Between Liberty and Necessity: Spinoza’s Philosophical Vision of Democracy

Abstract

Spinoza is rare among early modern philosophers in his claim that democracy is the best form of government. Rarer still, he argues that it is the best regime because it is the best guarantor of “the freedom to philosophize.” Yet the connection between Spinoza’s defense of philosophy and his advocacy of democracy has long puzzled scholars. This study argues that Spinoza proposed a certain form of democracy as the regime best able to address the theological-political problem posed by revealed religion to both public life and private philosophical investigation. He sought in his writings to give birth to a new form of democratic public morality based on a new conception of human freedom and capable of displacing the older moralities of both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures. The new democratic morality borrows from key elements of both the Old and New Testament, but in a way that undermines the possibility that the state itself can become an object of idolatry as an erroneously conceived vehicle for complete moral or religious perfection. While Spinoza’s politics are “anti-perfectionist”, he nonetheless reclaims and appropriates the classical philosophical argument for a summum bonum or highest human good, against his early modern predecessors Hobbes and Machiavelli. Yet this good is a private good of the autonomous individual; it cannot be made the direct goal of any political order. Spinoza’s argument for democracy is able to combine, paradoxically, both “utilitarian” and “anti-utilitarian” arguments, because behind both these presentations of politics — connecting them while transcending them — stands a defense of philosophy that is both practical as well as theoretical. This conception of democracy posits a new basis for the public alliance of philosophers, politicians and ordinary citizens, each of whom may find a shared, yet partial, good in the democratic order itself. The variability within Spinoza’s presentation of the key concepts of freedom, power and virtue corresponds to the diverse human perspectives among those involved in constructing and sustaining democratic politics. Weaving together this new alliance, Spinoza intends to give to politics its proper due, elevating it above mere utility and yet restraining it within limits. Though he is sometimes cast as the father of the “radical Enlightenment”, this study concludes that Spinoza’s argument for democracy is meant to persuade us that human freedom demands the vigilant moderation of our political hopes.