 58–​59
power of the people and, 97–​98, power of the people and, 104, 135–​36
136–​39, 262 power-​to and power-​over and,
private interests and, 125–​26 85–​86n.12
rationality and, 247 pressure on sovereign and, 262
seditious, 103, 132–​33 private power and, 131–​33
self-​interest and, 249 protective, 59
280 Index

associations (informal collectivities) bodies, ‘simplest,’ 204–​5n.11

(cont.) boldness, 29–​30
repressive egalitarianism and, 16 Book of Common Prayer, 102
scholasticism and, 91–​92 brainwashing, 229–​30n.74
science and, 67 Brandt, Frithiof, 35–​36n.29
secondary powers and, 30–​31 Brett, Annabel, 87n.17
security and, 261–​62 Brexit, 1–​2, 7–​8, 98n.45, 137
sedition and, 74–​75, 94–​95, 101–​2 bureaucracies and corporations, 229–​30,
Spinoza and Hobbes compared, 260–​61 230n.78
spontaneous goodness of, 63–​64 buy offs of leaders, 122–​23, 257–​59
spontaneous versus covenantal,
83–​84n.11 Cain and Abel, 118n.19
state of nature and, 82–​83n.10 campaigning, political, 137
state power and, 135–​36 capacity, 88, 88n.19, 98–​99
threat to sovereignty and, 101n.53 capitalism, 10–​11
unions compared, 15–​16, 19, 56–​65, causality from own nature. See also
86, 92–​93 causes, adequate and inadequate;
Astorga, Omar, 98–​99n.48 homeostasis; potentia agendi (power
Australia, 254n.50, 258n.60 of acting); sui juris status
Australian mining industry (2011), action and, 178
135–​36n.56 adequate and inadequate causation and,
Australian Republican Referendum 167–​68n.58, 179–​81, 181n.15
(1999), 136–​37n.61, 256n.59 collectivities and, 198
Australian Same-​Sex Marriage Postal external causes versus, 180–​81
Survey (2017), 256n.59 God and, 178, 190–​91n.26
authorization, 89–​90 individual power and, 204
autonomism, 10–​11n.24, 17–​18n.40, individual versus plenary power
202–​3n.5 and, 183–​84
auto-​regulation. See self-​regulation potentia agendi and, 180–​81
Averroism, 32–​33n.18 rules of nature and, 186–​87
“axe can cut” example, 53n.77 self-​destructive behavior and, 190–​91
social movements and, 216n.37
Bacon, Francis, 46–​47n.61 virtue and, 181
Balibar, Étienne, 8–​9n.20, 151n.7, 195–​ causal network, 178
96n.38, 204–​5n.10, 206–​8, 224, causes, adequate and inadequate (active
225–​26n.67 or passive). See also potentia
Barbone, Stephen, 206–​8 agendi (power of acting); power
Bastille, storming of, 104n.58 of producing effects (potentia
Baumgold, Deborah, 47–​48n.62, 101n.54 operandi)
Behemoth (Hobbes), 45–​46, 102 anger and, 187, 218–​19
betrayal, 210n.23 causality from own nature and,
billiard balls example, 183–​84 167–​68n.58, 179–​81, 181n.15
‘biopolitics’ of labor, 214n.29 causal relations and, 178–​79
blame, 39–​40n.45 external causes and, 179–​80
bodies, natural. See motion; natural bodies gradualism and, 182, 191n.27
bodies, persons’, 9 as matter of degree, 190–​91
bodies, political. See political bodies modes and, 182–​83
 Index 281

political power and, 175–​76n.18, Spinoza’s potentia and, 16–​17

190–​91n.26, 191–​92 uncaused, 177
potentia operandi and, 182–​83, 184, 187 ‘violent,’ 37
power of acting and, 184–​85n.21, 187 Cavalier Parliament (1661), 126–​27
right and, 187 centralized aristocracy, 164–​65n.51
subjects and states and, 196n.40 characteristic ratio, 204n.9, 204–​5, 204–​
sui juris status an, 193–​94 5n.11, 208, 210, 211n.23
causes, efficient, 51, 178–​79n.11 charity, 209
causes, entire, 183–​84 Charles I, 102–​3
causes, external (by another). See child with blanket example, 63, 209
external causes Christianity, 33–​34, 129–​30. See also
causes, final, 49 religion and churches
causes, material, 51 Christov, Theodore, 59–​60n.2, 83–​84n.11
causes and effects (efficacy) Chua Beng Huat, 141–​42n.67
action compared, 178 churches. See religion and churches
allegiance and, 48 cities and towns, 100–​1, 136–​37n.62,
blame and punishment and, 39–​40n.45 170–​71, 197, 219–​20n.49,
collective power and, 19, 165–​66 240–​41n.14, 261–​62
faculties and, 29, 42 Citizens Assembly (Ireland), 256
free will versus, 233–​34 De Cive (Hobbes), 6
God and, 177 civic strengthening. See also
Hobbesian natural science and, 51–​54 autoregulation
Hobbes’s early texts and, 65 absolutism and, 197–​98n.42
immanent, 177 democracy’s perverse effects and,
individual power and, 84–​85, 204–​5n.11 247–​52, 262
juridical authority and, 78–​79 direct versus representative democracy
multitude and, 19–​20 and, 244–​52, 245n.28, 248–​49n.36,
natural bodies and, 182 253, 256
obedience and, 67 formal principle erosion and,
overview, 91–​92 256–​58, 259
of political systems, 262 horizontal multitude and, 201
potentia and, 16–​17, 107, informal collectivities and, 258–​62
163–​64, 237–​38 naivete and, 236–​37
potentia operandi and, 175–​76 overviews, 148–​49, 235–​37, 247–​48, 262
potentia operandi versus potentia agendi power blocs and, 253, 256
and, 17–​18 power of the people and, 237–​44, 252
power versus, 52n.76 power of the people to resist and, 262
relational power and, 13–​14, 46 repressive egalitarianism versus, 13, 19,
scholasticism and, 35, 49, 53, 67 148–​49, 236–​37
secondary powers and, 36–​37 state and individuals sui juris
security and, 157 and, 238–​44
sedition and, 75 civil war, 108, 116–​17, 122–​23. See also
sleeping sovereign and, 16 English Civil War
sovereign power and, 98–​99, 163–​64 civitas (commonwealth). See sovereign
sovereign’s potestas and, 62–​63, 64 power
Spinoza and Hobbes compared, 157 class rule, 10–​11
Spinoza on, 148–​49 codependency, 220–​21n.54
282 Index

collectivities and collective power. See tendencies versus particular situations

also associations (societas) (informal and, 233–​34, 233–​34n.88
collectivities); covenants; hope Collins, Jeffrey R., 130–​32
of success; horizontal and equal colonialism, 19, 170–​71n.69, 219–​21,
aggregations; institutional structures; 219–​20n.51, 227, 239. See also
institutional structures and decolonization
organizational form; juridical politics common ends. See also common good;
(collectivities and state); oligarchy self-​preservation
and elites; power blocs; relationality associations and, 58, 59–​60
(social body) (social context); horizontal associations and, 59–​60n.3
repressive egalitarianism; sui juris; juridical politics and, 56–​57
unions (unio) (formal collectivities) passions and, 59
agency and, 135–​36 common good. See also corruption; ethical
alterius juris, 203 development of individuals; peace;
ethics and, 234 repressive egalitarianism; security
formal and informal, 56–​57, 92–​93 and safety
Hobbesian right (jus) and, 154n.12 appeasement and, 102–​3
Hobbes’s early and late texts compared, Aquinas’ potestas and, 71–​72
78–​79, 80 coercive laws and, 67
Hobbes’s late work, 155–​56, 155–​56n.14 democracy and, 16
individual power and, 157–​58 dependency and, 240–​41
individual self-​interest and, enduring state sui juris and, 222,
229–​30n.74 229–​30n.76
institutional structures and, 13–​14, fragmentation and, 236–​37
61, 203 freedom and, 222
juridical politics and, 67, 155–​56 Hebrew republic and, 213–​14
motivations and, 80–​82 informal collectivities and, 105–​6,
normative appeal and, 148 248, 258–​61
oligarchy and, 148 monarchy/​aristocracy versus corrupted
overviews, 19, 55, 57, 93, 262 assemblies and, 248–​49
possibilities of, 240–​41n.12 plebiscites and, 246–​47
potentia and, 13, 78, 79, 155–​56n.14, political body and, 197–​98n.42
167n.56 potestas and, 71–​72
potestas and, 93 power blocs and, 235–​36, 261–​62
potestas/​potentia compared, 79, 93, 94–​96, power of the people and, 148–​49,
98–​99, 101n.53 202–​3n.6, 243–​44
power of the people and, 13, 165–​66, private interest and, 173–​74
174, 201, 258–​62 reason and, 241–​42n.20
rationality and, 247 rebellion and, 122–​23
relationality and, 90 repressive egalitarianism and, 235–​36
right, Spinoza and Hobbes compared, reputation versus, 140
154n.12 Singapore and, 141–​42
right and, 198 social movements and, 63–​64
scholasticism and, 91–​98 sovereign power and, 258–​60
sleeping sovereign and, 57 sovereigns and, 259–​60
Spinoza and Hobbes compared, sovereign’s duty and, 119
155–​56n.14, 260–​61 sovereign’s interest versus, 71–​72, 141–​42
sui juris status and, 19, 175–​76, 209 stability and, 173
 Index 283

states sui juris and, 232–​33 commentators on, 236–​37n.1

syndics and, 257 corruption and, 174
tyrants and, 80–​82, 105n.60, 259n.61 ethics and endurance and, 170–​71,
union of minds and, 217 217–​18, 232–​33
voluntary servitude and, 229–​30, Hobbesian democracy and, 244–​45n.26
229–​30n.76 Hobbes’s early texts and, 202n.3
commonwealth (civitas). See sovereign Marx on, 136–​37n.59
power mixed constitutionalism and, 5–​6, 138
Commonwealth (Hardt and Negri), 8–​9 naturally good multitude and, 201–​2
community service, 63 on nonideal endurance, 18–​19
competition, 26, 59, 105, 137, 248, overviews, 16–​17, 133–​34, 158, 232–​33,
248–​49n.36, 251. See also ‘the 236–​37n.1
political problem’; positionality potentia and, 159, 163–​64, 217–​18n.41
conatus (striving) (perseverance), 157–​58, power of the people and, 165–​66
180, 190, 190–​91n.26, 206–​8n.16, “radical democratic,” 159–​60n.22
206–​8n.17, 210. See also potentia radical interpretations compared,
agendi (power of acting) 149–​50, 158, 163–​65, 169–​70, 199,
conflict. See also war 217n.41, 236–​37n.1, 245
as constructive, 215 relationality and, 169–​70
indeterminacy and, 47–​48n.62 on state power, 165
Machiavelli and, 215 tyranny and, 16–​17, 18–​19,
oligarchic associations and, 106 172–​73, 217–​18
power of the people and, 105–​6 ‘constitutional moments,’ 7–​8
social trust and, 215 ‘constitutive advance of power,’ 160–​62
sui juris status and, 239, 239n.5 ‘constitutive process’ (Negri), 160–​62, 169,
conformity, 224, 229–​30, 248–​49n.37 206–​8n.16
conquest, 61, 61n.4, 83–​84n.11, 170–​71, contemporary lessons. See also
170–​71n.69, 188, 227. See also war democratic theory
conscience, 245–​46 cooperation and, 214n.29
conscience, inner, 71 overview, 19–​21
consensus, overlapping, 220–​21 power of the people and, 244–​45, 262
conservatism, privileged, 11–​12 slave states and, 227
constituent power sortition and, 256
assemblies and, 7 Spinozist democracy and, 244–​45
constituted power versus, 1, 7, 163 contempt, 133–​34
contemporary theorists and, 8–​9, 262 contentious words, 59
Hobbes and, 7 cooperation, 54, 58–​59, 59–​60n.3, 82–​
origin of concept, 7n.14 83n.10, 84–​85, 105, 214n.29, 220–​21,
sleeping sovereign and, 7 229–​30n.74. See also common ends
Spinozist sovereignty and, 8–​9, co-​optation, 132–​33
206–​8n.16 corporate goals, 229–​30, 230n.78
constituted power, 1, 7, 7n.14, 163 corruption, 214n.29, 217–​18n.40, 240–​41,
constitutional (liberal) interpretations. 248, 253. See also private advantage
See also ethics and efficacy (Spinoza); and self-​interest
institutional structures and counsellors
organizational form; plebiscites aristocracy and, 253
(voting); social movements; Tuck, assemblies as, 125–​26
Richard Leviathan on, 132–​33
284 Index

counsellors (cont.) on emergent powers, 104n.57

overviews, 123–​27 on formal collectivities, 61–​62
the people as, 124, 125–​26n.31 on fragmentation, 86n.14
‘the political problem’ and, 124, 127 juridical politics and, 63n.8, 64
power blocs and, 136–​37 Leviathan compared, 16
power of the people and, 135–​36 multitudes and, 58–​59
sovereign’s internal motivation on patronage, 59–​60n.3
and, 109–​10 potestas/​potentia compared, 16, 27–​28,
state sui juris and, 222n.56 62–​63nn.6–​7, 89n.22, 90, 96
court system, 119 on power of the people, 25
covenants. See also social contract on reputation, 44n.56
domination and, 83–​84n.11 scholasticism and, 36–​37
individual rights and, 5 sleeping sovereign and, 16, 95–​98
Leviathan and, 88 sovereign’s duties and, 119
natural law and, 70–​71 Spinoza and, 150
obedience and, 63 on unions, 104n.57
potestas and, 62–​63, 88 decolonization, 216n.37
sovereign power and, 5–​6, 45–​46 De Corpore (Hobbes). See also Hobbes’s
spontaneous associations versus, late texts
83–​84n.11 actions and, 49n.68
transfer of powers and, 68 Epistle to, 49n.68
cruelty, 40, 70 Hobbes’s natural science and, 35–​36n.29
Curley, Edwin on internalization of duty, 114
on durable tyrannies, 170–​71 on natural bodies, 94
on Ethics, 150n.2 on potentia, 49n.69
on Genghis Khan, 170–​71n.69, on war, 114
175–​76n.18 defence, 82–​83n.10, 112, 119. See also self-​
on Hobbes and Spinoza compared, defence; self-​preservation
150, 150n.3 deference. See also honour; patronage
on Hobbes’s state of nature, 93n.31 education and, 115–​16
on letter to Jelles, 153n.10 equality and, 105–​6
nonideal endurance and, 217 excess docility and, 141
“survival” versus “salvation” and, glory and, 80–​82
171–​72n.73 inequality and, 134–​35
Curran, Eleanor, 122–​23n.27 of masses to government, 216n.43
as motivation, 80–​82
death, 39–​40n.47, 99–​100, 110–​11n.5, relational power and, 46
111–​12, 113, 115, 190, 190n.25. See degeneracy. See also ends; vice
also afterlife democracy and, 173–​74, 249–​50
deception, 187 Hobbesian science and, 40, 53–​54
De Cive (Hobbes). See also Hobbes’s early Hobbes’s early and late texts
and late texts compared; Hobbes’s compared, 53–​54
early texts honour and, 45–​46
covenantal groups and, 83–​84n.11 natural objects and, 66
death versus punishment and, political society and, 66
110–​11n.5 scholastic science and, 66, 68–​69
duties as citizens and, 36–​37n.32 secondary powers and, 42–​44, 80–​82n.5
on education, 113–​14n.10 sedition and, 74
 Index 285

vainglory and, 80–​82 dependency. See also enslaved people;

