Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan[1]
Edwin Curley
In an interview with Oriana Fallaci in 1972, Henry
Kissinger, asked about the
influence of Machiavelli on his thought, denied that the Florentine adviser of
princes had had any influence on him at all:
There is really very little of Machiavelli's one can
accept or use in the contemporary
world. . . . If you want to know who has influenced me most, I'll answer with two philosophers'
names: Spinoza and Kant. Which makes it all the more peculiar that you choose to associate me
with Machiavelli.[2]
We may suspect, of course, that if Kissinger had learned
anything at all from
Machiavelli, the last thing he would want to do, given Machiavelli's reputation as a teacher
of evil, would be to admit it. If a leader cannot
actually be virtuous, Machiavelli tells us, he
must at least try to seem
virtuous
(unless, in the particular circumstances, seeming vicious will be more helpful in maintaining his
position).
So far as I can discover, however, no one seems to have
noted the irony involved
in Kissinger's combining his disavowal of Machiavelli with an embrace of Spinoza. Spinoza is arguably the
most Machiavellian of
the great modem political philosophers.[3] We do
not know Spinoza,[4] and so
we do not notice the irony. Let us try to repair our ignorance.
I. SPINOZA AS AN
ECCENTRIC HOBBESIAN
At first glance Spinoza may appear, in his
political philosophy, to be more an eccentric Hobbesian than a
Machiavellian. He imagines a state of nature in which men's natural egoism and
hostility to one another make their lives insecure, wretched, and brutal (TTP iv.18‑
316 THE
CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO SPINOZA
25).[5] This state of nature is completely
amoral. Each individual in it has a perfect right to do whatever he is capable of doing, in the sense that he cannot be criticized on
grounds of justice for pursuing his own self-interest in any way.[6] The
concepts of justice and injustice make sense only in civil society, and there
they are to be defined in terms of obedience or disobedience to the civil law (TTP xvi.42; cf. Hobbes, L xv.3, xxiv.5,
xxvi.4,8). But because men
live miserably in the state of
nature, rational pursuit of their self-interest leads them to contract to form
a state which will restrain their behavior (TTP xvi.12-14; cf. L xvii.1,13 ). They come to see that less really is
more, that if they
give up the right they have in the state of nature to take whatever they can,
and transfer it to a state which will have the power to make and enforce rules
about property, they will be more secure in the possession of what they have
acquired in the past or might acquire in the future. Not only will they be
better off economically, since enterprise can flourish only where possessions
are secured by law, they will also be better off in terms of less mundane
goods, like knowledge, since cultural pursuits can flourish only when not all of our waking hours are
consumed in attending to basic needs. The state men form to provide these goods will have absolute
authority over its citizens, the supreme right to compel them by force in all
matters, including matters of religion (TTP xvi.24-25, and TTP xix; cf. L xvii.13, xviii, xxxi.37).
So far this all sounds very Hobbesian, and to the extent
that there is little or no
talk in Machiavelli about the state of nature or natural rights or a social
contract, nor much concern with the question whether there might legitimately
be limits on the authority of the state, not very Machiavellian. No doubt
Machiavelli would agree with the Hobbesian claim about what life would be like
without an effective government,[7] but the
passages in his work which come closest to discussing a state of nature (The Discourses I.i-ii)
seem to be more speculative history than a
thought experiment. Though he cites the need for security
as a motivation for the founding of cities, he does not develop a theory of human nature to explain that
need. Very likely if Machiavelli
were operating with the concept of a state of nature, he would agree with the Hobbesian
contention that in the state of nature utility is the
measure of right (DCv i.10).[8] But the fact is that he does not seem much interested in the
concept of right (or rights). Perhaps there is a slight hint of a social
contract where Machiavelli writes,
Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan 317
regarding cities built by natives of the place where
they are built, that the people "undertake to live
together in some place they have chosen in order to live more conveniently and the more easily
to defend themselves" (Machiavelli 1975: 100-1).
But there seems here to be only the vague notion of an agreement to live
together, with no notion of a transfer of rights, or of the establishment
of a power possessing rights. Since Machiavelli is not interested in
issues about the rights of the state,
he does not discuss the right of the state in matters of religion (although his
discussion of Roman religion in Discourses I.xi-xv certainly assumes that it is legitimate for the
state to encourage such forms of religion as the
rulers find useful for their secular purposes).[9] So
Machiavelli's conceptual framework is very different from that of Hobbes and
Spinoza.
Nevertheless, when we consider what kind of state is
supposed to emerge from the contractual process
in Spinoza, we see that he is an eccentric
Hobbesian at best. Unlike Hobbes, he has a marked preference for democracy, characterizing
it as the most natural form of government, because in it everyone remains
equal, as they were in the state of
nature, and because democracy approaches most nearly to the freedom of the state of
nature. In a democracy, "no one so transfers his natural right to another
that in the future there is no consultation with him; instead he transfers it
to the greater part of the whole society, of which he makes one part" (TTP
xvi.36). This may make us
think more of Rousseau than of Machiavelli,[10] but it
is clearly a
perspective Hobbes is very anxious to argue against.[11]
Spinoza's preference for democracy is also grounded on
the very un-Hobbesian
assumption that in a democratic state, "there is less reason to fear absurdities. For if
the assembly is large, it is almost impossible that the majority of its members
should agree on one absurd action" (TTP xvi.30). The reasons for this confidence in
the decisions of
large assemblies are unclear. Surely Spinoza was familiar with Hobbes's argument that in a large assembly very
few people would have the
understanding of foreign and domestic affairs to judge wisely what is conducive
to the common good, that the great majority would therefore be prey to orators who knew how
to make the worse
appear the better cause, appealing to popular prejudice rather than reason, and that the
influence of passion on these decisions would
frequently lead to faction, inconstancy, and in the worst case, civil war (cf. DCv X.9-I5).
