Ethics and Efficacy

This chapter schematizes two broad interpretive approaches to Spinoza’s political philosophy, both of which agree that Spinoza’s concept of power as potentia combines efficacy and ethical direction. Supposedly, the distinctive contribution of Spinoza’s political philosophy is the idea of a concrete potentia of the popular multitude that constitutes a normatively appealing limit on sovereign power, a limit that juridical projections of potestas ignore at their peril. Radicals conceive popular power as a prepolitical possession of a virtuous multitude that tends to disrupt oppressive forms of politics; ‘constitutionalists’ claim that only political orders taking a good democratic form can endure. But against the sunny romanticism of these interpretations’ conceptions of popular power, the chapter poses three Hobbesian problems: the problem of the multitude’s inner oligarchy; the problem of nonideal endurance; and the problem of democracy’s perverse effects.

The Political Problem

This chapter argues that Hobbes’s late view of human collective power, unlike the early view, is able to grasp informal and emergent collective power. Hobbes’s later works, with their new relational conception of potentia, offer both theoretical resources to conceive informal collective power distinct from the state, and also analytical reasons to expect such power to be politically troubling. The ‘political problem’ emerges: in order to achieve the concrete power sufficient to uphold its absolute authority (potestas), the state needs to harness or tame the informal collective powers within the populace. The chapter argues that the political problem explains the absence of the ‘sleeping sovereign’, so central to the radical democratic interpretation of Hobbes, from Hobbes’s later writings. But informal collective power cannot necessarily be celebrated as a welcome popular insurgency against excessive state power: for its characteristic inner structure is complex oligarchic allegiance rather than equal horizontal affiliation.

Introduction

This chapter lays out two contemporary radical democratic theories of popular power with conceptual frames drawn from early modern philosophy, and it foreshadows an alternative theory of popular power to overcome their shortcomings. The contemporary theories are exemplified by the work of Tuck and Negri. Tuck promotes Hobbes’s idea of a ‘sleeping sovereign’ as an absolute democratic sovereign, cutting through the ordinary workings of government. Alternatively, Negri promotes Spinoza’s idea of an insurgent popular multitude as an irresistible democratic force disrupting any settled institutional regime. The chapter then indicates some reasons for dissatisfaction with radical democratic theories of popular power, and foreshadows the alternative theory that will be put forward and defended through the course of the book. It sketches how this alternative theory emerges from a new interpretation of the political philosophies of Hobbes and Spinoza, and in particular, of their conceptions of power as potentia.

Civic Strengthening

This chapter establishes a neo-Spinozist criterion of popular power, whereby power is judged by the systematic effects and outcomes of a political order; and popularity lies in the degree to which those effects and outcomes durably uphold equality (glossed as mutual independence of citizens) and participation. The chapter provides a taxonomy of organizational elements that might best address the third Hobbesian problem—the problem of democracy’s perverse effects—not through Hobbesian repression and fragmentation, but through empowering the citizenry and encouraging the growth of non-oligarchic collective formations in the social body. In this frame, both social movements and popular plebiscites are decentred: they are no longer the exemplary expression of popular power as per the radical democrats, but, rather, partial elements within a larger political ecology that may or may not have an overall popular character. Popular power emerges as a difficult political achievement stabilized by good institutional design.

Juridical Politics

This chapter sketches Hobbes’s early view of human collective power, arguing that he conceives of this power in exclusively juridical terms. Hobbes’s most obvious account of collective power is his theory of the sovereign state (or commonwealth, civitas), which possesses power as authority, potestas. The holder of potestas could be a popular sleeping sovereign, a more traditional ruling assembly, or a head of state, but in all cases the potestas itself can only arise when the powers of the individual members of the population are brought together in formal juridical union. This chapter argues that in Hobbes’s early view, there is no other kind of collective power; it offers no conceptual rubric to conceive of informal or emergent collective human power. This view is characterized as neo-scholastic; the conceptual limitation of the neo-scholastic view is undergirded by a practical confidence that informal collectivities will not be robust or politically troubling.

Nature’s Indifference

This chapter argues that in Spinoza’s philosophy, popular movements do not necessarily testify to an underlying popular power driving political life; nor is efficacious political power necessarily popular. First, it argues that a collectivity’s own proper power, its power sui juris, is not some underlying disposition waiting to be expressed, but rather is manifested in the actual effects it durably produces. Correspondingly, it is a mistake to take social movements challenging oligarchy as exemplars of the power of the people, unless and until they durably consolidate an egalitarian social order. Second, it argues that within Spinoza’s metaphysics, nonideal regimes may well endure, either due to the support of an external power, or from their own power, but where that power is internally structured in an oligarchic or repressive manner. In sum, Spinoza accepts Chapter 6’s first two Hobbesian problems, and acknowledges the all-too-common divergence between ethics and efficacy in politics.

The Power of Producing Effects

This chapter establishes a new interpretation of Spinoza’s political conception of potentia, from within his broader metaphysical framework. Centrally, the chapter distinguishes between, on the one hand, potentia operandi (power of producing effects, for better or for worse, with no particular connection to virtue), which is similar to Hobbes’s notion of power; and, on the other hand, potentia agendi (power of acting), associated with a thing’s essence and virtue. An entity may be extremely powerful in the first sense without being powerful in the second sense. Politically, this manifests as a distinction between merely having right and power, versus being in control of one’s own right (being sui juris). Sui juris status is normatively desirable, but in this chapter the relation (and possible divergence) between the sui juris status of a political collectivity and the sui juris status of the members making up that collectivity is not yet established.

Repressive Egalitarianism

This chapter sketches Hobbes’s solution to the political problem, and interprets its meaning and significance for the question of popular power. Hobbes’s preferred model of politics, ‘repressive egalitarianism’, overcomes the political problem by breaking down the power blocs of the multitude into disempowered equality. The result is practically workable, but highly ambivalent to contemporary sensibilities. On the one hand, its elimination of informal oligarchy grounds its claim to meaningfully express popular power; the chapter offers a novel interpretation of Hobbes’s famous hostility to democratic assembly in light of this problem of informal oligarchy. But on the other hand, the resultant fragmented polity is unable to resist sovereign overreach.

Relational Power

This chapter analyzes Hobbes’s theory of individual human power (potentia), and its transformation across his works. It argues that Hobbes’s early works offer an account of potentia reflecting an intuitive common sense that an individual’s power lies in the faculties or capacities that the individual possesses. It claims that such a conception still bears the marks of scholasticism, and it illustrates this point against a stylized presentation of Aquinas’s conception of potentia. By contrast, the chapter argues that on Hobbes’s later account, individual potentia is irreducibly relational, with the corollary that potentia cannot be identified in abstraction from actual social life. This change belatedly extends the antischolasticism of Hobbes’s natural science into his science of human beings.