virtue and, 69 external causes; families with
De Homine (Hobbes), 27, 41n.48, 150n.4. children examples; inequality;
See also Hobbes’s late texts minorities; women; individual
Deleuze, Gilles, 18, 163n.42, 183n.17 power, Hobbesian; individual power,
Della Rocca, Michael, 164–​65, 184–​ Spinozist
85n.21, 217–​18, 217–​18n.39 alterius juris and, 193–​94n.32
demagogues, 2–​3 equality and, 107, 240–​42, 241–​42n.19,
democracy. See also democracy; 241–​42n.20
democratic theory; direct versus gradualism and, 194–​95
representative democracy; endurance hierarchies and, 85–​86
(stability) or fragility (instability) of individual power and, 195–​96n.38
states; equality and egalitarianism; interpersonal, 13, 168–​69n.61
institutional structures and oligarchy and, 85
organizational form; parliamentary pluralized and cross-​cutting, 241–​42,
democracies; ‘the political problem’; 241–​42n.19
power of the people; representation, power blocs and, 168–​69n.61
political; tyranny and tyrants social order, 196
as appealing, 169–​70 solidarity and, 230–​31
Hobbesian, 5–​7, 9, 56, 147, 160 state and, 195–​96
minimalist definition of, on state or individual, 194–​95n.36
216n.43, 251–​52 sui juris status and, 198, 240–​41n.10
multitude and, 147–​48 twenty-​first century and, 240–​41
overview, 1–​2 women and servants and, 240–​41
Spinoza and Hobbes compared, 9–​10, Descartes, René, 15–​16, 49, 50, 176–​79,
25n.1, 148–​49, 152, 157–​58, 165–​66, 177n.4, 178–​79n.10
242n.22, 252 Des Chene, Dennis, 33–​34
Spinozist, 4, 8–​11, 157–​58, 236–​37, desire or appetite. See also moral
236–​37n.1 psychology, Hobbesian; motivations
democracy’s perverse effects. See also civic for duty; passions; self-​regulation
strengthening; ‘the political problem’; convergence of, 227, 232–​33
repressive egalitarianism duty and, 110–​11
endurance and, 173 Hobbes’s early and late texts
overviews, 149–​50, 234, 235–​36, 247 compared, 110–​11
plebiscites and social movements mass, 248–​49
and, 20 modern education and, 227
radical interpretation and, 20 non-​egalitarian, 213–​14
Spinoza and Hobbes compared, to persevere in one’s being, 168–​69n.60
19, 173–​74 for power, 80–​82, 84–​85, 110–​11
Spinozist power of the people and, 236–​ pyramidical structure of capture of,
37, 247, 252 171–​72, 229–​30
democratic theory, 2–​6, 12, 88. right and, 187
See also American public law voluntary behavior and, 109–​10n.3
tradition; constitutional (liberal) despotic rule, 71–​72
interpretations; Marxism, neo-​ destroyers of earth, 212n.25
(European); radical democratic determinism, 177–​78, 179–​80. See
interpretations; Schumpeter, also causes and effects (efficacy);
Joseph A. natural laws
286 Index

dignity, 120 duration, 182

direct versus representative democracy. Dussel, Enrique, 202–​3n.6, 206–​8n.16
See also representation, political Dutch Republic, 21–​22, 151
American, 7–​8, 13–​14 duty and obligation, Hobbesian. See also
competition for power and, 248, counsellors; education; motivations
248n.36 for duty; obedience and disobedience
Hobbes on, 6–​7 desire and, 110–​11
multitude and, 245, 245nn.28–​30 education and rhetoric and, 28n.8,
oligarchy and, 253 109, 113–​14
power of the people and, glory and, 110–​11n.5
243–​52, 253–​56 God and, 109n.1
self-​regulation and, 245–​46 Hobbes’s early and late texts compared,
social movements and, 211–​12 109–​11, 112n.7
universal basic income and, 211–​12n.24 incentives and threats and, 110–​12
voluntary versus compulsory, 254 internalization of (sovereign’s), 123
disagreement, 84–​85, 100n.50, 133–​34 internalization of (subjects’), 110–​11,
discontent, 74, 74n.32 112, 113–​14, 115–​18
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (La mass knowledge and, 112n.7
Boétie), 171–​72 natural law and, 109
disengagement, 256–​57 overview, 109
disobedience. See obedience and ‘the political problem’ and,
disobedience 109–​10, 118
disputes, 187 repressive egalitarianism and, 139–​40
disruption, fear of, 61n.4 sedition and, 112
districting, electoral, 258, 258n.60 of sovereign, 109, 118, 120n.22, 123,
diversity, 228, 256–​57 133–​34, 142
divine law, 243–​44n.24 of subjects, 62–​63, 109, 133–​34
docility, excess, 141 weak versus strong (sovereigns), 119–​20,
domination (dominion). See also 120n.22, 122–​23
colonialism; power blocs; slave states;
submission economic change, 242n.21
for advantages, 80–​82 education and rhetoric. See also
desire for glory and, 80–​82n.7 counsellors; free expression and
enduring, 202n.3, 220–​21n.54 religion; indoctrination
fragmented social ontology and, absolutism and, 116–​66, 127
83–​84n.11 allegiance and, 140
good state and, 195–​96n.39 aristocracy and elites and, 140
non-​state sources of, 262 assemblies and, 125
potentia and, 80–​82n.6 duty and obligation and, 109, 113–​14
sophisticated populations and, 171–​72 elites and, 118n.19
state and, 202n.3 excess docility and, 141
war and, 80–​82 fear versus, 112
dominion, 59–​60, 59–​60nn.2–​3, 80–​82n.6 Hebrew republic and, 214n.32
dominium, 80–​82n.6 Hobbesian political science and, 140
“do not kick against the pricks,” 59–​60 Hobbes’s early texts and, 112
drunkenness, 40, 70 internalization of duty and, 115–​16,
durability. See endurance (stability) or 116–​17n.16
fragility (instability) of states Johnston on, 114n.11
 Index 287

Leviathan on, 132–​33 ends, 66–​67, 79, 80–​82. See also common
obedience and, 140 ends; common good
overview, 113–​18 endurance of associations and, 59, 80, 84–​85,
‘the political problem’ and, 87–​88, 92–​93, 100–​1
118n.20, 140 endurance of multitude, 250–​51. See also
punishment versus, 113–​15, 114n.11 security and safety; self-​preservation
religion and, 113, 116, 117–​18 endurance of oligarchy, 199
repressive egalitarianism, 139–​43 endurance of social movements, 203, 216
scholarship and, 139–​40 endurance (stability) or fragility
sedition and, 115–​16, 117, 120 (instability) of states. See also ethics
of sovereign, 123–​24 and efficacy; ethics and endurance;
sovereign power and, 76, 114–​17, 120 homeostasis; long-​term perspective
subjects’ judgement and, 116–​17n.16 active power and, 187n.23,
Turkish despotism and, 227 191–​92, 218–​19
tyrannies and, 171–​72 of allegiance, 87
efficacy. See causes and effects alterius juris and, 209–​10
egalitarianism. See equality and anger and, 218–​19
egalitarianism; radical democratic argument of book and, 199
interpretations aristocracy and, 249–​50, 261
elderly syndics, 257–​58 of associations, 80, 87, 92–​93
The Elements of Law (Hobbes) children versus states and, 220–​21n.54
abstraction from relational context collectivity alterius juris and, 203
and, 48 common good and, 173, 229–​30n.76
on bodies, natural and political, 93 democracy and, 164–​65, 164–​65n.51,
on common good, 119 173–​74, 216n.43, 230–​31n.81,
on conflict between fixed capacities, 247, 249–​50
47–​48n.62 dependency and, 211, 240–​41
on death versus punishment, 70–​71n.29, divided hierarchical regimes and,
110–​11n.5 230–​31n.79
on education, 113–​14n.10 domination and, 202n.3
on faculties, 28 efficacy and, 157
on formal collectivities, 61 egalitarianism and, 230–​31n.81
on fragmentation, 86, 86n.14 emotional, 210n.23
Hobbes’s natural science and, equality and participation and, 262
35–​36n.29, 112 existence versus bringing into existence
on juridical politics, 63n.8, 64 and, 240–​41
Leviathan’s human power and, 41 external causes and, 209–​10, 217–​18n.40,
normative and descriptive science 218–​30, 219–​20n.46, 219–​20n.49,
and, 68 220–​21n.54, 220–​21n53
relational power and, 46, 47–​48 foreign wars and, 229–​30n.75
rhetoric and, 118 forms of state and, 164–​65n.51
scholasticism’s potentia and, fragmented multitude and, 141–​42
32–​33, 36–​37 free expression and, 155–​56
on secondary powers, 43–​44 goodness and, 217–​18n.40
elites. See oligarchy and elites gradualism (right/​power) and, 191–​92
emergence, 204–​5, 204–​5n.10. See also hierarchy and, 202n.3
seed example Hobbes on, 87, 120, 141–​42
Empire (Hardt and Negri), 8–​9 indignation and, 225n.65, 225
288 Index

endurance (stability) or fragility English political thought, 131

(instability) of states (cont.) English Restoration, 63
individual power and, 204–​5n.11 English Revolution, 131, 211
infinite web of other things and, enslaved people, 16–​17, 46–​47, 59–​60,
218n.43 61, 63–​64n.11. See also slave states;
Israel and, 219–​20n.51 voluntary servitude
Leviathan on, 100–​1 envy, 30–​31n.14, 42, 59, 84–​85,
monarchy and, 242–​43, 247, 261 230–​31n.81
nonideal, 18–​19, 170–​73, 199, epicureanism, 32–​33n.18, 36–​37n.31
216–​34, 236 Epistle Dedicatory to The Elements of
oligarchic groups and, 115 Law, 112
overviews, 107, 120, 157–​58n.15, 215, Epistle to De Corpore, 49n.68
217–​18, 262 equality and egalitarianism. See also
own nature and, 218–​19 enslaved people; exclusions;
participation and, 164–​65, 170–​71 fragmentation; horizontal and equal
perfection and, 218n.43 aggregations; inequality; minorities;
‘the political problem’ and, 106 repressive egalitarianism; state of
potestas/​potentia and, 107 nature; women
power blocs and, 120, 235–​36 absolutism and, 132–​33
power of producing effects and, 217–​18 actual achievement and, 206–​8
power of the people and, 4, 20, 242–​43 antipathy to state and, 216
preinstitutional multitude and, 202n.3 aristocracy and, 249–​50, 253
Rawls on, 223n.58 associations and, 59, 132–​33
repressive egalitarianism and, 228–​29 citizens sui juris status and, 236–​37
repressive state and, 141–​42, 191 compounded, 202
republican liberal-​democratic model corruption of, 248
and, 201 democracy and, 136–​37, 173–​74
right and power and, 164–​65 dependency and, 107, 240–​42, 241–​
self-​preservation and, 214 42n.19, 241–​42n.20
sovereign duties and, 120n.22 desires and, 213–​14
Spanish Jews and, 230n.79 durable political system, 262
Spinoza on, 18–​19, 164–​65, 164–​65n.51 economic, 136–​37n.62
submission and, 61n.4 economic egalitarianism versus,
sui juris status and, 217–​21, 132–​33n.47
220–​21n.53, 222–​23 enduring state sui juris and, 230–​32
taxonomy of, 171–​72n.77 ethics and endurance and, 199,
of tyrannies, 16–​17, 169–​72, 170–​71n.68, 230–​31n.81, 230–​33, 231–​32n.82
170–​71n.69, 217–​18 Hebrew republic and, 213–​14
of unjust regimes, 142–​43 Hobbesian, 132–​33n.47, 241–​42
war and, 219–​20 Hobbes’s early and late texts
enemies, 220–​21 compared, 86n.14
enemies of the state, 231–​32n.82 hope of success and, 231–​33
England, 21–​22, 123. See also Brexit; ideals of, 206–​8n.20
scholarship on history of the period individuals sui juris and, 241–​42
English Civil War, 92–​93, 102, 242n.21. indoctrination and, 132–​33
See also civil war Israel on, 152n.9
English constitution, 211 juridical, 220–​21
English effort to eliminate monarchy, 259 mass resistance and, 260n.62
 Index 289

multitude and, 131–​32 on adequate causation, 186–​87, 193–​94

natural, 214, 214n.32 on feelings-​based affinities, 168–​69n.60
oligarchical social movements and, 259 gradualism and, 191n.27
opportunity and, 258 Hobbes and, 150, 150n.2
organizational mechanisms and, 19 on horizontal versus vertical forms, 169
passions and, 250 on political power and, 184–​85
of poor people, 120 on political power and active power,
power blocs and, 261 217–​18n.39
power of the people and, 10, 19, 20, on political right, 187
148–​49, 262 Political Treatise compared, 151
reason and, 241–​42n.20 potentia agendi and, 179–​80, 184–​85,
rebellion (insurgency) and, 10 187, 198
relationality and, 26, 132–​33, 134–​35 potentia and, 16–​18, 157–​58
Rousseau on, 133 potentia operandi and, 183–​84, 198
secondary powers and, 29 power of acting and, 184–​85n.21
sortition and, 255–​56 on reason, 167–​68, 241–​42n.20
Spinozist power of the people on substance, 177
and, 236–​37 sui juris and, 193–​94
state of nature and, 59, 127–​28 on “understood through own nature
state power and, 131–​32 alone” and “adequate cause,”
states sui juris and, 230–​32, 231–​32n.82 167–​68n.58
sui juris status and, 238 virtue and power and, 182
as virtue, 213 ethics and efficacy. See also ethics
equanimity, 180–​81 and endurance; ethics and
essence, 16–​17, 157–​58, 159, 178, 181, endurance (nature’s indifference);
184–​85n.21 normativity; virtue
ethical development of individuals, constitutional interpretation and, 109,
183n.17, 210n.23, 221, 227, 158, 163–​65, 169n.62, 169–​71, 174,
228–​29n.73, 229–​31 184–​85, 199
ethics. See also equality and egalitarianism; ethics and endurance and, 216–​34
ethical development of individuals; overviews, 16–​18, 147–​56, 165–​66,
ethics and efficacy (Spinoza); ethics 169–​70, 175, 198, 199
and endurance; normativity; virtue ‘the political problem’ and, 165–​74
individual power and, 16–​17 potentia and, 157–​59
individual sui juris and, 196 potestas/​potentia compared, 150–​56,
political power and, 18–​19, 187, 189 154n.13, 165–​66
‘the political problem’ and, 224–​25 power of the people and, 165–​66, 174, 175
politics and, 232–​33n.84 radical interpretation and, 149–​50,
potentia agendi/​operandi and, 17–​18 159–​63, 165–​67, 169–​70, 174,
potentia and, 16–​17 184–​85, 199
producing many effects and, relationality and, 169–​70
182–​83n.16 right and, 152–​56, 154n.12,
Spinoza’s potentia and, 16–​17 154n.13, 191–​92
sui juris status and, 17–​18, 196 Spinoza’s politics and, 176
Ethics (Spinoza) ethics and endurance (nature’s
on action, 179–​80, 193–​94 indifference). See also appealing/​
on action, substance, modes and unappealing regimes; tyranny and
effects, 178 tyrants; virtue
290 Index

