Spinoza and the Political Imaginary

Abstract

For those interested in pursuing the historical and philosophical origins of the idea of the political imaginary— a key concept in contemporary social and cultural theory— Spinoza represents a wellspring. Even if many seventeenthcentury authors refl ected on the imaginary and imagemediated nature of political relationships, particularly in the connection between politics and religion, few did so as thoroughly and systematically as Spinoza. Indeed, even more than for Hobbes, for Spinoza the ability of the human mind to create images is an anthropological given and an irreducible dimension of all human actions and interactions. But even for those more interested in pursuing theoretical and methodological resources for a contemporary theory of political imaginaries, something can be found here. Despite the generality of Spinoza’s epistemological conception of the imaginatio, it receives a remarkable sharpness and concreteness in his political writings. Equipped with a fi ne sense of the imaginative power of the mind, Spinoza systematically describes political processes and institutions as imaginative and imaginary phenomena. From this perspective, politics as a whole can be read as an area of human life in which images, projections, misjudgments, and ofteninvoluntary associa-