And Spinoza's own view of the
318 THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO SPINOZA
masses' capacity for rational choice does not, on the
whole, seem to be more
favorable than that of Hobbes.[12] So it
is a puzzle, which for now I leave to be
discussed later, why Spinoza should think there is less danger of absurdity in a democracy. But that he
does think this, and that it is
a very un-Hobbesian view, is clear.
Perhaps the strongest indication that
Spinoza is at best a very revisionist Hobbesian, though, lies in the
fundamental purpose of his main political work: to argue that, however absolute
the sovereign's right may be to do as he pleases, even in sacred matters (TTP
xix, title), nevertheless, "in a free state everyone is permitted to think
what he wishes and to say what he thinks" (TTP xx, title). Hobbes, on the
other hand, argues that the sovereign must have absolute control over what
doctrines may be published in books, taught in the schools or preached in the
churches (L xviii.9; Review and Conclusion, 16; xlii.68), and that this control is consistent with the freedom of his subjects (L
xxi.7). And though Hobbes may be more concerned to defend the sovereign's right
of control over the external
expression of belief than he is to license attempts to control "the inward thought and belief
of men" (L xl.2; cf. xxxii.4–5, xlii.11), still, so long as he holds that
"the actions of men proceed from opinions, and in the well-governing of
opinions consisteth the well-governing of actions, in order to their peace and
concord" (L xviii.9), he cannot leave opinions alone for long.[13] However
similar the foundations
of their political philosophies may be, Spinoza some-how manages to reach very different conclusions than
Hobbes does.
2. THE COEXTENSIVENESS OF
RIGHT AND POWER
Sometimes comparisons are odious; sometimes they help us
to understand by making the unfamiliar seem more familiar. But in the end Spinoza is Spinoza, not Hobbes
(or Machiavelli either). He is, as one recent
writer puts it, an anomaly.[14] To
understand the anomaly we need to try
to probe more deeply into the logic of the system. We may begin by considering
why Spinoza holds that the right of each thing extends as far as its power does
(TTP xvi.4).
I find this a disturbing thesis, and
I imagine that most readers of Spinoza share that reaction. Perhaps the fact
that this thesis is so central to
Spinoza's political theory, and has often seemed not to be persuasively argued, helps explain why historians of
political thought
Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan 319
have often neglected him. The thesis
is reminiscent of Hobbes's claim, already disturbing enough, that in the state
of nature every man has a right
to every thing (L xiv.4), but it is a stronger statement in at least two respects: Spinoza applies it to all
individuals (and not only to human beings), and he does not
qualify it by saying that it applies only to individuals in the state of nature.[15]
In Hobbes we can construct at least
two paths to the more restricted claim,[16] and at least
one of these may have exercised some influence on Spinoza. The more familiar
line of argument proceeds as follows: In war it is permissible to do whatever
is necessary to preserve
yourself; but the state of nature is a state of war; therefore, in the state of nature it is permissible to do whatever
is necessary to preserve yourself; but anything at
all might turn out to be necessary for self-preservation; therefore, there is nothing which
is absolutely impermissible in
the state of nature; in that state, you may do what-ever you can do.
This can seem at least to be the
argument running from the beginning of Leviathan
xiii through Leviathan
xiv.4, and
perhaps it does represent the best way to understand
that argument. It has the virtue of relying on a moral intuition - the permissibility of
self-preservation in extreme situations - which seems to be deeply rooted in people and might be granted even by
people who are otherwise quite skeptical of morality. It has the virtue that Hobbes can and does make a
strong case for the assumption that in the state of nature (understood as a
state in which there is no effective government) there would be enough actual
conflict (or well-founded fear of conflict) to make everyone's life
intolerably insecure. It has the weakness (from the standpoint of justifying a conclusion as
strong as the one Hobbes
seems to want) that it seems to license behavior contrary to conventional morality only
where you can make a plausible case that the behavior really is necessary for self-preservation.[17]
In some passages of De Cive there may be a
different, more theological route to
the conclusion that right is identical with power, and one which gets us closer to
Spinoza's argument in the Theological-Political Treatise. Suppose we begin with the proposition
that God's right of
sovereignty over man derives from his omnipotence (DCv xv.5). This seems a plausible reading
of the book of Job, where God defends the justice of his
afflicting Job, not by pointing to any sin Job has committed, but
by affirming his own power (cf. Job 38:4, cited by
320 THE
CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO SPINOZA
Hobbes in DCv xv.6). We then contend
that if it is the irresistibility of God's power which confers on him a right
to behave in whatever way he pleases, similar power in man must confer a
similar right on the man who possesses it. Under pressure from theological opponents
Hobbes may deny that any man could have irresistible power, but that does not appear to be his
position in De Cive i.14, where, in virtue of the maxim that
irresistible power confers a right of ruling, conquest is held to confer a
right to the obedience of the vanquished without the need to argue that the
vanquished consent by their submission.[18]
The argument in Theological-Political Treatise xvi.3-4, seems to follow a similar pattern,
except insofar as it apparently involves at least one thesis peculiar to
Spinoza's metaphysic: God has absolute sovereignty, that is, the supreme right
to do all things, that is, what-ever he can do; but the power of nature
(considered absolutely) simply is the power of God; therefore, nature
(considered absolutely) has the right to do whatever it can do; but the power
of the whole of nature is nothing but the power of all the individuals in
nature; therefore,
everything in nature has a right to do what it can do. Right is coextensive with power.