ethics and endurance (nature’s passions and, 180–​81

indifference) (cont.) physically internal, 218n.42
constitutional interpretations of potentia operandi and, 178, 187
Spinoza and, 232–​33 power of acting and, 183n.17
ethics and efficacy and, 216–​34 producing effects and, 178
external causes and, 217–​30 self-​regulation and, 218–​19
fear of state and, 224–​25, 224–​25n.64 state sui juris and, 197, 217–​21
freedom and, 215, 220–​22 tendencies to actualize and, 206–​8n.16
individuals and, 204–​8 tyrannies and, 217–​18
inequality and, 230–​31n.81, 230–​32,
231–​32n.82 ‘fable’ of power, 88
inner oligarchy and, 201–​16 faculties. See also secondary powers
multitude sui juris and, 201–​2, animal, 59
204, 208–​10 causes and, 29, 42
overviews, 199–​201, 216–​34, 236 effects versus, 42
participation and, 164–​65 equal, 86n.14
possibility of resisting oppression Hobbes’s early and late texts compared,
and, 233–​34 86n.14, 166–​67
relationality and, 209–​11 Hobbes’s early texts and, 28–​32,
right and, 191n.27, 233–​34 30–​31n.14
slave states and, 225–​26n.67, inner oligarchy compared, 166–​67
225–​26n.68, 225–​27 lack of desire for power and, 80–​82
social movements and, 201–​4, 208, power of the people and, 28–​32
209–​10, 211–​16 as relational power, 48
state organization sui juris, 225–​30 signs of, 42n.52
states not sui juris and, 221–​30, of sovereign, 68
231–​32n.82, 232–​33 fairness, 119, 120, 132–​33n.47
states sui juris and, 217–​21, 232–​33 faith, 243–​44n.24
state sui juris and, 221–​25 false prophets, 141, 227, 249
unappealing regimes and, 221–​32 fame, 30–​31, 43–​44, 85
Weinstein and, 218–​19n.45 families with children examples, 59–​60,
European wars of religion, 220–​21 61, 83–​84n.11, 100–​1, 220–​21n.54,
Evrigenis, Ioannis D., 118n.19 240–​41n.16, 262. See also child with
exclusions, 240–​41nn.10–​15, 256–​57. See blanket example
also minorities; servants; women favour, 29, 43–​44, 125, 134–​35, 229–​30n.75.
external causes. See also alterius juris See also patronage
status (subject to another’s right); fear
civic strengthening; conquest; of death, 39–​40n.47
dependency; homeostasis; democracy and, 248–​49n.37
‘infinite web of other things’; durability of states and, 224–​25
self-​regulation; war education and rhetoric versus, 112
adequate and inadequate causes enduring states sui juris and, 225–​27
and, 179–​80 Hobbes’s early and late texts
endurance and, 19, 209–​10, 217–​18n.40, compared, 110–​11
217–​30, 218n.43, 219–​20n.46, hope versus, 167n.57, 225, 249
219–​20n.49, 220–​21n.53, 220–​21n.54 insecurity and, 249
nature and, 178–​79 intolerance and, 261n.63
from own nature versus, 180–​81 obedience and deference and, 112
 Index 291

potestas and, 167n.57, 167–​68 freedom. See also free expression and
power blocs and, 260–​61, 261n.63 religion; free will; non-​slave states
slave state and, 229–​30 cities and, 261–​62
slave states and, 171–​72, 229–​30 democracies and, 173–​74
sovereign’s motivation and, 122–​23 equality and virtue and, 220–​21
state instability and, 224–​25, ethics and endurance and, 215,
224–​25n.64 220–​22, 232–​33
superstition and, 171–​72 five types of, 222, 224, 232–​33
tyrants and, 171–​72 good state and, 195–​96n.39
unity and, 170–​71n.68 hope or fear and, 225–​27
federations, 86n.16 radical versus constitutional
feminism, 105–​6n.63 interpretations and, 165
Feuer, Lewis Samuel, 151n.7, 215n.36, repressive egalitarianism and, 228n.72
252n.47 sovereign power and,
Fishkin, James S., 256 195–​96n.39, 224–​25
fishman’s uprising sui juris status and, 215, 217,
“flatten onto the multitude,” 245, 245n.28 221–​22, 228–​30
flattery, 101 free expression and religion
Florence, 215, 239n.5 enduring state and, 155–​56, 172–​73
flourishing collective life, 232–​33 enduring state sui juris and, 222
foreign combat, 229–​30n.75 ethical development and, 228–​29n.73
foreign enemies, 137 gradualism and, 191
formal and informal collectivities, 56–​57, juridical egalitarianism and, 131–​32
92–​93. See also associations; unions oppression and, 173–​74
forms, substantial, 34–​35, 49n.69, 50–​51 repressive egalitarianism and, 228
fragility. See endurance (stability) or Spinoza and Hobbes compared,
fragility (instability) of states 152, 154–​55
fragmentation (disempowerment) Freeman, Jo, 105–​6n.63
of allegiance, 57 free will
associations and, 59, 75, 80–​84, 83–​ Aquinas and, 39–​40
84n.11, 86, 86n.14, 133 defined, 178
collective power and, 78–​79 degeneracy and, 68–​69
hierarchy and, 79 determinate causes versus, 233–​34
Hobbes’s early and late texts compared, duties and, 109
78–​79, 82–​83, 86, 86n.14 Hobbes on, 15–​16, 39–​40,
Hobbes’s early texts and, 56, 57 39–​40n.45, 178–​79
Hobbes’s late texts and, 56 natural bodies versus, 37
hope of success and, 75–​76, 112 oppression and, 16–​17
individual power and, 208 possibility of resistance and, 233–​34
multitude and, 100 potestas and, 29–​30
power blocs and, 235–​36 relational power and, 49
private power and, 138–​39 scholasticism and, 16–​17, 32–​33, 37
repressive egalitarianism and, 16, 128–​ sovereign potestas and, 68–​69
29, 141, 148, 236–​37 Spinoza and, 16–​17, 177–​78
scholarship and, 82–​83n.9 unappealing regimes and, 16–​17
sedition and, 74, 75 French constitutional plebiscites,
franchise, 230–​31n.81 7–​8, 11–​12
fraud, 251–​52 French democracy, 95–​96
292 Index

friendship, 29–​30, 30n.12, 43–​44, 228 favour of, 29

Fronde, 132–​33n.49 mechanistic explanation versus, 94–​95
Frost, Samantha, 80n.2, 87, 88n.19, 88n.20, natural bodies and, 94
89–​90, 89–​90n.24, 105, 117–​18, potentia and, 178, 178n.8
140n.65 power of producing effects and, 178
fundamental principles of states. See as substance, 176–​77
also equality and egalitarianism; good birth, 42
laws, civil goodness. See also appealing/​unappealing
aristocracies and, 260n.62 regimes; degeneracy
assemblies and, 257, 262 endurance and, 217–​18n.40
cities of unequal power and, 240–​41n.14 of multitude, 18, 19–​20, 199, 208
indignation and, 260 good rule/​poor rule, 120, 121–​23,
informal pressure on state and, 262 121–​22n.25. See also appealing/​
jus naturale versus civile and, 222–​ unappealing regimes
23n.57, 243–​44n.23 goods, individual, 224
overviews, 238–​39, 259–​60 goodwill, 209
power of the people and, 242–​44, government, Hobbesian. See also
256–​58, 262 institutional structures
representative democracy and, 245–​46 administration of (administratio
sovereign power and, 222–​23 gubernandi), 64
delegated, 97–​98
Gandhi, 233–​34, 233–​34n.88 interests of, 98n.45
Garrett, Don, 179–​80n.12, 206–​8n.16 mixed-​form, 69
Garsten, Bryan, 139–​40n.64 potentia and, 64
Gatens, Moira, 230–​31n.80 sovereignty versus, 6–​8n.13, 6–​7, 16,
Genghis Khan, 170–​71n.69 96, 98n.45
glory government, Spinozist
collectivities and, 82 power blocs compared, 168–​69n.61
desire for, 110–​11 self-​destructive behavior and, 189–​92
duty and, 110–​11n.5 gradualism, 189, 190–​91n.26,
Hobbes’s early and late texts 191n.27, 191–​92
compared, 110–​11 greed, 168–​69
honour and, 30–​31n.14, 80–​82 groups. See associations
justifiable, 30–​31 ‘groupthink,’ 248
as motivation, 80–​82, 80–​82n.4, guilds, 260n.62
80–​82n.7
power and, 82n.8 Hampton, Jean, 116–​17n.16, 121,
reason and, 38 122–​23n.27
rightful, 80–​82 happiness, 119–​20
vain-​, 80–​82 Hapsburg Naples, 215n.36
glory, false, 43–​44 Hardt, Michael, 8–​9, 159–​60n.23, 211–​
God. See also divine law; faith; religion and 12n.24, 212n.25, 214n.29, 215n.34,
churches 245n.29
acting from own nature and, 190–​91 harm, 168–​69
action and, 178 Harrington, James, 131
actions, gradualism of, 190–​91 hatred, 168–​69n.60, 170–​71n.68, 182, 187,
deference to sovereign and, 116 213–​14, 219–​20, 249–​50
duty and obligation and, 109n.1 heavenly bodies, 37, 38
 Index 293

Hebrew republic, 170–​71, 170–​71n.68, juridical politics and, 25, 56, 155–​56
197–​98, 197–​98n.42, 213–​14, mechanistic explanations and, 50
213–​14n.28, 214n.32, 219–​20, natural objects and, 36–​37n.30
219–​20n.46, 230, 245–​46 overview, 15–​16
Hegel, G.W.F., 8–​9n.20 periodization and, 27
helpfulness, 63, 87–​88 power and, 28, 28n.7, 106
hierarchy. See also domination; inequality; power of the people and, 78–​79,
oligarchy and elites; power blocs; 107, 155–​56
submission; voluntary servitude secondary powers and, 29,
associations and, 59–​60, 85–​86, 41–​46, 42n.52
85–​86n.13 sleeping sovereign and, 16
compounded, 202n.3 state of nature and, 83–​86
dependency and, 19 unions and, 80
federations and, 86n.16 Hobbes’s early texts. See also The Elements
fragmented equality and, 79 of Law; juridical politics (collective
individual power and, 206–​8 power and state)
joyful submission to, 171–​72 faculties and, 28–​32, 30–​31n.14
Marxism and, 10–​11 fragmented equality and, 57
multitude and, 19–​20, 167–​68 juridical entitlement and, 78–​79
overview, 106 multitude and, 58
potestas and, 166–​68 normativity and, 70
power blocs and, 202 on peace, 76–​77
sages and, 167–​68 power of the people and, 28–​40, 49–​54,
slavery and, 16–​17 56, 73–​74
sui juris, 201–​2n.1 sovereign robustness and, 43–​51
Hindess, Barry, 47–​48n.62, 54, 88, 88n.19, Hobbes’s late texts. See also Leviathan
88n.20, 98–​99 (Hobbes); new natural and civil
history, cyclical understanding of, science (Hobbes); relationality (social
240–​41n.12 body) (social context)
Hobbes, Thomas. See also absolutism, collective potentia and, 155–​56,
Hobbesian; Hobbes’s early and 155–​56n.14
late texts compared; multitude, oligarchic power blocs and, 165–​66
Hobbesian; sleeping sovereign; Tuck, potentia and, 107, 155–​56
Richard power of the people and, 41–​54
influence on Spinoza, 150n.3, Hoekstra, Kinch, 90–​91, 96n.42,
150n.4, 150–​51 105–​6n.63, 122–​23n.27, 128–​29n.36,
influences on, 32–​33n.18 133–​35, 138
overviews, 4, 12–​16, 19–​21 Holland, population and, 255n.54
Spinoza compared, 150–​51, homeostasis. See also endurance (stability)
151n.5, 151n.7 or fragility (instability) of states;
Hobbes’s early and late texts compared. self-​regulation
See also De Cive (Hobbes); Leviathan active power and, 210n.23
(Hobbes) civil law and, 240–​41
associations and, 80, 82–​83n.10, degrees of, 209–​10n.22, 210n.23
83–​84n.11 external causes and, 211
degeneracy and, 53–​54 five freedoms and, 232–​33
honour and, 45n.58 human malleability and, 223–​24
informal collective power and, 78–​79 institutional structures and, 63
294 Index

homeostasis (cont.) normatively appealing, 165–​67

overviews, 204, 210 overview, 157–​58
power of the people and, 242–​44, 258 potentia and, 169
relationality and, 211 potestas and, 161
social movement opposed to oppressive power of the people and, 236
state and, 211–​14 radical interpretations of Spinoza and,
states sui juris and, 222–​25 16–​17, 202
sui juris status and, 18, 209–​10, 239 shared ends and, 80–​82
honour. See also deference social movements and, 202–​3
The Elements of Law on, 42, 43–​44 virtue and, 165–​66
glory and, 30–​31n.14, 80–​82 hostile relations, 16–​17
Hobbes’s early and late texts compared, human behaviour, actual, 37, 38–​39,
42, 45n.58 40, 42n.53, 88nn.20, 223–​25. See
inequality and, 134–​35 also motivation; individual power,
Leviathan on, 44–​46 Hobbesian; individual power,
power and, 42, 43–​44n.55, 85 Spinozist
secondary powers and, 29–​30, human beings, 37–​38, 38n.41. See also
29–​30n.10, 44–​46 action (agency); human behaviour,
as sign of power, 42 actual; power of the people;
sovereign potentia and, 103 individual power
hope human bodies, 50, 66
fear versus, 167n.57, 225, 249 human development, 228–​29
insecurity and, 249 humanism, 32–​33n.18, 45n.58
multitude and, 167–​68 human nature, 1–​2, 28, 36–​37,
obedience and, 246–​47n.35 36–​37n.32, 224
power blocs and, 168–​69 human rights, 258
slave states and, 225, 229–​30 hylomorphic metaphysics, 33–​34, 35–​36,
strategic versus affective, 168–​69n.60 50. See also scholasticism
hope of success. See also power blocs ‘hyperpotentia’ of the masses, 202–​3n.6
collective power and, 115
egalitarianism and, 230–​31, 232–​33 ideals, 206–​8n.20
fragmentation and, 75, 112 idleness, 100n.50
private power and, 138 imperium, 62, 62–​63n.6, 64, 106, 192. See
sovereign power and, 115, 120 also dominium; sovereign power,
subject’s duty and, 133–​34 Spinozist (imperium)
horizontal and equal aggregations. See imprudent government, 191, 191n.27
also equality and egalitarianism; incentives and threats, 110–​12, 121–​23.
fragmentation See also punishment
as abstraction, 166–​67 independence, 133, 193–​94, 221
civic institutions and, 201 Independents, magisterial, 130
conflict and, 16–​17 Indian struggle against Britain, 233–​34
continuum of, 167–​68 indigenous people, 10–​11
Hobbes’s early and late views compared, indignation or resentment
83–​84, 83–​84n.11, 166–​67, 202 aristocracies and, 260n.62
Hobbes’s early view of, 59–​60, associations and, 59
59–​60nn.2–​3 fundamental laws of monarchy and, 260
imperfect virtue and, 165 individual power and, 258–​59
multitude and, 18, 169 inequality and, 134–​35
 Index 295

mass, 260 ethical development of, 183n.17

minorities and, 231–​32 ethics and, 16–​17
normative ambivalence of, 260 freedom and, 224–​25
repressive egalitarianism and, 228 hierarchy and, 206–​8
slave states and, 225–​26 Hobbes compared, 241–​42
Spanish Jews and, 230n.79 multitude and, 157–​58
stability and, 225n.65, 225 nature of, 204, 205–​6
states non-​sui juris and, 224–​25 overviews, 204–​8, 238–​39
tyranny and, 10 plenary power and, 183–​84
individual power, Hobbesian. See potentia agendi and, 186–​87, 206–​8
also associations; competition; potentia agendi/​operandi and, 118,
dependency; faculties; human 120n.22, 133–​34, 142, 196n.40
behaviour, actual; innate powers of potentia and, 205–​6, 205–​6n.13,
human being; multitude, Hobbesian; 205–​6n.15, 205–​6n.16
obedience and disobedience; potentia operandi and, 182–​84
scholasticism; state of nature; radical liberals and, 162
submission relationality and, 238–​39
associations and, 80–​82 right and, 186–​87, 193n.29
bodies and, 87–​88 rules of nature of, 186–​87
desire for, 84 scholasticism and, 204–​5n.11, 205–​8
diversity and, 228 sovereign power and, 16–​17, 157–​58,
efficacy and, 84–​85 159, 193–​94n.33, 205–​6, 208
hierarchy and, 106 substance and, 179–​80n.12, 204
innate in human beings, 35 sui juris status and, 189, 193n.29,
institutions and, 165 193–​96, 193–​94n.33, 197, 204–​8, 209,
oligarchy and, 258–​59 238n.2, 241–​42
overviews, 26–​28, 49, 50, 78, 80–​83, 106 weak, 204
relationality and, 26–​28, 32, indoctrination. See education and rhetoric
41–​49, 87–​88 inequality. See also appealing/​unappealing
right (jus) and, 161 regimes; dependency; exclusions;
self-​preservation and, 65–​66 hierarchy; minorities; oligarchy and
Spinoza compared, 241–​42 elites; power blocs; women
state potestas compared, 161 aristocracy and, 249–​50
unions and, 59–​60 associations and, 86
individual power, Spinozist. See also democratic institutions and, 136–​37
dependency; ethical development; desire and, 134–​35
homeostasis; human behaviour, elites and, 134–​35
actual; multitude, Spinozist; endurance and, 240–​41n.14
participation; persons; potentia ethics and endurance and, 230–​33
(concrete, individual power); Hobbesian potentia and, 15–​16
potentia agendi; rules of nature of motivations of sovereign and, 122–​23n.27
each individual; sui juris multitude and, 105–​6, 105–​6n.63
active power and, 204, 204n.9 plebiscites and, 250–​51
assembly’s will and, 243–​44n.23 rebellion and, 122–​23
causality and, 204–​5n.11 relationality and, 15–​16, 134–​35
collective power and, 157–​58 resentment and, 105, 133–​34
collective right and, 157–​58 spontaneous groups and, 86
emergent, 204–​5 unions and, 75
296 Index

