Ethics and Efficacy

Abstract

Abstract 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.