You can understand why some people might find this
argument unpersuasive. Insofar as it relies on traditional assumptions about
God's sovereignty, it is an argument we might expect to be persuasive to
Spinoza's audience. Insofar as it relies on the doctrine that the power of God
may be identified with the power of nature (where that notion in turn is
identified with the power of all the individuals in nature), it is not. Some have suggested that this is
not a peculiarly Spinozistic
assumption, and hence is an assumption one would not have to be a Spinozist to
grant,[19] but
this seems to me to be wrong. Spinoza's critique of the common understanding of
miracles proceeds very much on the assumption that people ordinarily make a
(mistaken) distinction between the power of nature and the power of God (cf. TTP vi.I-2). Moreover, if we
compare the version of Spinoza's argument in Theological-Political Treatise xvi.3-4 with the reprise in the Political Treatise ii.2-3, we can see that in his later work Spinoza is trying to provide an
alternative version of the argument which avoids simply assuming an identity
between the power of nature and the power of God.[20]
Whether or not that attempt is successful, there will, I
think, be a
Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan 321
problem with any argument for the
coextensiveness of right and power which proceeds on the assumption that God's
right is based on his power (as the argument of the Political Treatise does explicitly, and the argument of
the Theological-Political
Treatise does
implicitly). Some theists will grant this; others will not. I suggest that
Spinoza has a more effective argument for the coextensiveness of right and
power, which does not presuppose this assumption, to be found not in the
overtly political chapters of the Theological-Political Treatise, but in Chapter iv.
We might
reconstruct the argument of Chapter iv in the following way: Suppose there is a law which
imposes an obligation on us, and hence limits
what we are permitted to do; if this law is to impose an obligation on us, we must conceive it as a command, and
not merely as a statement
about how, in virtue of their nature, some or all members of some species act;[21] a law
in the proper sense must be, not only a command, but a command which it is possible for the person
commanded to disobey (not only does "ought" imply "can," it
also implies "cannot"); but a command which it is possible for the
person commanded to disobey must be a human command; for if God commands
something, then obedience must follow, else he would not be omnipotent (we assume here that to command
an act is to will that it
occur, and that God's omnipotence implies that what he wills to occur occurs); therefore,
any law which imposes an obligation on us must be a human law; God cannot be a law-giver. This conclusion of reason is confirmed by
what we find in experience; for a law-giver
rewards obedience and punishes disobedience; but experience teaches us, as Solomon puts it, that "the same
fate comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, to
the good and the evil. "[22] As far
as God or nature
is concerned, what we can do, we may do.
It is sometimes
said that Spinoza's theory of natural right is "with-out normative content, "[23] and it
is sometimes suggested that in this way he avoids
the objection Rousseau made against those who base right on power (Social Contract I.iii). Spinoza, the
idea is, grants that might gives you a right, but because he simply identifies
the notion of right with that of
physical power, this doctrine has no justificatory implications:
If a new Genghis Khan invaded a small Spinozist republic
with crushing forces, he would have the right to invade it, then the right to
oppress its
322 THE
CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO SPINOZA
inhabitants, as long as they remained
too frightened to resist him. Not that Spinoza intends
by that to justify whatever tyranny may be, nor to justify anything in general. (Matheron 1985: 176)
Certainly Spinoza does not intend to
justify such an invasion or oppression, if justifying it implies that the
people invaded have a moral duty to submit to their new master (as it seems to
in Rousseau's critique of this doctrine). To point this out is useful. But I
think the doctrine that right is coextensive with power should not be thought
of as a doctrine which identifies right with power
if that implies that, when Spinoza says this "new Genghis Khan"
(Louis XIV, perhaps) has the right to invade "a small spinozistic republic" (the
Dutch Republic of 1672, perhaps), all he means is (what we already knew) that Genghis Khan has the power.
Generally
Spinoza will express his thesis about the relation between right and power by
saying that right extends as far
as power does. He
does not identify the two concepts. And if he did, the thesis would lose interest. As things stand,
though, Spinoza is using normative language with normative implications here: He is saying that there
is no transcendental standard of justice by which Genghis Khan's actions can be
judged to be unjust (cf. note 5). And this (challenging) normative disclaimer
does not imply that there is no other standard by which his actions may be
judged. For to say that Genghis Khan acts in accordance with natural right is compatible
with saying that he acts contrary to the law of reason (cf. TTP xvi.5—6), and I
take this also to be a genuinely normative claim.[24]
3. SPINOZA AS A SOCIAL CONTRACT THEORIST
To say that it is not unjust for us
to do, because no transcendent law forbids us to do, what we have the power to do, is to
make a disturbing, normative, perhaps Machiavellian claim. It is also to make
trouble for the idea that the right of the state is founded on a social
contract.