‘infinite web of other things,’ 218n.43 popular influence and, 127–​28, 242n.22
informal versus formal power, 92–​93. potentia and, 13, 26
See also associations; associations power of the people and, 1, 4, 7–​8, 13–​14,
(informal collectivities); unions; 20, 147, 237–​38, 242n.22, 252–​62
unions (unio) (formal collectivities) radical interpretations and, 25, 86, 147,
in foro interno versus in foro externo, 245n.28, 245–​46
109–​10n.4 roles of, 47–​48n.62
ingenium (mentality), 228 roles within, 47–​48n.62
inherence, 179–​80n.12 sovereign right and, 192
injustice, 16–​17 sovereign’s duties compared, 127
innate powers of human beings, 35 special interests and, 13–​14
insecurity, 248–​49 Spinoza and Hobbes compared, 4, 13–​14,
instinct, 49n.69 151n.5, 258
institutional structures and organizational Spinoza on, 4
form. See also assemblies; Spinozist democracy and, 252–​62
autoregulation; civic strengthening; subjects sui juris and, 201–​2n.1
counsellors; education and submission and, 61n.4
rhetoric; fundamental principles by union versus by acquisition, 62n.5
of states; homeostasis; laws, vice and, 69, 213
civil; participation; repressive virtue and, 213, 237–​38, 246–​47
egalitarianism insubordination, 57, 73–​74, 75, 76–​77,
collectivities and, 13–​14, 61, 203 79–​80, 109, 113, 119, 140, 208. See
colloquial power and, 188 also obedience and disobedience;
commonwealth and, 127–​28 power blocs; sedition, rebellions,
competition and, 248 uprisings, and insurgencies;
constitutional interpretations and, subordination
165–​66, 169–​70, 206–​8n.16, insurgencies. See sedition, rebellions,
244–​45n.26 uprisings, and insurgencies
democracy and, 246–​47n.35 internal attitudes, 70n.28. See also duty
democratic endurance and, 216n.43 and obligation, Hobbesian
egalitarianism and, 19, 213–​14 internal dissent, 9
enduring external force and, 218–​20 internet, 254n.50
equality and virtue and, 165 ‘in themselves,’ 206–​8n.16
formal collectivities and, 61 irascibility, 17–​18, 182–​83
Hebrew republic and, 213–​14 Ireland, 256
Hobbes’s absolutism and, 128–​29 irrationality, human, 88nn.20, 110–​11,
individual power and, 165 141, 187–​88, 194–​95
integration and, 219–​21 Israel, Jonathan I., 152n.9
liberal and radical interpretations of Israel and Palestine, 219–​20, 219–​20n.51
Spinoza and, 17–​18
minorities and, 248–​49 Jelles, letter to (Spinoza), 152–​53,
multitude and, 169–​70, 201–​2, 202n.3, 153n.10, 155–​56
204, 213–​14, 216, 242n.22, 245, Johnston, David, 39–​40n.47, 98–​99n.48,
245n.28 113n.9, 113–​15, 114n.11
multitude sui juris and, 18 joy, 168–​69n.60, 183n.17, 191n.27, 250
Negri’s anti-​institutionalism and, judge, learned and uncorrupt, 46–​47
245n.28, 245–​46 juridical politics (collectivities and state).
overviews, 13, 25, 262 See also absolutism, Hobbesian;
plebiscites versus, 248–​49 obedience and disobedience;
 Index 297

‘the political problem’; potestas labour and commerce, 119. See also
(authorized power); right (jus), working class
Hobbesian; unions (unio) lawlessness, 197
allegiance and, 79–​80 laws, civil. See also fundamental principles
commentators and, 91n.28 of states; obedience and disobedience
commonwealth’s efficacy and, 78–​79 coercive, 67
Dutch scholars and, 153n.10 democracy and, 246–​47n.35
duties and, 109 dependency and, 241–​42
The Elements of Law and, 64 endurance and, 240–​41
equality and, 131–​32 fundamental law and, 243–​44n.23
formal collectivities and, 61–​65, 68, king’s will and, 243–​44n.23
72–​73, 75–​77 natural laws and, 70–​71, 243–​44n.23
Hobbes’s early and late texts compared, pseudo-​, 67
78–​79, 107 sovereign rights and, 71–​72
informal collectives and, 26, 27–​29, Spinoza and Hobbes compared, 152
74–​75, 76 what ought to be done versus, 214
multitudes and, 73, 76 ‘Laws are silent among arms,’ 38–​39n.43
overviews, 25–​27, 29, 35, 65–​66 laws of own nature alone, 181
popular agency and, 73–​74 laziness, 249–​50, 253
potentia and, 26–​27, 62–​64, 106, 107 Lazzeri, Christian, 168–​69n.60, 206–​8n.16
potestas and, 56, 62–​63, 64–​65, Lee, Daniel, 7n.14, 128–​29n.36
89–​90, 97 Leijenhorst, Cees, 32–​33n.18, 35–​36n.28
potestas/​potentia compared, 106, Leviathan (Hobbes). See also Hobbes’s
108, 235–​36 early and late texts compared;
power of the people and, 107, 155–​56 Hobbes’s early texts; Hobbes’s
private power and, 137–​38 late texts
relational power and, 54 aggregation/​fragmentation and, 86
right (jus) versus, 153–​54 association and, 83–​84n.11
roles within political structure and, on associations, 80–​91
47–​48n.62 audience of, 114–​15
scholasticism and, 35–​43 on bodies, natural and political, 93–​94
sedition and, 74–​76 on Cain and Abel story, 118n.19
self-​preservation and, 109 on church democracy versus absolute
sovereign robustness and, 43–​51 sovereignty, 129–​33
sovereign’s potentia and, 96 on church structure, 129–​30
Spinoza and, 150–​51 on cousellors, 123
Spinoza and Hobbes democracy and, 25n.1
compared, 150–​51 on education, 113–​14
Spinoza on, 155–​56 education and, 118
jus civile, 222–​23n.57 on elite inequality, 134–​35
jus naturale, 222–​23n.57 on eminence, 46–​48
English revolution and, 131
Kavka, Gregory S., 42n.53, 88nn.20 external motivation of subjects and,
knowledge, 38n.38, 46–​47, 46–​47n.61, 112, 113–​14
59–​60n.3. See also new natural and on individual power, 80–​83
civil science (Hobbes) internalization of duty and, 113–​14
potentia operandi and, 150–​51
La Boétie, Étienne de, 171–​73, 228, 229–​30, potestas/​potentia compared, 42, 88, 90
233–​34, 259n.61 on power, 53–​54
298 Index

Leviathan (Hobbes) (cont.) hierarchy and, 171–​72

“power after power” and, 82 on Hobbes, 8–​9
on power blocs, 132–​33 Italian autonomous, 10–​11n.24
on power of the people, 135 on liberal constitutions, 136–​37n.59
relational power and, 41–​48, MacPherson’s interpretation and,
47–​48n.62, 82 155–​56n.14
repressive egalitarianism and, 141–​42 multitude and, 13–​14
rhetoric and, 118 Negri and, 8–​9n.20, 161, 161n.33
secondary powers and, 29, 42–​43, 44–​46 overview, 5
on seditious associations, 101 on power of working class, 202–​3n.5
on self-​preservation, 168–​69n.60 Spinoza and, 8–​9, 8–​9n.20, 10–​11
sleeping sovereign and, 95–​96 Masaniello uprising, 215n.36
on sovereign power, 88–​91, 141–​42 mass deliberative assemblies, 6–​7
sovereign’s duties and, 119, 120n.22 mass uprisings, 20
Spinoza and, 150 masters. See enslaved people; servants
state of nature and, 93n.31 materialist monism, 103n.56
liberality, 42, 47–​48 Matheron, Alexandre
Liberty and Necessity (Hobbes), 39–​40n.45 on biological preservation, 168–​69n.60
liberty of subjects, 119 on dependency, 240–​41
life of the mind, 227, 238n.2 on enduring states sui juris, 222–​23
Locke, John, 131 on exclusions, 240–​41n.10
long-​term perspective, 184–​85n.21, 188. on externally caused instability,
See also endurance (stability) or 217–​18n.40, 219–​20n.46
fragility (instability) of states on Genghis Khan, 170–​71n.69
Lord, Beth, 241–​42n.18 on Hebrew republic’s stability, 219–​20
Lordon, Frédéric, 171–​72, 229–​30 on multitude’s inequality, 201–​2n.40
love, 168–​69n.60, 214n.29 Negri and, 8–​9n.20
loyalty, 163–​64, 170–​71, 229–​30n.75. See on servants and women, 240–​41n.15
also allegiance on simplest bodies, 204–​5n.10
sovereign’s self-​interest, 169n.62
Machiavelli, 150n.3, 215, 224–​25n.64, on stable regimes, 164–​65n.51,
239n.5, 249–​50, 256–​57, 262 171–​72n.77, 187n.23
Macpherson, Crawford B., 42, 47–​48, 56, on state active and passive power,
82–​84, 83–​84n.11, 155–​56n.14 196n.40
majorities and minorities, repression of, on Turkish state, 225–​26
170–​71, 173–​74. See also exclusions; matter, 50–​51
minorities; oppression May, Larry, 85–​86n.13, 104n.58,
majority decisions, 58–​59 122–​23n.27
Malcolm, Noel, 94 means, contention over, 59
manipulation, 217, 248–​49n.37, 251–​52 mechanistic explanation. See also billiard
Martel, James R., 105n.62, 128, 130, balls example
135n.55, 135–​36 Anti-​White and, 36–​37n.30
Marxism, neo-​(European). See also Negri, Hobbes’s early and late texts compared,
Antonio 15–​16, 49, 50
autonomism and, 17–​18n.40 Hobbes’s early texts and, 65–​66
collective power and, 55–​56 potentia and, 157
formal power of the people versus powers versus, 54
oligarchic groups and, 136–​37n.59 priority for right and, 94n.36
 Index 299

scholasticism versus, 15–​16, 91–​92 monism, materialist, 103n.56

Short Tract and, 49 monopolies, 100–​1
Melamed, Yitzhak Y., 184–​85, 184–​85n.18, Montag, Warren, 101n.53, 202–​3n.6, 205–​
188, 197, 217–​18, 219–​20n.51 6n.15, 240–​41n.10, 246–​47n.34
mentality, 228 moral psychology, Hobbesian, 109–​11,
mercenary army example, 184–​85, 113–​14. See also incentives and
184–​85n.20, 188 threats; motivations for duty;
Mersenne, Marin, 35–​36 motivations for forming associations
Mersenne circle, 35–​36, 49, 91–​92 motion, 35, 37, 50–​52, 53, 238–​39. See
‘might is right,’ 184–​85 also causality; characteristic ratio;
migrants, 239n.9 mechanistic explanation
the military, 119, 229–​30n.75 motivations for duty. See also common
military service, refusal of, 47–​48n.62 good; counsellors; education and
minorities, 63–​64, 170–​71, 170–​71n.68, rhetoric; incentives and threats;
173–​74, 230–​32, 230–​31n.80, punishment
248–​49, 250. See also enslaved Hobbes’s early and late texts compared,
people; equality and egalitarianism; 121n.23
migrants; scapegoating internal and external, 109–​10
mixed constitutionalism, 5–​6, 138 overviews, 40n.47, 109
mode of production, 214n.29 of sovereign, 118–​27, 122–​23n.27
modes, 178–​79, 182–​83 of subjects, 108–​18, 109–​10n.4
Moller Okin, Susan, 121n.23, 126–​27 motivations for forming associations, 10,
monarchy 80–​83, 80–​82n.5. See also indignation
democracy and, 9–​11, 127–​28, 160, or resentment
173–​74, 235–​36, 239n.8, 260n.62 Multitude (Hardt and Negri), 8–​9
direct appointment of sovereign multitude, Hobbesian. See also
and, 62n.5 collectivities; hierarchy; oligarchy
Dutch republic and, 151 and elites; power of the people; social
endurance and, 247, 261 movements; state of nature
families and masters compared, 59–​60 agency and, 127–​28
Hobbes on, 5–​6 animal, 59
king’s will and, 243–​44n.23 collective power and, 58
liberal, 164–​65n.51 commonwealths and, 61
nepotism and, 121–​22, 121–​22n.25, De Cive and, 58–​59
121–​22n.26 durable political potestas and, 161
non-​representative democracy and, 254 effects and, 19–​20
power blocs and, 254–​56 equality and, 131–​32
power of the people and, 239n.7 goodness of, 18, 19–​20, 199
power of the people versus will of the Hobbes on, 56
people and, 242–​43 Hobbes’s early texts and, 58
representative democracy and, 245–​46 inequality and, 105–​6
repressive egalitarianism and, inner oligarchy and, 18, 149–​50, 236
128–​29n.36 Marxism and, 10–​11, 13–​14
sleeping sovereign and, 6–​7 Negri on, 160–​61
sovereign’s will and, 242–​43 normativity and, 16–​17
Spinoza and Hobbes compared, 151n.5 opposition to state and, 18
sui juris status and, 239n.8 overview, 56
universities and churches and, 140 personation and, 135–​36
300 Index

