La philosophie politique au miroir de Spinoza

Abstract

In both France and Italy, Spinoza’s political thought has given rise to a number of Marxistinspired studies that have sought to identify the originality of the philosopher, both inside and outside of modem political liberalism. The themes consistently at the heart of these studies have included the constitutive power of the multitude, the pregnant force of the collective imagination, and the quest for models of the “automatic” or necessary modality of public virtue. Today’s apparent eclipse of the masses is the crucial problem for which the Spinozan invocation can provide a conceptual perspective. It implies a confrontation between political philosophy and repUblicanism, the other tradition of political modernity, which, until now, has not been seriously considered from this perspective. The question which then emerges is that of the dual overcoming of these two traditions of modernity.