This idea was
already in trouble in Hobbes. For although it is a law of nature, according to Hobbes, that
we should keep covenants we have made (L xv.1), it is unclear what the status of the laws of nature is in Hobbes. In the final paragraph
of Leviathan xv Hobbes will say that these
"laws" cannot be regarded as laws in the strict sense of
Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan 323
the term unless we think of them as divine commands; his
own commitment to
theism is questionable enough that we do not know what to make of
this escape clause. Elsewhere (Curley 1992) I have argued that Hobbes was probably (as many of his
contemporaries thought) an
atheist. If that is correct, the escape clause implies that the laws of nature do not bind us (since the condition
for their being binding cannot
be satisfied).[25]
So we would be left with the conclusion that the laws of nature are simply
theorems about what conduces to our
self-preservation, and do not impose any obligations on us. On this view, the imperative
"keep covenants you have made" looks like no more than good general
advice about how to conduct your life, advice you would be free to disregard if
special circumstances made it
seem not to be good advice – as, for example, when there is no sovereign to make sure that the other party
reciprocates your honesty (L
xvii.2).
I do not think
Hobbes was happy to settle for viewing his laws of nature in that way. He seems, for
example, to have a very deep attachment to the
value of promise keeping, arguing repeatedly that we are bound to keep promises even in the state of nature,
provided the other party has already performed first (L xiv.27;
cf. DCv ii.16,
and Elements of Law I.xv.13). In his famous "reply to the fool" (L xv.5), he goes to some
lengths to persuade us that, appearances to the contrary not-withstanding, this really is the
prudent thing to do. But his indignation against Wallis for betraying the King during the
Civil War (English Works IV: 416–19) seems evidence of moral intuitions which it is hard for prudential
considerations of the normal sort to justify.
Spinoza seems to
lack those intuitions entirely. As we might expect, given the argument of the preceding section, that
right is coextensive with
power, he holds that "no contract can have any force except by reason of
its utility. If the utility is taken away, the con-tract is taken away with it,
and is null and void" (TTP xvi.20). This conclusion is
also derived in part from an egoistic psychology which seems to make any contractarian theory of the state
hopeless: "The universal law
of human nature is that no one fails to pursue any-thing which he judges to be good,
unless he hopes for a greater good, or fears a greater harm, nor does he submit to any evil,
except to avoid a greater one, or because he hopes for a greater good"
(TTP xvi.15 ). From
this it follows, Spinoza says, that "no one will promise to give up the right he has to all things except with
intent to deceive,
324 THE CAMBRIDGE
COMPANION TO SPINOZA
and absolutely, that no one will
stand by his promises unless he fears a greater evil or hopes for a greater good" (TTP xvi.16).[26] There are two strange things here: one is that
Hobbes, whose psychology generally seems to be
no less egoistic than Spinoza's, should present people as sincerely making, in the
social contract, an irrevocable commitment to obey the commands of the
sovereign (or his heirs) in perpetuity (L xviii.3); the other is that Spinoza,
who has no such expectations of people, should nevertheless couch his political
theory in terms of a social contract.
Commentators frequently
point out that talk of a social contract is prominent in Spinoza's earlier political work, the Theological-Political Treatise, and absent in his later work, the Political
Treatise, from which we
might infer that Spinoza abandoned social contract theory because he recognized that the
contract was superfluous.[27] If no contract is binding unless it is useful, then the
supposed social contract can play no real part in founding the sovereign's
right to command. The
sovereign's right will depend on his power to persuade his subjects (in one way or another) that it is in their
interest to obey. If they believe
that, they will obey (and the sovereign, in virtue of his power, will command with right). If
they do not, then no matter what promises they
may have made, they will not obey (and he, in virtue of his lack of power, will cease to be
the sovereign).
Now there is
much that is right about the discussion summarized in the preceding paragraph, but I
think we should not infer from it that Spinoza changed his mind, in any fundamental way,
about the issue of
political legitimacy, between the Theological-Political Treatise and the Political Treatise. Even in the Theological-Political Treatise, where Spinoza seems to be most
contractarian, there is something distinctly odd about his contractarianism.
Given his views about the
moral and psychological force of the act of making a promise, Spinoza simply cannot regard that act by itself
as endowing the sovereign
with the moral authority to command his subjects. If all people were rational, he thinks,
it would be rational for all people to keep their
promises; but most of the time people are not rational, and no natural law obliges them to
behave rationally (TTP xvi.2i-22). That is why, he says,
though men may promise with definite signs of an
ingenuous intention, and contract to maintain trust, still, no one can be
certain of another's
Kissinger,
Spinoza, and Genghis Khan 325
reliability unless something else is added to the
promise. For by natural right each person can act deceptively,
and is bound to stand by the contract only by the hope of a greater good or
fear of a lesser evil. (TTP xvi.23; emphasis added)
What must be added, I take it, is the existence of a
sovereign with the power (and the will) to enforce contracts. If such a
sovereign exists, then we will be able to rely on others to perform what they
have promised and we will be bound to do the same.