multitude, Hobbesian (cont.) potestas/​potentia compared, 16n.33

potentia and, 8–​9, 10, 14–​15, 128–​29, power of the people and, 10, 147,
143, 148 152, 238
potestas/​potentia compared, 58–​59 radical interpretations and, 9, 11–​12,
power of the people and, 56 147–​48, 166–​67, 201–​3, 208, 245
rebellion and, 73 revolt against oppression and, 245–​46
romance of, 13–​14 ruler and, 215
sedition and, 76 sages and, 167–​68
social movements and, 8–​9 self-​organization of, 214
sovereign and, 127–​28 slave and non-​slave states and, 227
sovereign’s potestas and, 148 social movements and, 203, 204, 208
Spinozist compared, 148–​49, 151n.5, sovereign power and, 127–​28, 147–​48,
159–​61, 166–​67 163–​64, 196, 201–​2, 206–​8n.16, 208,
multitude, Spinozist. See also collectivities 238, 243–​44n.23
and collective power; ethics and state potestas and, 202
efficacy; hierarchy; horizontal states and, 196, 208
and equal aggregations; oligarchy states compared, 238
and elites; social movements; state state’s fundamental principle and,
of nature 243–​44n.23
action and, 161n.32 sui juris status and, 18, 201–​2, 203, 204,
active power and, 201–​2, 206–​8n.16 208, 216
agency and, 160 tolerance and respect and, 245–​46
democracy and, 9–​10, 147–​48, 245, unappealing forms of, 214n.29, 250–​51
245n.29 vertical relations and, 167–​68
democratic endurance and, 250–​51
democratic self-​organization and, 214 Nadler, Stephen, 36–​37n.31
elites versus, 208, 208n.21 names, 50–​51
‘enemies’ of, 212n.25 Naples, 215n.36
ethics and efficacy and, 16–​17 natural bodies (objects). See also
goodness and, 201–​2, 208 characteristic ratio; mechanistic
historical configuration versus explanation; motion; new natural and
ontological foundation of, 160–​62 civil science (Hobbes); persons; rocks
historical shape versus ontological (stones) examples
foundation of, 160–​62 causality and, 178–​79, 182
Hobbesian compared, 148–​49, 151n.5, causal networks and, 177–​78
159–​61, 166–​67 God and, 94
individual power and, 157–​58, 208 Hobbes’s early and late texts compared,
inner oligarchy and, 166–​67 36–​37n.30, 93–​94
institutions and, 169–​70, 201–​2, 202n.3, Hobbes’s human science and, 37,
204, 213–​14, 216, 242n.22, 245, 39–​40n.47, 40
245n.28 humans versus, 50, 66
‘mind’ of, 243–​44n.23 individual power and, 87–​88
Negri’s interpretation, 161, 161n.32 mechanistic explanation and,
overviews, 9–​10, 143, 148–​49 94–​95, 178–​79
the people versus, 161 normativity and, 36–​37, 39–​40, 94
popular uprisings and, 215 political bodies versus, 93–​94
potentia and, 157–​58, 159–​60, 163–​64, potentia and, 37
206–​8, 206–​8n.16, 238 potentiae of, 15–​16
potestas and, 160–​61, 169 scholasticism and, 34–​35, 37
 Index 301

natural laws on tendencies to actualize, 206–​8n.16

civil laws and, 70–​71, 243–​44n.23 “two individuals joining together” and,
commonwealths and, 70–​71, 107n.2 167n.54
covenants and, 89–​90 valorizing struggle and, 211–​12n.24,
divergence from, 70n.28 242n.22
duty and obligation and, 109 on working class, 203n.5
equality and, 133–​34 neoliberalism, 171–​72, 229–​30
Hobbes’s early and late texts nepotism, 121–​22, 121–​22n.25,
compared, 26–​27 121–​22n.26, 249–​50
moral ends and, 38 nesting, 204–​5, 204–​5n.10
normativity and, 38–​40, 70 new natural and civil science (Hobbes).
obedience and, 115 See also causality; juridical politics
potestas and, 66, 67 (collectivities and state); mechanistic
reason and, 188, 201 explanation; motivation; natural
scholasticism and, 66–​67 bodies; natural laws; political
security and, 70–​71 bodies; political power, Hobbesian;
self-​preservation and, 40, 109 scholasticism
state of nature versus commonwealth Anti-​White and, 49n.65
and, 38–​39, 70–​71 ‘autonomy thesis’ and, 94n.36
tendencies versus, 34 causality versus power and, 52n.76
natural science. See new natural and civil collectivities and, 93
science (Hobbes); scholasticism geometrical conception of, 103n.56
natura naturans versus natura naturata, Hobbes’s early and late texts compared,
177, 178, 182 35–​36n.29, 94, 117
nature, 36–​37, 178–​79 natural objects versus humans and, 50
nature’s indifference. See ethics and normativity and, 38–​40, 39–​40n.47, 68,
endurance 93n.33, 94
Negri, Antonio on Spinoza overviews, 50, 91–​93
action of multitude and, 161n.32 potentia and, 13, 108
anti-​institutionalism and, power of the people and, 127–​29
245n.28, 245–​46 powers and, 53–​54
condemnation of enemies and, scholasticism and, 39–​40n.47, 50,
214n.29 53–​54n.79
on conflictual institutions, 215 scholasticism’s natural bodies and, 40
democracy of the multitude and, social order and, 103n.56
245n.29 sovereign rights and, 89–​90n.24, 119
on democratically unappealing newspapers, 113–​14
collective forms of multitude, 214n.29 nobility. See oligarchy and elites
on direct democracy, 253 non-​juridical collective formations. See
‘enemies’ of multitude and, 212n.25 associations (societas) (informal
on horizontal structure of collectivities); state of nature
multitude, 169 non-​sectarianism, 216n.43
Marxism and, 8–​9n.20, 161, 161n.33, non-​slave states, 227, 228–​30
202–​3n.5 normativity. See also appealing/​
on multitude, 160–​61, 169, 250–​51 unappealing regimes; ethics and
overviews, 8–​9, 12 efficacy; ethics and endurance; virtue
on potestas, 160–​61, 205–​6 action and, 38–​39
potestas/​potentia compared, 163 Curley on political power and,
on social movements, 5, 11–​12, 202–​3 175–​76n.18
302 Index

normativity (cont.) potestas and, 73

degeneracy and, 68–​69 potestas/​potentia compared, 67
efficacy and, 72–​73 promise to obey/​not to resist and, 61
The Elements of Law and, 68 reason and, 246–​47n.35
free will and, 37 refusal to comply and, 71
Hobbes’es new natural science and, 40, relational power and, 46, 116
41, 50, 93n.33, 94 repressive egalitarianism and, 139–​40
Hobbesian rights and, 94 right of state and, 193–​94n.33
Hobbes’s early and late texts compared, rights of sovereign and, 89–​90n.24
26–​27, 36–​37 as secondary power
Hobbes’s science and, 39–​40n.47 (Leviathan), 44–​45
human action and, 37 security and, 64n.13
internalization of duties and, 112 of one slave, 63–​64n.11
multitude and, 19–​20 sovereign authority and, 89–​90
natural bodies and, 36–​37, 39–​40, 94 sovereign power and, 61, 61n.4, 71,
natural law and, 38–​40, 70 89–​90n.24, 90–​91, 90–​91n.27, 102
political bodies and, 94 sovereign’s duty and, 122–​23n.27
political versus ethical, 187 sovereign’s effectiveness and, 62–​63, 73
politics versus metaphysics and, 189 sovereign’s poor rule and, 120
power of bodies and, 36–​37 sui juris status and, 193–​94n.33
relationality and, 157 threats and, 112
scholasticism and, 14–​15, 16–​17, 32–​33, occult qualities, 49n.69
37, 65–​66, 68n.24 oligarchy and elites. See also aristocracy;
sovereignty’s potestas and, 67 democracy’s perverse effects;
sui juris status and, 193 dependency; fragmentation
tyrants and uprisings and, 105n.60 (disempowerment); hierarchy;
honour; patronage; power blocs;
obedience and disobedience. See also private advantage and self-​interest;
absolutism, Hobbesian; allegiance; private power; riches (wealth)
duty and obligation; insubordination; assemblies and, 119, 248–​49, 258
motivation; punishment; sedition, collectivities and, 148
rebellions, uprisings, and colloquial power and, 188
insurgencies conflict and, 100n.50, 101n.54
allegiance and, 102–​3 constitutional plebiscites and, 7–​8
assemblies and, 97–​98 counsel and, 124
against better judgement, 225 democracies and, 235–​36
covenant and, 63 democracy and, 2
divine law and, 243n.24 direct democracy and, 253
education and rhetoric and, 140 education and, 140
The Elements of Law on, 43–​44 endurance and, 199
Leviathan on, 132–​33 equality/​inequality and, 134–​35
natural law and, 71 fear of masses and, 197
of one slave, 63–​64n.11 Hobbes’s early and late texts compared,
overview, 63–​64 78–​79, 80
person of the commonwealth Hobbes’s readership and, 118, 118n.19
and, 94–​95 Hobbes versus Spinoza on, 19
‘the political problem’ and, 115 informal competitive, 26
potentia/​potestas and, 90–​91 informal power and, 258–​62
 Index 303

inner, 18, 149–​50, 166–​67, 169–​70, 199 order, 197–​98n.42

Leviathan on, 132–​33 organizational forms. See institutional
multitude and, 128–​29, 208, 214 structures and organizational form
plebiscites and, 7–​8, 240–​41, ‘ought implies can,’ 39–​40, 39–​40n.45
243–​44, 262 outsiders, 249–​50
potentia and, 115
power of the people and, 13–​14, 20, Palestine and Israel, 219–​20, 219–​20n.51
105–​6, 135–​36, 160, 253–​56, 262 pandering, 103
rebellion and, 122–​23 parliamentary democracies, 1, 125, 126,
repressive egalitarianism and, 107–​8, 132–​33, 136–​37. See also Cavalier
128–​29, 132–​33 Parliament (1661)
rhetoric and, 118n.19 participation. See also disengagement;
Richelieu and, 132–​33n.49 plebiscites (voting); social
right to press counsel and, 132–​33 movements
Singapore and, 141–​42, 141–​42n.67 aristocracy and, 249–​50, 253
sovereign potestas and, 108, 262 enduring state sui juris and, 222
sovereign’s duty and, 127 freedom and, 222
Spinoza and Hobbes compared, monarch and aristocracy and, 239n.7
236–​37, 262 Negri’s anti-​institutionalism and, 245
Spinoza on, 143 ‘the political problem’ and, 199
state-​sector employment and, power of the people and, 19, 148–​49
141–​42n.67 repressive egalitarianism and, 228–​29
unappealing, 15–​16, 79–​80 Spinozist power of the people
vice and, 213 and, 236–​37
voting power and, 240–​41 stability and, 164–​65, 170–​71, 199
Online Direct Democracy (Australia), states sui juris and, 230–​31, 232–​33
254n.50 sui juris status and, 217, 238
Operation Coldstore (Singapore), passions. See also autoregulation; desire or
233–​34n.88 appetite
opportunism, 1–​2 action and, 180–​81
oppression. See also appealing/​ animals and, 59
unappealing regimes; free expression common ends and, 59
and religion; repression of majorities control of, 210
and minorities; tyranny and tyrants; as drives versus contextually
wicked rule determined, 53–​54n.79
containing informal oligarchy external causes and, 180–​81
and, 13–​14 institutions and, 246–​47
homeostasis and, 63–​64 internal structure of regime and, 9–​10
indignation and, 225 joyful, 183n.17
multitude, Spinozist and, 169, 245–​46 multitude and, 169
possibility of resistance and, 233–​34 oligarchy and, 19
repressive egalitarianism and, 228–​29 power to produce effects and, 183–​84
scholasticism and, 16–​17 reason and, 38
sedition and, 74n.32, 159 social life and, 250
social movement’s stability and, 216 passivity. See causes, adequate and
sovereign’s duties and, 119 inadequate (active or passive)
sovereign’s rights and, 173–​74 paternalism, 170–​71, 219–​20
stability and, 164–​65 patriotism, 184–​85n.20
304 Index

patronage. See also deference; favour anti-​institutionalism and, 4

assemblies and, 125–​26, 248 common good and, 246–​47
charity versus, 209 competition and, 251–​52
cooperation and, 59–​60n.3 compulsory, 258, 258n.60
desire for power and, 84 constitutional interpretations and,
disagreements and, 100n.50 7–​8, 98
envy and disagreement and, 84–​85 cynical shaping of, 136–​37n.61
help for client and, 63 deliberation and, 6–​7, 137, 256
horizontality and, 59–​60n.3 Hobbes and, 11–​12
inequality and, 134–​35 inequality and, 250–​51
potentia and, 13 informed populace and, 125–​26n.31
syndic insulation from, 257–​58 institutions versus, 248–​49
peace. See also security and safety; non-​secret, 240–​41n.15
sedition, rebellions, uprisings, and oligarchy and, 7–​8, 240–​41, 243–​44, 262
insurgencies; war online, 254n.50
covenants and, 89–​90 overviews, 4, 147, 262
doctrinal disagreement and, 76 perverse effects and, 20
education and rhetoric and, 114 power blocs and, 128–​29, 254, 254n.50
‘the political problem’ and, 139–​40 power of the people and, 1–​3, 6–​7,
potestas and, 89–​90 20–​21, 55–​56, 95–​96, 107–​8, 136–​37,
slave states and, 226 136–​37n.61, 174, 198, 199, 237–​38,
sovereign and, 70–​71, 73, 119–​20 243–​44, 244–​45n.25, 262
unjust regime and, 142–​43 radical interpretations and, 16, 20, 55–​
the people. See also assemblies; common 56, 199, 202–​3
ends; common good; multitude, relationality and, 19–​20
Hobbesian; multitude, Spinozist; repressive egalitarianism and, 128–​29
persons; power of the people sleeping sovereign and, 7–​8, 25–​28, 98
as counsellors, 124, 125–​26n.31 Spinozist democracy and, 246–​47
multitude versus, 161 Tuck on, 7–​8, 11–​12, 16, 98n.46, 128–​29
perfection and endurance, 218n.43 US Constitution and, 7–​8
personation, 89n.22, 89–​90, pluralism, 2
127–​28, 135–​36 politeness, 43–​44
persons, 94–​95. See also individual power, political bodies, 68n.24, 93–​94,
Hobbesian; individual power, 197–​98n.42. See also assemblies;
Spinozist counsellors; juridical politics;
persuasiveness, 29–​30 parliamentary democracies; political
Pettit, Philip, 109–​10n.3, 133 power, Hobbesian; political power,
pilfering, 71 Spinozist; sovereign power
plants, 37, 176–​77 political leaders, 2–​3, 96n.42,
pleasure/​displeasure, 41n.48, 80–​82, 122–​23, 257–​59
80–​82n.5 political power, Hobbesian, 26, 66, 152. See
plebeians, 213 also juridical politics (collectivities
plebiscites (voting). See also American and state); potentia (of state); potestas;
constitutional plebiscites; Brexit; right (jus), Hobbesian
direct versus representative political power, Spinozist. See also
democracy; districting, electoral; absolutism, Spinozist; potentia agendi
franchise; participation; ‘the political (power of acting); potentia operandi
problem’; sortition (power of producing effects);
 Index 305

