Abstract
On many interpretations of Spinoza’s political philosophy, democracy emerges as his ideal type of government. But a type of government can be ideal and yet it can be unwise to implement it if certain background conditions obtain. For example, a dominion’s people can be too ‘wretched by the conditions of slavery’ to rule themselves. This begs the following question. Do Spinoza’s arguments for democracy entail that all political bodies should be democracies at all times (the received view), or do they merely entail that we should only have a democracy when the right sort of background conditions are in place (the challenging view)? This paper argues that a new interpretation of one of the four versions of the rationality argument for democracy as it features in the Tractatus entails that the received view is correct. The paper also explains away part of the appeal of the challenging view by arguing that none of the other versions of the rationality argument supports the received view. It closes by arguing that a slightly modernised version of the rationality argument can be important for contemporary political philosophy.
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Notes
It will not help to claim that every dominion of over a dozen or so will experience this benefit. For dominions with only three or four people can also be arranged along democratic lines, and I take it as read that the advantage of knowledge in numbers cannot be achieved in such dominions.
There is one objection to using the Rationality Argument for my purposes that I want to put to rest right at the start. According to this objection, we should ‘dismiss [the Rationality Argument] as a rudimentary theory, scarcely deserving consideration’ (Ueno 2009, p. 56) on the grounds that it is absent from the Political Treatise, which was written by the more mature Spinoza. I will not attempt at a reply other than to note that if the mature Spinoza would have omitted the Rationality Argument from a finished version of the Political Treatise then my argument in this paper shows that doing this would have been a bad idea. For, as I will argue, the Rationality Argument is universally applicable and therefore allows Spinoza to put forward his desired thesis—viz., that democracies are preferable to other kinds of political organization—in the strongest way possible.
I write ‘the’ state of nature, and not ‘a’ (possible or hypothetical) state of nature because the Spinoza of the TTP thought that there was only one state of nature; namely, the one that has actually existed and was ‘prior to religion in nature and in time’ (TTP, p. 246).
There are, of course, concerns about the normativity of rationality, such as whether its normativity depends on something else that is normative and whether it can ground other sorts of normativity (Southwood 2008). For the purposes of this paper I will set these issues aside.
‘the purpose of [a] state … is to achieve security’ (TTP, p. 92).
I do not claim that this is the only way in which a version of the Rationality Argument can be shown to be universally applicable; all I need is that this is a way of doing this.
There is an important connection between this thesis and Spinoza’s thesis of God as Nature. Unfortunately I do not have the space to explore it here.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Eric Schliesser, Annie Sadoo and audiences at the following events for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper: ChiPhi Early Modern Philosophy Workshop, University of Sheffield; 1st CEGP Political Theory Graduate Conference, LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome, Italy; 3rd Biannual Philosophy Graduate Conference, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary; Nederlands-Vlaamse Dag voor de Filosofie, University of Tilburg, the Netherlands; Graduate Student Conference ‘Intersecting Histories’, Claremont Graduate University, California, USA; Postgraduate Seminar, University of Leeds, United Kingdom. Research on this paper has profited from financial support by a Jacobsen Fellowship from the Royal Institute of Philosophy (2012/13).
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Kalf, W.F. The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Received View of Spinoza on Democracy. Res Publica 20, 263–279 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-014-9245-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-014-9245-y