But what does it take to bring such a
sovereign into existence if the act of promising in a social contract is not
enough? Here I think Spinoza's answer
is that we must reconceive the social contract, not (as in Hobbes) as a transfer of
right, but (in accordance with Spinoza's theory about the relation between right and power)
as a transfer of power
(cf. TTP xvi.24-25). It is the transfer of power which
generates the sovereign, not the utterance of any magic formulas.
But how can power be transferred? The
best way to approach this, I think, will be to consider what the social contract ultimately comes
to in Hobbes. Hobbes does not always write as though what bound us to obey the government in
power was a promise we (or our ancestors) made in the past. He knows that the actual origins of many,
if not most, political orders are lost in the mists of history, and that if we
knew what they were, we might not find them pretty. "There is scarce a
commonwealth in the world whose beginnings can in conscience be justified"
(L "Review and Conclusion," 8). What matters, in the end, is not
whether promises were made, but whether the government has the power to provide
us with the security which was our end when we agreed to obey its commands.
This strain of thought is strongest in Hobbes in the "Review and Conclusion"
of Leviathan, where he is explicitly concerned to
settle a problem of conscience for those who had supported the late king in
the Civil War: At what point may they, consistently with any oaths of loyalty
they may have taken, transfer their allegiance to the new government? But it is
present earlier in Leviathan, and even in Hobbes's earlier works
(cf. DCv vi.3; Elements of Law II.i.5), so we cannot in fairness accuse
Hobbes of having written Leviathan "to secure
Oliver's title." And in any case, from this point of view what matters is
not the person who holds power, but the power he holds. "The obligation of
subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as
326 THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO SPINOZA
long, and no longer than, the power
lasteth by which he is able to protect them" (L xxi.21).[28]
When Hobbes is
in this mode, the fundamental question is "what are the conditions for the
preservation of political power?" Having lived through a civil war in
which the rebels won, Hobbes is acutely conscious of the fragility of political
power. One of the fundamental propositions of his political theory is that
individuals are approximately equal in mental and physical power. Whatever
differences may exist between them are not sufficient to provide the basis for
a lasting
relationship of dominion based on power alone (L xiii. i ). It is a consequence of this that a ruler cannot dominate a
multitude of subjects unless many of those subjects
are willing to help him enforce his commands. It need not be the case that the majority of
the people obey all of his
commands willingly, but there must be at least a substantial number who willingly obey enforcement commands,
and the enforcement
cadre must be larger and more dedicated just in pro-portion as people in general are more
hostile to the regime. Enforcing the law is risky
business and Hobbesian man is highly risk averse.[29]
Hobbes puts this
most sharply in Behemoth, his history of the English Civil War,
where he writes: "The power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and
belief of the people. . . . If men know not their duty, what is there that can force them
to obey the laws? An army, you will say? But what shall force the army?" (English Works VI,184,237). Spinoza could not have known Behemoth, but he might have found similar
reflections in Leviathan itself, for example, in the analysis
of power in the opening sections (1–15) of Chapter x, or in Chapter xxx, which reminds sovereigns that they were
entrusted with power to procure the safety of the people (L xxx. 1) and that they need to be both
loved and feared by the people if they are to
perform their office with good success (L xxx.28-29). It is not enough, pace Machiavelli, for the ruler to be
feared.[30]
If we apply these
reflections on the conditions of power to the question of political legitimacy,
in the context of a political philosophy where it is understood that right is
coextensive with power, the result we get is that rulers govern with right just
to the extent that their subjects consent to their rule by obeying their
commands. What matters is not an oath
of loyalty to the state, but a willingness in the enforcement cadre to see that the laws are obeyed, and a
willingness in the general population at least not to forcibly resist
Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan 327
the enforcement cadre.[31] As we
shall see in the next section, this perspective yields limits on the right of
the sovereign which one might not have expected from Spinoza's initial
characterization of the social contract.
4. SPINOZA AS A MACHIAVELLIAN
I began this essay by suggesting that in some important
sense Spinoza was a Machiavellian in political theory. You may feel that I
have already identified one important sense in which that is true: Spinoza holds that it is never unjust
to do what your power permits you to do. Given this doctrine, we would expect a Spinozistic political
leader to behave like Kissinger's Bismarck: pursuing "political utility unencumbered by moral
scruples" (Kissinger 1968: 916).[32] If Machiavelli were to agree that right and power are
coextensive, then he would agree
with one of the most central tenets of Spinoza's political theory. But I am not
sure he would agree with Spinoza about that.