power of the people; right (power); sleeping democratic sovereign

sovereign power (Spinozist) and, 98–​99
active power and, 217–​18n.39 sovereign power and, 16, 98–​99
ethics and, 18–​19, 184–​85, 187, 189, sovereign’s duties and, 142
232–​33n.84 Spinoza and Hobbes compared, 173–​74
Hobbes compared, 152 states sui juris and, 222–​23, 239
overview, 149–​50 subject’s duty and, 118
potentia operandi and agendi unions and, 88–​91
and, 184–​85 political science, Hobbesian. See new
relational power and, 209 natural and civil science (Hobbes)
right and, 192 Political Treatise (Spinoza). See also
self-​destructive behavior and, 189–​92 mercenary army example
‘the political problem.’ See also commercial aristocracy and, 252n.47
democracy’s perverse effects; on constraint of rulers, 197–​98n.42
endurance (stability) or fragility on democracy, 150n.2, 173–​74, 237
(instability) of states; oligarchy, inner; on durable tyrannies, 170–​71
power blocs; private advantage and ethics and endurance and, 216–​17
self-​interest; sedition, rebellions, and Ethics compared, 151
insurgencies individual sui juris and, 196
assemblies and, 173–​74 institutions and, 245–​46
associations and, 80–​88 multitude and, 9–​10, 159–​60
common good and, 105 on multitudes, 157–​58
counsellors and, 124–​25, 126–​27 overviews, 150, 237
defined, 15–​16 potestas/​potentia compared, 169
democracies and, 173–​74 on power, 184–​85
democracy and, 126 on right, 175–​76, 198
disobedience and, 73, 98–​99, 115 right to power gradualism and, 191–​92
effective capacity and, 98–​99 Spinoza’s death and, 150n.2
ethically appealing regimes on sui juris status, 193
and, 224–​25 on sui juris status and potestas,
ethics and efficacy and, 17–​18, 167–​68n.58
165–​74, 198 political unity, 170–​71n.68
Hobbes’s early and late texts compared, ‘politics of permanent revolution,’
79, 80–​91, 109–​10 245–​46n.34
Hobbes’s late texts and, 98–​106 popular will, 242–​44, 243–​44n.23, 252. See
multitude sui juris and, 18 also power of the people
overviews, 15–​16, 18–​19, 57, 73, population, 119
79–​80, 98–​99, 106, 108, 109, 148, 198, positionality of power and, 28, 31–​32,
199, 235–​36 46–​48, 86
parliaments and, 102–​3n.55 possibility, 53, 53n.77
participation and, 199 potentia. See potentia agendi (power
peace and, 139–​40 of acting); potestas and potentia
potentia and, 18, 79–​82, 107 compared; power of the people;
potestas/​potentia and, 115, 127, 139–​40 power of producing effects (potentia
potestas/​potentia compared, 98–​99, 106, operandi); sovereign power
108, 161 (Spinozist); individual power,
relational power and, 82–​88 Hobbesian; individual power,
scholasticism and, 91–​98 Spinozist
306 Index

potentia agendi (power of acting). See deterministic single-​substance

also causality from own nature; metaphysics and, 179–​80
causes, adequate and inadequate durability of, 199, 217–​18
(active or passive); conatus (striving) efficient, 51, 178–​79n.11
(perseverance); power of producing entire, 183–​84
effects (potentia operandi); sui juris Ethics and, 179–​80
status (control of own right) ethics or rationality and, 182–​83n.16
active versus passive and, 180–​81 external supports and, 183n.17
actual effects and, 206–​8, 206–​8n.17 faculties and, 29, 42
adequacy of causation and, 180 free will versus, 233–​34
endurance and, 191–​92, 215 God and, 177
ethics and, 184–​85n.18 Hobbesian natural science and, 51–​54
Hobbesian potentia compared, 239 Hobbesian power compared, 18, 149–​
homeostasis and, 210n.23 51, 183–​84, 188, 206–​8n.17
individual and state compared, 17–​18 Hobbes’s early texts and, 65
individual power and, 186–​87, 204, immanent, 177
204n.9, 206–​8 individual power and, 84–​85, 204,
overviews, 175–​76, 217–​18 204n.9, 204–​5n.11
passive power and, 180 infinite web of others things and,
perfect, 210n.23 218n.43
political power and, 217–​18n.39 juridical authority and, 78–​79
potentia operandi compared, 17–​18, multitude and, 19–​20, 238
175–​84, 186–​87, 189, 190–​91, natural bodies and, 182
196n.40, 198, 206–​8, 206–​8n.19 normativity and, 182–​83n.16
power of other things and, 187–​88 obedience and, 67
power of the people and, 176 overviews, 91–​92, 175–​76, 182–​84,
relationality and, 209 198, 217–​18
right and, 187, 219–​20 of political systems, 262
scholarship and, 184–​85n.18 potentia agendi compared, 17–​18, 175–​
tendency to express itself and, 84, 186–​87, 189, 190–​91, 198, 206–​8,
206–​8n.16 206–​8n.19
virtue and, 175, 182 potentia and, 16–​17, 107,
potentia operandi (power of producing 163–​64, 237–​38
effects). See also action (agency); potentia operandi and, 175–​76
causes and effects; conatus (striving) potentia operandi versus potentia agendi
(perseverance); endurance (stability) and, 17–​18
or fragility (instability); ethics and power versus, 52n.76
efficacy; normativity; possibility; relationality and, 13–​14
potentia agendi (power of acting); relational power and, 46
power, colloquial; power of scholarship on, 182–​83n.16
producing effects, Hobbesian scholasticism and, 35, 49, 53, 67
action compared, 178 secondary powers and, 36–​37
adequate/​inadequate causes and, 182–​ security and, 157
83, 184, 187 sedition and, 75
allegiance and, 48 sleeping sovereign and, 16
blame and punishment and, 39–​40n.45 sovereign power and, 98–​99, 163–​64,
collective power and, 19, 165–​66 196, 238
colloquial power and, 185–​88 sovereign’s potestas and, 62–​63, 64
 Index 307

Spinoza and Hobbes compared, 157 power, active, Aristotelian, 34–​35

Spinoza on, 148–​49 power, active, Cartesian, 178–​79
Spinoza’s potentia and, 16–​17 power, active, Hobbesian, 510, 52–​53,
Spinozist political power and, 184–​98 178–​79n.11
Spinozist right (power) and, 16–​18, power, active, Spinozist. See causes,
186–​88, 187n.23, 190 adequate and inadequate (active or
sui juris status and, 175–​76, 189–​98 passive); potentia agendi (power of
uncaused, 177 acting)
‘violent,’ 37 “power after power,” 82
virtue and, 179–​80, 181–​82 power blocs. See also conflict; ‘the
potestas (authorized power). See also political problem’; private power;
covenants; juridical politics sedition, rebellions, uprisings, and
(collectivities and state); obedience insurgencies
and disobedience; political power; aristocracy and, 255–​56n.56
‘the political problem’; potestas assemblies and, 125, 136–​37,
and potentia compared; right (jus); 250n.39, 254–​56
sovereign power, Hobbesian (summa Brexit and, 137
potestas) buying off, 122–​23
‘authority’ and ‘power’ and, 62–​63 common good and, 235–​36, 261–​62
as collective potentia (Spinoza), 167n.56 compounded, 202–​3
common good versus rule’s interest counsellors and, 136–​37
and, 71–​72 democracies and, 173
constraint of, 197–​98n.42 egalitarianism and, 261
Hobbesian, 8–​9, 26, 32–​33, 61, 65–​66, endurance and, 120, 235–​36
72, 88–​89 fear and, 260–​61, 261n.63
overviews, 62–​63, 147–​48 fragmentation and, 235–​36
Spinoza and Hobbes compared, 202 government compared, 168–​69n.61
Spinoza’s early and late texts compared, hierarchy and, 202
192, 197–​98n.42 Hobbes’s early and late views
Thomist, 66–​70 compared, 166–​67
potestas and potentia compared. See also individual power and, 260–​61
associations (informal collectivities); inequality and, 134–​35
collectivities and collective power; Leviathan on, 132–​33
sovereign power; unions (unio) obedience and, 140
(formal collectivities) oligarchy and, 215
Hobbes’s early and late texts compared, overview, 120
14–​16, 26–​28, 27n.3, 64–​65, 89n.22, plebiscites and, 254, 254n.50
90, 96, 97–​98, 104, 106, 107, 235–​36 ‘the political problem’ and, 199
radical democratic interpretations and, potestas and, 168–​69
8–​9, 96, 158, 159–​63, 163n.43, 165–​ power of the people and, 135–​36,
66, 169, 202–​3 135–​36n.56, 235–​36
Spinoza and Hobbes compared, 8–​9, repressive egalitarianism, 128–​29
12–​13, 14–​15, 147–​48, 151–​57, social movements and, 214
154n.13, 165–​69, 167n.56, 239 sovereign’s authority and, 120
power, 14–​15. See also action (agency); sovereign’s potentia/​potestas
causes and effects; potentia; potestas; and, 126–​27
power of the people Spinoza and Hobbes compared, 18,
power, absolute. See absolutism 168–​69, 260–​61
308 Index

power, colloquial, 184–​85, 188 power of producing effects, Spinozist.

power, desire for, 80–​82, 84–​85, 110–​11 See potentia operandi (power of
power, ‘fable’ of, 88 producing effects); individual power,
power, generative, 29–​30 Spinozist
power, individual. See individual power, power, signs of, 29–​30n.11, 42
Hobbesian; individual power, power-​to and power-​over, 85–​86n.12,
Spinozist 167n.57
power, instrumental, 41–​42 praise, 29–​30n.10
power, materialist, 88n.19 pride, 133–​34
power of the people (popular will) prior temporal moment, 53
(will of the people) (popularity). private advantage and self-​interest. See
See also constituent power; also ambition and ambitious men;
contemporary lessons; democracy; corruption; oligarchy; oligarchy and
dependency; multitude, Hobbesian; elites; private power
multitude, Spinozist; plebiscites assemblies and, 249
(voting); potentia; potestas; power; association and, 80–​82
sedition, rebellions, uprisings and common good and, 173–​74
insurgencies; social movements; democracy and, 250–​51
individual power, Hobbesian; desire for power versus, 82
individual power, Spinozist domination and, 80–​82
criterion of, 20 of government, 98n.45
defined, 4, 13, 20–​21 Hobbes’s early and late texts
democracy and, 2–​3 compared, 110–​11
expressed popular will versus, 242–​44, individual versus collective, 229–​30n.74
243–​44n.23, 252 as motivation for association, 82
Hobbesian, 13, 41–​54, 56, 73–​74, 78–​79, public right and, 213–​14, 246–​47
105n.62, 106, 107, 155–​56 reason and, 188
as incoherent, 2–​3, 251–​52 of sovereign, 71–​72, 94–​95, 98n.45,
overviews, 1–​2, 12, 20–​21, 25–​28, 56, 121n.23, 121–​23, 169n.62
78–​79, 107, 147–​48, 149–​50, 175, Spinozist democracy and, 246–​47
199, 239, 262 war and, 80–​82
potestas/​potentia compared, 78, private power. See also oligarchy and elites;
202–​3n.6 power blocs; private advantage and
prepolitical, 199 self-​interest; religion and churches
sovereign power and, 6–​8, 13–​14, 61–​ emergent associations and, 131–​32
62, 74, 78–​79, 97–​98, 103, 138, 152, fragmentation and, 138–​39
160, 242–​44, 252, 262 mixed constitutions and, 138
Spinoza and Hobbes compared, 4–​12, neutralising, 140n.65
13, 147–​49, 152, 153–​54, 165–​66, power of the people and, 137–​38
234, 236–​38, 252, 262 repressive egalitarianism and,
Spinozist, 10, 19, 237–​44, 252–​62 16, 137–​38
tendency to increase of, 242n.22 sedition and, 140
power, plenary, 51, 52–​54, 87–​88, productive forces, 202–​3
183–​84 proletariat, 10–​11, 202–​3. See also
power of producing effects, Hobbesian, working class
52–​54, 149–​51, 183–​84, 188, 206–​ promise to obey/​not to resist, 61
8n.17. See also causes and effects; property law, 119
individual power, Hobbesian proportionality, 222n.56
 Index 309

prosperity, 119–​20 multitude and, 9–​10, 143, 147–​48, 201–​3,

prudence and imprudence, 191–​92 208, 245
pseudo-​, 69 multitude’s inner oligarchy and,
pseudo-​laws, 67 166–​67, 201–​2
pulchrum/​pulchritudo, 41n.48 overviews, 4, 25, 147, 160, 236–​37n.1
punishment. See also afterlife; obedience potentia and, 6–​7, 162, 206–​8n.16,
and disobedience 217–​18n.41
in afterlife, 110–​11n.5 potestas and, 89–​90n.13
death versus, 70–​71n.29 potestas/​potentia compared, 8–​9, 158,
duty and, 111–​12 159–​63, 163n.43, 165–​66, 169,
education and rhetoric versus, 113–​14 202–​3, 205–​6
efficacy of, 39–​40n.45 power of the people and, 2–​3, 4, 7–​8,
free will and, 39–​40n.45 13–​14, 147
of mad persons, 195 repressive egalitarianism and, 128–​29
natural law and, 70–​71 scholasticism and, 18, 205–​8
obedience and, 63–​64, 71, 98–​99, 101–​4 Spinoza and Hobbes compared,
overview, 106 5–​12, 13–​14
right (jus) and, 106 Spinoza’s individual power and, 205–​6
social context and, 45–​46 state’s potentia and, 159, 162, 205–​6
sovereign right and, 111–​12 theorists on, 236–​37n.1
sovereign’s effective power and, 98–​99 tyranny and, 16–​17, 18–​19, 218n.41
troublesome associations and, 101–​4 radical egalitarianism, 127–​28
unions and, 82 radical liberal interpretations, 159,
‘pyramidical structure of capture of 159n.17, 162–​63. See also Barbone,
desire,’ 171–​72 Stephen
ratio of motion and rest, 210
Qudrat, Maryam, 141 Rawls, John, 220–​21, 220–​21n53,
223n.58
race, 46–​47, 212n.25, 215n.36. See also reason. See also irrationality, human; sage
enslaved people example
radical democratic interpretations. adequate ideas and, 181n.15
See also American public law affects versus, 173–​74
tradition; constitutional (liberal) assemblies and, 125
interpretations; direct versus collectivities and, 247, 248
representative democracy; Marxism common good and, 241–​42n.20
(neo-​) (European); Negri, Antonio; contentious words and, 59
plebiscites; social movements corruption assemblies and, 248
anti-​institutionalism and, 245–​46 counsellors and, 126
assemblies and, 244–​45 democracy versus aristocratic forms
constitutional interpretations and, 164–​65n.51
compared, 149–​50, 158, 163–​65, desirable human life and, 227
169–​70, 199, 217n.41, 236–​37n.1, 245 equality and, 241–​42n.20
on endurance of tyrants, 217–​18n.41 Hobbes’s early and late texts
goodness of multitude and, 208 compared, 113n.9
Hobbes and, 13–​14, 127–​29, hostile relations and, 16–​17
136–​37, 160 human behaviour and, 42n.53
individual power and, 9, 162 human essence and, 50–​51
institutions and, 25, 86 human striving and, 206–​8n.16
310 Index