The question of Machiavelli's
amoralism is often framed in terms of the question whether the end justifies the means. We
might better ask, I think, whether there are
certain ends (such as the establishment or preservation
of a political community) so good that they justify the use of any means whatever. The most
instructive passage I find on this occurs in Machiavelli's discussion of Romulus's
murder of Remus, where his consequentialism falls somewhere in between the extreme individualism of the egoist
and the extreme universalism of the utilitarian:
A prudent founder of a republic, one
whose intention is to govern for the common good, and not in his own interest, not for his
heirs, but for the sake of the
fatherland, should try to have the authority all to himself; nor will a wise mind ever reproach anyone for
some extraordinary action performed in order to found a kingdom or institute a republic. It is,
indeed, fitting that while the action
accuses him, the result excuses him; and when the result is good, as it was with Romulus, it will
always excuse him; for one should reproach a man who is violent in order to destroy, not
one who is violent in order to mend
things. (The
Discourses I.ix
in Machiavelli
1979: 200—1)
In this passage Machiavelli does concede that in some
sense an act like that of Romulus is
reprehensible; the fact that it leads to a good
328 THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO SPINOZA
result does not justify the action, it excuses it. But I think
we should not put too
much weight on this distinction in this context. On some readings of
Machiavelli, he remains committed to the moral standards which would judge the
actions of a Romulus to be evil at the same time that he is recommending that
political actors disregard those
standards.[33]
I find this not merely paradoxical, but incoherent. If "good" really is the most general
adjective of commendation (as the
Oxford English Dictionary tells us, and as I believe), then there is a kind of contradiction in recommending conduct
you go on to call evil. I
think we must take Machiavelli to be using the term "good" ironically when he
urges rulers to learn how not to be good.[34] In the passage under discussion
here, he talks about excuses only because he wants to allow for the
condemnation of such actions when they are not aimed at (and do not lead to)
results of the kind Romulus's did. We should still reproach the man "who
is violent in order to destroy."
It is not just
any good result which will "excuse" an action of this character. It takes a very
significant result, affecting a large number of people, not merely the agent and those who are close
to him. As Bondanella and Musa point out, the result in this case was "the
establishment of the most durable and powerful republican government in human
history" (Machiavelli 1979: 22, editors' introduction). It may be that "patriotism, as Machiavelli
understood it, is collective selfishness,"[35] but Machiavelli's
"patriotic consequentialism," as I am inclined to call it, falls
short of saying that what-ever you can do, you may do. What it does hold is that a ruler is to be praised, not blamed, even though he does things which
might other-wise be highly reprehensible,
provided he acts with a prudent regard for the well-being of the community he is ruling. So I
do not call Spinoza a Machiavellian because he believes that right is coextensive
with power, since I do not think Machiavelli himself believed that. As Spinoza
is sometimes more Hobbesian than Hobbes himself, sometimes he is more
Machiavellian than Machiavelli himself.
A much more
fundamental point of similarity, I believe, lies in Spinoza's pragmatic
attitude toward politics, exemplified in the opening paragraph of the Political Treatise, where he writes that
Philosophers ... think they perform a godly act and reach
the pinnacle of wisdom when they have learned how to praise a human nature
which exists
Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan 329
nowhere, and how to assail in words
the human nature which really exists. For they conceive men not as they are,
but as they wish them to be. That's why for the most part they have written satire instead of
ethics, and why they have never conceived a politics which can be put to any
practical application. The politics
they have conceived would be considered a chimera, and could be set up only in utopia, or in the
golden age of the poets, i.e., where there was no need for it at all. In all the sciences which have a
practical application, theory is believed to be out of harmony with practice,
but this is most true of politics. (TP L i )
This critique of utopian political
theorizing naturally makes us think of the similar critique Machiavelli makes
at the beginning of Chapter xv of The Prince, and on the other side, of Thomas More's Utopia or Plato's Republic. But in a fascinating article
(Matheron 1986) Matheron
has argued that we need not imagine that Spinoza meant to
criticize only such thinkers as Plato and More, that the less obviously utopian political theory of Thomas Aquinas is
also subject to these strictures, and that if we
take what Spinoza said strictly he must have had
Hobbes in his sights as well. For Spinoza does not say merely that some or many philosophers who have written on politics have erred by conceiving men not as they are but as
they wish them to be; he says philosophers
have done this,
that is, that this is what philosophers generally do when
they write about politics. Machiavelli will escape criticism, because it is clear that Spinoza classes him, not with the
philosophers attacked in Political Treatise i.1, but with the politicians, who are praised in Political
Treatise i.2, for having learned from experience
to anticipate the wicked conduct of men, and for having, as a result, written
successfully about human affairs. But there is no denying that Hobbes is a
philosopher, and that his
work was too prominent in Spinoza's field of vision for Spinoza to have ignored it when he
made his generalization about philosophers.
Now if we must include Hobbes among
the targets of Spinoza's critique, that really is a paradox. Who would have
thought that Hobbes, of all
people, would be criticized for conceiving men not as they are, but as he wished them to
be? Can Spinoza fairly charge Hobbes with taking an overly optimistic view of man, when Hobbes wrote that, because of man's natural propensity to
competition, mistrust, and glory-seeking, the life of
man in the state of nature would
330 THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO SPINOZA
be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"?
Can we really class Hobbes with Plato, Aquinas, and More?[36]
And yet, from what we have said
above, we can see that there would be some justice in that criticism. Hobbes
does (in some moods, at least) found the legitimacy of the sovereign on men's willingness to surrender all their
natural rights to him, and the sovereign's power on their willingness to stand by that
promise come what may. And this is arguably an abandonment of his otherwise
realistic psychology.[37] So we
find Spinoza, after defending a broadly Hobbesian theory of sovereignty in
Chapter xvi of the Theological -
Political Treatise, taking much of
it back in Chapter xvii, which begins with the following warning:
In the last chapter we contemplated the right of the
supreme powers to do everything, and
the natural right which each person has transferred to them. But though the view expressed there
agrees in no small measure with practice, and a practice could be established
so that it approached more and more closely to the condition contemplated,
still, it will never happen that this view should not remain, in many respects,
merely theoretical. For no one will ever be able to so transfer his power, and hence, his right, to
another that he ceases
to be a man, nor will there ever be any supreme power which can carry out
everything it wishes. (TTP xvii.1-2)
There are some things a sovereign cannot effectively
command a subject to do – hate someone who has benefited him, love someone who
has harmed him, not be offended by insults, and so forth. And since the sovereign's right can be no
more extensive than his power, these matters to which the sovereign's power cannot reach are also
matters to which his right does not extend.
Men have never surrendered their right and transferred
their power to an-other in such a way that they were not feared by the very
persons who had received the right and power from them, and that the state was
not in greater danger from its own citizens . . . than from enemies. . . . It
must be granted that
each person reserves many things to himself, that he is his own master (sui juris) in many things, which depend on no
one's decision but his own. (TTP xvii.3-4)
Spinoza concludes from this that a violent rule never
lasts long, that it is incumbent on the supreme powers
to consult the common good (to maintain their own power, if for no other reason – cf. TTP
Kissinger,
Spinoza, and Genghis Khan 331
xvi. 16 ). The most stable state will be one in which the
constitutional arrangements decentralize the decision making.
In the Theological-Political
Treatise Spinoza makes
his argument for this, paradoxically, in a lengthy analysis of the political
history of the Hebrew state. It is a mistake to regard this apparent digression,
which begins at Theological-Political Treatise xvii.25, and runs to the end of
Chapter xviii, as mere "aimless wandering," and as a place where the
"progressive tendencies" of Spinoza's thought are not visible.[38] For its
point is to argue that after the death of Moses
No one had all the functions of the supreme commander.
These things did not all depend on the decision of one
man, nor of one council, nor of the people, but some
were administered by one tribe, and others by the other tribes, with equal right for each
one. From this it follows most evidently that after Moses' death the state was neither
monarchical, nor aristocratic, nor popular. (TTP xvii.6o)
In the continuation of the passage quoted, Spinoza will
characterize this state as a theocracy, because of the central place which
religion held in it, but his political message appears more clearly in an
earlier passage in which he argues that, though from a religious point of view
the people of Israel were fellow citizens, "in relation to the right they
had against one another, they were only allies, in almost the same way as the Federated States of the
Netherlands are ...." (TTP XVII.54; emphasis added). The path to political stability lies in
constitutional arrangements which "contain both the rulers and the ruled
so that the ruled [do] not become rebels and the rulers [do] not become
tyrants" (TTP xvii.62; cf. TP vi.3 ).
There is a similar movement of thought in the final two
chapters of the Theological-Political Treatise. Chapter xix argues for a strongly
Hobbesian juridical position regarding the rights of the state concerning
religion:
[S]acred matters . . . are subject
only to the control of the supreme [secular] powers. Without
their authority or permission no one has the right or power to administer these things, to choose their ministers,
to determine . . . the foundations of the Church and its
doctrine, to judge concerning customs and the actions
of religious duty, to excommunicate someone or to receive someone into the Church, nor even, finally, to provide
for the poor. (TTP xix.39)
332 THE CAMBRIDGE
COMPANION TO SPINOZA
But Chapter xx undermines that Hobbesian position by
arguing that there are
necessary limits on the sovereign's power to control people's minds (TTP xx.1-6),
and hence on his right to do so (TTP xx.7). Even Moses, who was able to
persuade most of his people that he spoke by divine inspiration, was not able
to entirely avoid dissent and rebellion (TTP xx.5). Less charismatic leaders
must beware of trying for too much control over their subjects' minds and
tongues, lest they alienate their subjects and consequently destroy the power
they have, which depends on the willing obedience of their subjects. The best
state, judged purely by the criterion of stability, will be one which permits
its citizens a broad freedom to think as they like and to say what they think.
Though Spinoza often seems to be an extremely conservative political thinker,[39] the
emphasis he places on freedom is an important liberal element in his thought.
The most important point of
similarity between Spinoza and Machiavelli, however, lies in the preference
they both have for a form of republican government in which the people act as a
check on their leaders, a preference which readers of Machiavelli will not
learn about if they read only The
Prince. As I noted
above, Spinoza claims that there is
less reason to fear absurdities in a democratic state. This is reminiscent of Machiavelli's
claim that, although the people are apt to be unstable, ungrateful, and unwise,
princes are even more liable to these
faults: A prince who is able to do what he wishes, that is, who is unrestrained by laws, is
apt to behave like a madman, whereas a people which can do what it wishes is
apt merely to act unwisely (Discourses I.lviii). In Spinoza's case part of the explanation for this somewhat unexpected
optimism about the decisions of popular assemblies seems to be that in a large
population true madness is likely to
be found only among a minority, who will find it difficult to persuade the
majority to behave as the minority would (TTP xvi.30). But where power is
concentrated in the hands of one person, if that one person is mad, the
consequences can be disastrous.