reason (cont.) oligarchic power blocs and, 202

as innate capacity versus achievement, overviews, 79, 106
53–​54n.79, 206–​8 passions and, 250
nature and, 188, 201 political power and, 209
obedience and, 246–​47n.35 positionality and, 31–​32
producing many effects and, potentia and, 107, 157
182–​83n.16 power of the people and, 13, 105,
self-​determination and, 193–​94 105n.62, 106
sin versus, 37 scholasticism and, 32–​40, 50, 91–​92
sovereignty and, 72 secondary powers and, 29, 47–​48
sui juris status and, 167, 197 seditious associations and, 93
rebellion. See sedition, rebellions, self-​regulation and, 181n.15
uprisings, and insurgencies social body, 205–​6
refusal of military service, 47–​48n.62 sovereign power and, 45–​46,
relationality (social body) (social 88, 205–​6
context), 237–​38, 249–​50. See also Spinoza and Hobbes compared,
civic strengthening; collectivities 148–​49, 175–​76, 206–​8n.17,
and collective power; dependency; 238–​39, 241–​42
equality and egalitarianism; juridical Spinozist potentia operandi
politics (collectivities and state); compared, 175–​76
power, plenary sui juris status and, 203, 209
action and, 53–​54 virtue and, 220
active power and, 53–​54, 209 religion and churches. See also afterlife;
causality and, 13–​14 Cain and Abel; divine law; faith;
conflict and, 100n.50 false prophets; free expression and
constitutional interpretations religion; God; Hebrew republic;
and, 169–​70 superstition; Ten Commandments
desire for power and, 82, 84–​85 absolutism and, 129–​33
durability and, 82–​83 colloquial power and, 188
efficacy and, 19–​20 democracy and, 129–​30
The Elements of Law and, 46, 47–​48 education and, 113, 117–​18
elite power and, 101n.54 English Civil War and, 102
eminence and, 46–​48 European wars of, 220–​21
equality/​inequality and, 26, excess docility and, 141
132–​33, 134–​35 Hobbesian sovereignty and, 118n.20
as faculties, 28–​32 indoctrination and, 132–​33
glory and, 30–​31 insubordination and, 76–​77, 113
Hobbes’s departure from scholasticism juridical egalitarianism and, 220–​21
and, 49–​54 Leviathan and, 129–​30, 132–​33
Hobbes’s early and late texts compared, monarchies and, 140
25–​28, 46–​48, 47–​48n.62, 78–​79, 82–​ political authority versus, 170–​71n.68
86, 86n.14, 157 power blocks and, 168–​69, 261–​62
Hobbes’s late texts and, 41–​48, 53–​54, religious minorities, 231–​32n.82
82–​83, 84–​85, 87–​88, 202 repressive egalitarianism and, 107–​8
homeostasis and, 63–​211 social movements and, 63–​64
individual power and, 26–​28, 32, 41–​48, sovereignty and, 118n.20
87–​88, 238–​39 Spinoza and Hobbes compared,
normativity and, 182–​83n.16 151n.5
obedience and, 116 superstition and, 161
 Index 311

threat by, 100–​1, 100–​1n.51 unions and, 135n.55, 135–​38

toleration of, 173 repressive state (Spinoza), 184–​85, 191.
troublesome associations and, 100–​1 See also repressive egalitarianism
visionaries and, 168–​69 (Hobbes)
wars of, 220–​21 republican tradition, 184–​85n.20. See also
‘Reliqua Desiderantur’ (Negri), 242n.22 Machiavelli
representation, political, 10–​11, reputation, 29–​30, 44, 45–​46, 85, 101, 102,
128–​29, 235–​36, 251–​52n.45. 134–​35, 140
See also assemblies; direct versus resentment. See indignation or resentment
representative democracy; sortition respect, 122–​23n.27, 125, 245–​46
repression of majorities and minorities, responsibility, individual, 230n.78
173–​74. See also minorities; revenge, 38
oppression; women revolution, politics of permanent, 242n.21
repressive egalitarianism. See rhetoric, Hobbes’s, 118
also education and rhetoric; Richelieu, 132–​33n.49
fragmentation (disempowerment) riches (wealth). See also aristocracy;
absolutism and, 128–​33 monopolies; oligarchy and elites;
assemblies and, 132–​33, 136–​38 private power
associations and, 128–​35 assemblies and, 248
civic strengthening versus, 13, associations and, 258–​59
149–​50, 236–​37 counsellors and, 124
common good and, 235–​36 desire for, 80–​82n.5
democracy, 107–​8, 128–​29n.36 envy and, 30–​31n.14
duties of sovereign and, 118–​20, 127 liberality and, 47–​48
education and, 113–​18 patronage and, 84
as enduring state sui juris, 228–​29 power and, 29–​30, 42, 131–​32
equality and, 128–​29, 133–​35 reason versus, 173–​74
freedom and, 228n.72 sedition and, 140
free expression and, 228 right (jus), Hobbesian. See also duty and
harnessing of desires and, 228 obligation, Hobbesian; juridical
informal pressures and, 258–​59 politics (collectivities and state);
institutional forms and, 127–​29, 135–​38 political power, Hobbesian; sedition,
mixed constitutions and, 138 rebellions, and insurgencies;
motivation of sovereign and, sovereign power (Hobbesian)
109–​10, 121–​27 absolutism and, 64n.14
motivation of subjects and, 108–​18 capacity versus, 88, 88n.19, 98–​99
multitude’s potentia and, 128–​29 covenant establishing sovereignty
obedience and, 139–​40 and, 5–​6
oppression and, 228–​29 Hobbesian political science and, 66, 68,
overviews, 16, 107–​8, 109, 143, 155–​56 89–​90n.24, 94
participation and, 228–​29 as normative, 94
‘the political problem’ and, 16 overview, 5–​6
potestas/​potentia compared, 147–​48 potentia and, 64n.14
power of the people and, 26, 127–​28, potestas and, 62–​63, 91n.28
135–​39, 148 power versus capacity and, 88
Singapore and, 141–​42, 141–​42n.67 pretence of, 74, 75, 120
sovereign power and, 107–​8 repressive egalitarianism and, 127–​28,
success of, 139–​40n.64, 139–​43, 140n.65 132–​33, 135, 138, 139–​40
as sui juris, 239 scholarship on, 91n.28
312 Index

right (jus) (cont.) Rome, 215, 239n.5

slavery and, 63–​64n.11 Rosenthal, Michael A.
sovereign and, 63, 114 on democratic forms of state,
Spinozist right compared, 89–​90n.24, 164–​65n.51
152–​56, 154n.12, 154n.13, 157–​58 on fear, ambition, and intolerance,
war and, 93n.31, 139–​40, 227 261n.63
right (power), Spinozist. See also being on Hebrew republic example,
alterius juris status (subject to 170–​71n.67
another’s right); antinomianism; on individual versus collective goods,
political power, Spinozist; slave states; 224–​25, 229–​30
sui juris status (control of own right); on political ideals, 206–​8n.20
individual power, Spinozist on potentia, 184–​85
active power and, 187, 219–​20 on resentment, 228
actual occurrence and, 187–​88, 190, on right and power, 164–​65
200, 206–​8 on successful revolution, 242n.21
adequate/​inadequate power and, 187 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 5–​6, 125–​26n.31,
colloquial ‘power’ and, 186, 188 133, 137
ethics and efficacy and, 164–​65, 170–​71, royal marriage example, 197
184–​85, 184–​85n.20, 191n.27 rules of nature of each individual,
ethics and endurance and, 233–​34 186–​87, 188
Hobbesian right compared, 89–​90n.24,
152–​56, 154n.12, 154n.13, 157–​58 sadness, 191n.27, 250
human nature and, 223–​24 safety. See security and safety
multitude and, 160, 217 sage example, 167–​68, 194, 195–​96, 209,
overviews, 149–​50, 185, 198, 200 210n.23, 216
potentia and, 153–​54 sand clump, 209–​10n.22
potentia operandi and, 17–​18, 186–​88, The Savage Anomaly (Negri), 8–​9, 202–​3
190, 200 scapegoating, 231–​32n.82
private advantage and, 213–​14, 246–​47 Schaffer, Simon, 103n.56
sovereignty and, 186–​87, 188, 189, 192, Schapin, Steven, 103n.56
193–​94n.33, 196, 225 Schmittian leftists, 163, 215, 258–​59
what ought to be done versus, 214 scholarship on history of the period,
right and wrong, 59 21–​22, 21–​22nn.37–​38, 100–​1n.52,
right of nature, 187, 188 114–​15, 131n.42, 182–​83n.16, 189.
rights. See also equality and egalitarianism; See also English Civil War
sovereign power scholasticism. See also causes and effects;
potentia and, 64n.14 conatus (striving) (perseverance);
potestas and, 62–​63 faculties; natural bodies; substances
state versus popular, 152 collectivities and, 91–​98
transfer of powers and, 9 conatus doctrine and, 206–​8n.16
well-​constituted commonwealth and, De Corpore on, 49, 49n.69
63n.9, 71–​72 Descartes and, 50
rocks (stones) examples, 35, 37, 40, Hobbesian new natural science and,
66, 176–​77, 178–​79n.10, 204, 15–​16, 49n.69, 50
209–​10n.22 Hobbes’s early and late texts compared,
roles, institutional, 47–​48n.62 26–​27, 35–​36n.29, 79, 91–​92
Roman private law, 65–​66n.15, mechanistic explanation versus,
89–​90n.23 15–​16, 91–​92
 Index 313

new natural and civil science efficacy and, 157

(Hobbes), 68n.24 ethically rich meaning of, 261n.63
normativity and, 16–​17 happiness and, 119–​20
oppression and, 16–​17 laws of nature and, 70–​71
overviews, 14–​15, 33–​34 overview, 157–​58n.15
potentia and, 14–​15, 32–​33, 67, 68, sage example and, 210n.23
96, 206–​8 sovereign’s duty and, 72, 118–​19
potestas and, 15–​16 sovereign’s effectiveness and, 73
power and, 50–​51 sovereign’s right (jus) and, 154–​55
power and act and, 96 submission and, 141
power of the people and, 32–​40 sui juris status and, 197
radical democratic Spinozists and, virtue of state and, 220
18, 205–​8 sedition, rebellions, uprisings, and
relational power and, 49–​54 insurgencies. See also English
science of commonwealth and, 68n.24 Civil War; hope of success;
Spinoza’s individual power and, 205–​6 insubordination; obedience and
Spinozist individual power and, disobedience; ‘the political problem’;
204–​5n.11, 205–​8 power blocs; social movements
tendencies to actualize and, 206–​8n.16 ambitious subjects and, 101, 119–​20
unactualized potentia and, 206–​8, assemblies and, 103, 132–​33
206–​8n.16 associations and, 74–​75, 94–​95, 101–​2
Schumpeter, Joseph A., 1–​3, 11–​12, 135–​ democracies and, 247
36, 216n.43, 251–​52, 254 education and, 115–​16, 117, 120
science. See new natural and civil science equality and, 133
(Hobbes); scholasticism execution and, 99–​100
science as power, 46–​47, 46–​47n.61 fundamental laws of monarchy and, 260
scientific and intellectual groups, Leviathan on, 131
100–​1n.52 as motivation for sovereign, 122–​23,
scientific revolution, 33–​34. See also 122–​23n.27
mechanistic explanation Negri and, 161
Scotland, 102 overview, Hobbesian, 74–​77, 74n.32, 93
secondary powers. See also allegiance; plebiscites and, 98n.45
positionality of power ‘the political problem’ and, 108
degeneracy and, 42–​44, 80–​82n.5 politics of permanent revolution and,
desire for, 80–​82n.5 202–​3n.6, 242n.21, 245–​46n.34
faculties and, 43–​44n.55, 44 power of the people and, 10, 97–​98,
Hobbes’s early and late texts compared, 149–​50, 199, 225
29, 41–​46, 42n.52 private power and, 140
human causality and, 36–​37 radical liberal interpreters on, 159
natural science and, 36–​37 right to, 98–​99n.48, 99–​100, 105n.60,
overviews, 28, 29–​31 122–​23, 122–​23n.27
relational, 47–​48 sovereign power and, 79–​80, 102, 104,
secularism, 152n.9 104n.57, 105n.60, 108, 120, 140, 215
security and safety sovereign’s duty and, 119–​20
assemblies and, 125–​26, 261–​62 tyrants and, 105, 105n.60
commonwealths and, 87 unions and, 100, 101
desire for power and, 84 seed examples, 35, 206–​8, 206–​8n.16
disobedience and, 64n.13 self-​defence, 109n.2
314 Index

self-​destructive behavior, 189–​92, Silverthorne, Michael, 64

190–​91n.26, 191n.27 Singapore, 141–​42, 233–​34n.88
self-​determination, rational, Singapore Referendum on Merger (1962),
193–​94, 238n.2 136–​37n.61
self-​preservation. See also defence; Skinner, Quentin, 89n.23, 118n.19
endurance (stability) or fragility slave states. See also enslaved people;
(instability) of states; security and Turkish despotism; voluntary
safety; self-​destructive behavior; servitude
‘survival’ versus ‘salvation’ enduring, 170–​71, 170–​71n.69,
as affect, 168–​69n.60 170–​71n.70
dependency and, 195–​96, 195–​96n.38 as enduring state sui juris, 222, 225–​30,
duties and obligations and, 109, 117 225–​26n.67, 225–​26n.68
education and, 116–​17 fear and, 171–​72, 229–​30
endurance and, 214 non-​slave regimes versus, 222
individual and collectivities and, 65–​66 right of, 227
laws of nature and, 38–​40, 66, 70, 109 scholarship of, 226–​27
Leviathan and, 168–​69n.60 sui juris, 227
nature versus, 188, 201 sleeping sovereign
reason and, 188 collectivities and, 57
sovereigns and, 71–​72 democracy and, 95–​98
of states, 240–​41 formal equality versus power blocs and,
self-​regulation. See also homeostasis; sage 136–​37, 136–​37n.58
example; serenity Hobbes’s early and late texts compared,
action-​guiding fictions and, 252–​53n.49 16, 78–​79, 95–​99
adequate causation and, 181n.15 plebiscites and, 6–​8, 55–​56, 98n.45
anger and, 218–​19 potestas and, 55–​56
civic strengthening and, 19, 252–​62 potestas/​potentia compared, 98–​99
direct democracy and, 245–​46 power and, 6, 78–​79
external causes and, 180–​81, 218–​19 power of the people and, 6–​7, 26, 55–​56,
institutions versus, 245–​46 78–​79, 137
political context and, 181n.15 social movements compared, 262
power of the people and, 252–​53 social body/​context. See relationality
social movements and, 216n.37 (social body) (social context)
Spinozist institutions and, 252–​62 social contract, 62–​63. See also covenants
sui juris status and, 209–​10 social contract (covenant),
Seneca, 16–​17, 18–​19, 154–​55 151n.5, 164–​65
serenity, 180–​81, 182. See also child with socialism, 251–​52n.45, 251–​52
blanket example; sage example social movements. See also endurance
servants, 100–​1, 103, 230–​31, 240–​41, of social movements; sedition,
240–​41nn.10–​15. See also women rebellions, and insurgencies
servitude, voluntary, 170–​72 acting from own nature, 209–​10
Sharp, Hasana, 216, 240–​41n.10 agency and, 216n.37
Short Tract (Hobbes), 27, 35–​36, 35–​ alteris juris, 203
36n.28, 36–​37n.31, 39–​40, 49. See anti-​institutionalism and, 4
also Hobbes’s early texts aristocracies and, 63–​64, 260n.62
Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph, 7 constitutional interpretations and, 202
signs of faculties, 42n.52 determinate causes of, 233–​34
signs of honor, 43–​44 equality and, 63, 202–​3
signs of power, 29–​30n.11, 42 flat, equal, and responsive, 208
 Index 315