But I suspect that Spinoza also felt
that a reading of history would show that if a ruler was not mad when he assumed power,
his possession of
absolute power was very apt to drive him mad. This certainly seems to be an
important theme in one of his favorite Roman historians. Consider the speech
Tacitus puts in the mouth of Lucius Arruntius, as he is about to commit
suicide, to escape punishment on trumped-up charges of adultery and disloyalty
to Tiberius:
Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan 333
I have lived long enough . . . I only regret that between
insults and dangers I have endured an anxious old age. . . . Certainly I might
survive the few days before Tiberius dies, but how will I avoid the youth of
his successor? If Tiberius, with
all his experience of affairs, has been subverted and transformed by the power of domination, will Gaius Caesar [Caligula] take a better course, when he is hardly out
of his boyhood, knows nothing, and has been trained by the worst people . . . ? I foresee an even more bitter
bondage, and so flee both
evils past and those to come. (Tacitus, Annals VI.xlviii; emphasis added)[40]
We lack Tacitus's account of the reign of Caligula, but
the corrupting effect of power
is a central theme in his work.[41]
Nero provides another example of the
same phenomenon, as Spinoza's contemporary, Racine, saw. Defending himself
against the conflicting accusations that in his Britannicus he had made Nero both too cruel and
too good, he wrote: "It is necessary only to have read Tacitus to know
that, if he was for a while a good emperor, he was always a very wicked man. . . . I have always
regarded him as a monster, but here
he is a nascent monster."[42]
Racine's play can be read as a case study in the effects of power on
personality: how the subservience of his subjects permits an autocratic ruler
to act on desires others
must repress, but how, in spite of his power, he must nevertheless be tormented by continual fear of rivals
and assassins.[43] Spinoza too is acutely aware of the dangers, both to the
ruler and to the ruled, when one man possesses
"absolute" power, though in his case they are
articulated in the abstractions of political theory, not in the concreteness of historical drama
(cf. TP vi.3, vii. I,14,27 ).
5. CONCLUSION
The fundamental question I have about Spinoza's political
philosophy is whether he is not too complacent about the limits of state
power. Alexandre Matheron seems to sum up Spinoza's position very well when he
writes: "If the people acquiesces in obeying a tyrant, whatever its reasons, so much
the worse for it. And so much the worse for the tyrant, if the people awakes, for a small minority, even well armed, can no longer do
anything, and hence has no right against a multitude unified by a common desire and no
longer re-strained by
fear."[44]
In our own time we might illustrate this proposition by citing the breakup of the Soviet Union and the
end of its
334 THE CAMBRIDGE
COMPANION TO SPINOZA
domination of Eastern Europe, or the rapid rise and fall
of Nazi Germany. Spinoza, lacking these examples, is fond of quoting Seneca's
observation that "no one has ever maintained a violent rule for
long."[45]
Perhaps tyrannical governments do inevitably destroy
themselves. If the power of autocratic rulers is as fragile as Spinoza seems to
think, [46]this
would seem likely. The question I have is whether such a dispassionate view of tyranny is
acceptable. A tyrant can do a great deal of harm even if his tyranny lasts only
a relatively short time, as the history of the Third Reich illustrates. And
Stalin's rule was not so very short. Does viewing things sub specie aeternitatis require us to accept the success of such governments so
long as they are able to maintain their power? If so, does being a good
Spinozist not require a level of detachment from individual human suffering
which is either superhuman or subhuman?[47]
In the Political
Treatise Spinoza
recognizes that a tyrannical government can be quite stable and long-lasting,
and he is apparently not so preoccupied with security that he is prepared to
approve of such a government simply for that reason. He writes:
No state has stood so long without any notable change as
that of the Turks, and, conversely, none has been less
lasting or more liable to civil strife than democratic or
popular states. But if slavery, barbarism, and desolation (solitudinem) are to be called peace, nothing is more miserable for men than peace . . . peace consists not merely in the absence of
war, but in a union or harmony of
minds. (TP vi.4)
This eloquently expresses a sentiment which I believe
many of us share. But does Spinoza's philosophy possess the theoretical
re-sources to condemn tyrannical governments as strongly as we would wish to?
Consider the classical passage to
which Spinoza is alluding here. The Agricola
is Tacitus's homage
to his father-in-law, the general who completed the Roman conquest of Britain.
It is a tribute to Tacitus's objectivity that, in the course of celebrating the
imperialist, he composes for the British leader, Calgacus, a biting condemnation
of the imperialism, culminating in the famous lines: "If the enemy is
rich, they [the Romans] are greedy; if he is poor, they are ambitious [for
power] . . . alone of all people they lust equally after both poverty and
riches. To robbery, slaughter and rapine they give
Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan 335
the lying
name of 'empire.' They make a wasteland (solitudinem),
and call it peace" (Agricola
30).[48] Part
of what gives this passage its force is the use of language which implies, not
merely that the Romans are making life miserable for the Britons, which would
no doubt be bad enough, but that they are
doing something even worse: violating their rights by taking from them
what is properly theirs, their lives, their
property, and their honor. If we cannot make sense of the idea that
people have a natural right to such things, then we seem to be handicapped in
the criticism we want to make of the Roman conduct (or of a tyrant's treatment
of his own people). That the notion of natural right (not coextensive with
power) disappears in Spinoza seems to me
still to be a defect in his political philosophy, sympathetic though I
may be to the arguments which lead to that result.