homeostasis and, 63–​214 power, Hobbesian; potestas

horizontality of, 202–​3, 216 (authorized power); right (jus),
‘hyperpotentia’ of masses and, 202–​3n.6 Hobbesian; sleeping sovereign
institutional structures and, 63–​214 Hobbes’s early and late texts
just, 11–​12 compared, 14–​19, 96–​97, 155–​56,
multitude and, 203, 208 155–​56n.14, 187
multitude sui juris and, 203–​4, 208 opposition to, 18
Negri on, 11–​12 overviews, 9–​16, 26, 65, 67, 68,
oligarchy and, 259 69–​70, 73, 78, 88, 89–​90, 89n.22,
organizational design and, 4 89–​90n.23, 138
overviews, 147, 262 potentia and, 64, 65, 89n.22, 96,
partial, 2 106, 116
perverse effects and, 20 potentia/​potestas and, 88–​91, 96–​97,
potentia and, 8–​9 98–​99, 108, 126–​27, 154–​55
power blocs and, 214 Spinozist compared, 8–​9, 12–​18, 147–​48,
power of the people and, 2, 20, 148, 151–​57, 154n.13, 163–​64, 222–​23,
149–​50, 174, 198, 199, 237–​38, 235–​36, 237–​38, 239
242, 262 unitary sovereign and, 138
radical interpretations and, 5, 20, 161, well-​constituted, 26–​27n.2, 63, 63n.9,
199, 202–​3, 205–​6, 208 68, 71–​72
Schumpeter on, 216n.43 sovereign power, Spinozist (imperium).
sleeping sovereign compared, 262 See also democracy; endurance
sovereign power and, 216, 242 (stability) or fragility (instability)
Spinoza’s early and late texts and, of states; ethics and endurance
215n.36 (nature’s indifference); freedom
sui juris status and, 216n.37 (Spinoza); fundamental principles
social order, 103n.56, 196 of states; institutional structures and
social support, 110. See also external organizational form; political power,
causes; relationality (social body) Spinozist; power of the people; right
(social context) (power), Spinozist
solidarity, 215n.36, 230–​31, 249–​50 complex parts and, 222–​23
Sorell, Tom, 94n.36 counterpowers to, 236–​37
sortition, 19, 255nn.52–​55, 255–​56, Hobbesian compared, 8–​9, 12–​18,
255–​56n.56, 256n.59 147–​48, 151–​57, 154n.13, 163–​64,
souls, 176–​77 222–​23, 235–​36, 237–​38, 239
sovereign power. See collectivities opposition to, 215
and collective power; multitude, overviews, 16–​19, 149–​50, 205–​6,
Spinozist; ‘the political problem’; 205–​6n.13, 205–​6n.15,
potestas (authorized power); 205–​6n.16, 236–​37
sovereign power, Hobbesian (summa potentia agendi/​operandi and, 196n.40
potestas); sovereign power, Spinozist potentia and, 205–​6
(imperium) potentia operandi and, 196
sovereign power, Hobbesian (summa potentia/​potestas and, 158
potestas). See also collectivities and potestas and, 154–​55, 159–​60, 202
collective power; common good; Spinoza’s early and late texts compared,
covenants; democracy; duty and 192, 197–​98n.42
obligation, Hobbesian; government, summa potestas and, 192, 197–​98n.42
Hobbesian; institutional structures sovereign power, Thomist, 69, 70, 71–​72, 89
and organizational form; political Spanish Jews, 230n.79
316 Index

speaking truth to power, 248 on endurance and goodness,

speech, 59. See also free expression and 217–​18n.40
religion epistemic conditions for democracy
Spheres of Justice (Walzer), 63–​64 and, 252
Spinoza, Benedict de. See also civic on ethical development, 183n.17
strengthening; ethics and efficacy; on kinds of freedom, 229–​30n.74
ethics and endurance; Negri, on sage sui juris, 194, 195–​96
Antonio; political power, Spinozist; on securitas, 261n.63
potentia operandi (power of on Spinozist ethics and politics,
producing effects); sovereign power 232–​33n.84
(Spinozist) superstition and, 249
death of, 150n.2 on voting, 248–​49
father and, 10–​11n.22 stones (rocks) examples, 35, 37, 40,
Hobbes compared, 150–​51, 66, 176–​77, 178–​79n.10, 204,
151n.5, 151n.7 209–​10n.22
Hobbes’s influence on, 150n.3, Strauss, Leo, 45n.58, 94n.37
150n.4, 150–​51 striving conatus, 157–​58, 180
overviews, 4, 8–​12, 16–​19, 150, 151 stupid or barbarous population, 171–​72
Spragens, Thomas A., 35, 38n.41 subjective conception, 44
Sreedhar, Suzanne, 120n.22 subjects. See also duty and obligation,
stability. See endurance (stability) or Hobbesian; obedience and
fragility (instability) of states disobedience; plebiscites (voting);
state of nature. See also covenants; power of the people; individual
equality; fragmentation power, Hobbesian; individual power,
(disempowerment); multitude, Spinozist
Hobbesian; multitude, Spinozist acting against their better
associations and, 59, 82–​83n.10 judgement, 224–​25
democracy and, 157–​58 passivity and activity and, 196n.40
diversity of human ends state complexity and, 222–​23
and, 75 sui juris, 201–​2n.1
equality and, 59, 127–​28 submission. See also domination
Hobbes’s early and late texts compared, (dominion); enslaved people;
83–​86, 93n.31 families with children; hierarchy;
laws of nature and, 70 voluntary servitude
natural law and, 38–​39 associations and, 85
rights (jus) and, 152, 153–​54 education and, 115–​16
Spinoza and Hobbes compared, endurance and, 61n.4
152, 153–​54 formal collectivities and, 61, 61n.4
vertical dominions and horizontal illicit unions and, 75n.33
associations and, 59–​60n.2 religion and, 117–​18
states. See political power, Hobbesian; uncritical, 141
political power, Spinozist; sovereign subordination, 74–​75, 82, 123, 133. See
power also insubordination; oligarchy
status, 110, 125, 140. See also equality and and elites
egalitarianism; honour; oligarchy and substances
elites; patronage action (agency) and, 36–​37n.31,
Steinberg, Justin D. 178, 204
on absolutism, 197–​98n.42 active and passive, 35–​36
on divided hierarchy, 230–​31n.79 Aquinas on, 176–​77
 Index 317

cause and effect and, 35 having right versus, 149–​50

Hobbes on, 36–​37n.31, 49n.69, security and, 197
176–​77n.3 social movements and, 203, 216n.37
individual power and, 204 sovereign power and, 193, 196–​98, 225
inherence and, 179–​80n.12 Spinoza on potestas and, 167–​68n.58
potentia and, 176–​77 Spinozist power of the people and, 236–​37
scholastic versus mechanistic states and, 217–​18, 220–​21, 220–​21n53,
philosophies and, 176–​77n.3, 176–​84 222–​25, 238–​39n.4, 238–​39, 242
Spinoza on, 176–​77, 178–​79, virtue and, 193–​94, 217, 220
179–​80n.12, 204 summa potestas (sovereign power). See
substantial forms, 34–​35, 49n.69, 50–​51 sovereign power, Hobbesian (summa
success, hope of, 74, 75, 76, 139–​43 potestas)
sui juris status (control of own right). summum imperium, 62, 64n.14, 89n.22.
See also autoregulation; freedom See also absolutism, Hobbesian
(Spinoza); homeostasis; potentia superstition, 113, 113n.9, 161, 248–​49
agendi (power of acting); reason ‘survival’ versus ‘salvation,’ 171–​72n.73
active power and, 189, 193–​94, 196, 200, sycophants, 154–​55, 172–​73
201–​2, 209, 238–​39n.4 sympathy, 49n.69
aristocracy and, 239n.8 syndics, 257–​58, 260
collective power and, 19
conflict and, 239, 239n.5 table eating grass example, 223
defined, 193–​94 Tarlton, Charles D., 80n.2, 117–​18n.18
democracies and, 216n.43 taxes, 119, 135–​36n.56
egalitarianism and, 230–​31, 238 teaching of duties, 28n.8
endurance and, 215, 219–​20, 222–​23 techno-​optimism, 214n.29
ethics and, 17–​18 Ten Commandments, 116, 118
ethics and endurance and, 220–​21n.53 tendencies
freedom and, 215, 217, 222 to actualize, 206–​8n.16
gradualism and, 194–​96, 194–​95n.36 anti-​democratic, 11–​12 (see also
homeostasis and, 18, 239 power blocs)
indignation and, 224–​25 of collectives, 233–​34, 233–​34n.88
individuals and, 189, 193n.29, 193–​96, contrary, 37
197, 204–​8, 209, 238n.2, 241–​42 to democracy, 213, 230–​31n.81, 236
irrationality and, 194–​95 to increase in activity, 206–​8n.16
maximal for population, 221n.55 natural law versus, 34
multitude, 201–​3 scholastic potentia and, 176–​77
overviews, 17–​19, 149–​50, 175–​76, 193 toward horizontality, 202
participation and, 217, 238 unactualized potentia and, 206–​8n.16
perfectly, 210n.23 well-​ordered commonwealth and, 38
political exclusions and, 240–​41n.10 tennis player in a wheelbarrow, 126
political order versus individuals and, 189 theft, 71
‘the political problem’ and, 239 Theological-​Political Treatise (Spinoza)
potentia agendi and, 149–​50, 238–​39n.4 on constraint of rulers, 197–​98n.42
potestas and, 193–​94, 241–​42 constraint of rulers and, 197–​98n.42
potestas of others and, 167, 167–​68n.58 on democracies, 173–​74, 252n.47
potestas/​potentia compared, 239 on equality, 243–​44
reason and, 167 on free expression, 172–​73
relationality and, 209 Hobbes compared, 9, 150, 150n.2
right versus, 175–​76, 199, 217–​18 liberalism and, 159–​60
318 Index

Theological-Political Treatise (Spinoza) tyranny and tyrants. See also endurance

(cont.) (stability) or fragility (instability)
on multitudes, 157–​58 of states; Turkish despotism;
naivete and, 236–​37 wicked rule
non-​ideal endurance and, 170–​71 common good and, 105n.60, 259n.61
on obedience, 193–​94n.33 constitutional interpretations and,
overview, 150 172–​73, 217–​18
on power, 184–​85 ethics and efficacy and, 163–​65
on right and power, 189, 198 ethics and endurance and, 16–​17,
on right versus control of one’s 155–​56, 158, 165, 170–​71, 217–​18,
right, 175–​76 217–​18n.41, 226n.70
on slavery versus salvation, 171–​72 homeostasis and, 63
on sovereign’s power and right, 189 indignation and sedition and, 10
on state’s potentia agendi, 184–​85 majority, 10
on state’s right and active power, 191–​92 non-​ideal endurance and, 169–​73
summa potestas and, 192 potestas and, 67
thermostat example, 210 radical/​constitutional interpretations
tolerance, 216n.43, 220–​21, 245–​46, compared, 16–​17, 18–​19
261n.63 radical interpretations and, 218n.41
towns and cities, 100–​1, 136–​37n.62, right versus control of own right
170–​71, 197, 219–​20n.49, and, 217–​18
240–​41n.14, 261–​62 self-​interest and, 169n.62
transphobes, 212n.25 in Theological-​Political Treatise versus
trust of others, 43–​44, 215 Political Treatise, 226n.70
truth, 228 uprisings and, 105, 105n.60
Tuck, Richard. See also sleeping vice and, 69
sovereign
on constituent power, 6–​7n.13, 7 Ulysses example, 242–​43
on democracy, 6–​7, 130 understood through own nature alone,
on Hobbesian radical 206–​8n.16
democracy, 159–​60 unemployed people, 10–​11
on Hobbesian sovereignty, union organizing, 233–​34
11–​12, 62n.5 unions (unio) (formal collectivities).
on imperium, 62–​63n.6 See also collectivities and collective
overviews, 6–​8, 12 power; covenants
on plebiscites, 7–​8, 11–​12, 16, 98n.46, associations compared, 15–​16, 19, 56–​65,
128–​29 86, 92–​93
on power of the people, 12, characterized, 58
128–​29n.36, 143 De Cive on, 104n.57
on Sieyès, 7 Hobbes’s early and late texts
on sleeping democratic compared, 80, 90
sovereign, 95–​96 Hobbes’s late texts and, 88–​91
on sovereign democracy, 130 illicit, 75n.33, 75–​77
on sovereignty versus government, 96 individual power and, 205–​6
on United Kingdom, 6–​7n.13 institutions by union versus by
Turkish despotism, 170–​71, 225–​ acquisition and, 62n.5
26nn.66–​68, 225–​27, 229–​30 juridical politics and, 72–​73, 91–​92
“two individuals joining together” passage, Leviathan and, 88–​91
167n.54, 167n.57, 167–​69 majority decisions and, 58–​59
 Index 319

motivations for, 82 regimes and, 163–​64

overviews, 20, 61–​65 relationality and, 220
‘the political problem’ and, 80, 88–​91 security of state and, 220
positionality and, 86 slave states and, 227
potestas/​potentia compared, 61, 63–​91, 104 Spinozist state and, 16–​17
repressive egalitarianism and, 16 state and, 165
scholasticism and, 91–​92 state institutions and, 165
science and, 61 sui juris status and, 193–​94, 217, 220
sedition and, 100, 101 viziers, 6–​7
small, 63–​64n.11 voice of the people. See power of the
sovereignty and, 62–​63 people (popular will) (will of the
United Kingdom, 7–​8n.13 people) (popularity)
United Nations General Assembly, volition, 109–​10, 109–​10n.3
240–​41n.14 voluntary behavior, 109–​10n.3
United States, 240–​41n.14 voluntary servitude, 228, 228–​29n.73,
universal basic income (UBI), 63n.24 229–​30n.74, 229–​30n.76, 229–​30
universalism, 152n.9 voting. See plebiscites
universities, 117, 117n.17, 119, 140
uprisings. See sedition, rebellions, Walzer, Michael, 63–​64, 241–​42n.19
uprisings and insurgencies war. See also conquest; English Civil
War; peace
value, 44–​45 absolutism and, 108
vendettas, 182–​83 cooperation and, 220–​21
Venice, 249–​50 doctrinal disagreement and, 76–​77
Venice, sixteenth-​century, 230–​31n.80 domination and, 80–​82
vice, 69, 213. See also degeneracy equal faculties and, 86n.14
violence, 35, 37, 67, 212n.25. equality and, 133
See also war fragmentation and, 83–​84n.11
violent rule, 154–​55, 190n.25 internal dissent versus, 9
virtue. See also appealing/​unappealing political stability and, 219–​20
regimes; ethics and efficacy; ethics potestas and, 108
and endurance; normativity; potentia religious, 220–​21
agendi (power of acting) rights and, 93n.31, 108, 139–​40, 227
aristocracy and, 222n.56 tolerance and, 220–​21
causality from own nature and, 181 warmongers, 212n.25
characterized, 182 Warrender, Howard, 109n.1
degeneracy and, 69 Watkins, John W. N., 93n.33
endurance and, 234 wealth. See oligarchy and elites; riches
horizontal relations and, 165–​66 (wealth)
individual freedom and, 224–​25 Weinstein, Harvey, 218–​19n.45
institutional structures and, 213, wicked rule, 119–​20, 122–​23n.27, 155–​56,
237–​38, 246–​47 188. See also oppression; tyranny and
natural law and, 66 tyrants
overview, 165 will of the people. See power of the people
as potentia, 184–​85 Witt, Jan de, 151, 215n.36
potentia agendi and, 175, 182 women, 10–​11, 230–​31, 230–​31n.80,
potentia and, 16–​17, 157–​58 239, 240–​41, 240–​41nn.10–​15. See
power of acting and, 179–​80, 181–​82 also equality and egalitarianism;
private, 224–​25 minorities; servants
320 Index

working class, 171–​72, 202–​3n.5, ‘worst of the barbarians’ sign, 215n.36

215n.36. See also biopolitics of
labor; labour and commerce; Zagorin, Perez, 100–​1n.52, 127–​28n.33,
proletariat 131n.42, 132–​33n.49
worm in blood example, 218–​19 Zourabichvili, François, 214, 240–​41