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‑

 

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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,

 

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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

 

 

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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

 

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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

 

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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

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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

 

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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

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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,

 

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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

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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

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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

 

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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

 

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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

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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

 

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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)

 

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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:

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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

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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.



[1] From the Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. by Don Garrett, 1996, pp. 315-343.

[2] The New Republic, 16 December 1972, page 21. Regrettably Ms. Fallaci did not follow up by asking Dr. Kissinger which aspects of Spinoza's (or Kant's) thought had influenced him. There is, of course, some question as to whether the printed interview corresponds to what Kissinger actually said on the occasion. See Walter Isaacson, Kissinger, Simon and Schuster, 1992, page 478. But I see no reason to question this part of the interview.

[3] Machiavelli's influence on Spinoza has been emphasized both in McShea 1968, and Stanley Rosen, in his contribution to Cropsey and Strauss 1981. The most thorough study is Calvetti 1972.

[4] I.e., Anglo-American philosophers do not know Spinoza as a political thinker, particularly if their knowledge of the history of political thought is derived from works like Sabine's influential A History of Political Theory (4th edition, rev. by T. L. Thorson, Dryden Press, 1973), where he is barely mentioned.

[5] The Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) was Spinoza's first political work, published anonymously in 1670, with false information about the publisher and the place of publication. It aroused a great storm of protest, mainly because of the theological portions of the work, which encouraged skepticism about miracles, prophecy, and the authority of scripture. At his death Spinoza was at work on a purely political treatise, the Tractatus politicus (TP), which was published in an unfinished state in his Opera Posthuma (1677). Translations from Spinoza's political works are mine, from the forthcoming second volume of my Collected Works of Spinoza, Princeton University Press. I use the Bruder section numbers for references to the Theological-Political Treatise.

For a comparable passage in Hobbes, see Leviathan xiii. In compari­sons with Hobbes I will cite either De Cive (which we know Spinoza owned a copy of) or Leviathan (which some scholars think he never read), as convenience dictates. Leviathan was translated into Dutch in 1667, by Abraham van Berkel, a member of the "Spinoza circle" who saw its argument for the indivisibility of sovereignty as supporting the De Witts in their controversy with the House of Orange, which had traditionally claimed executive and military power (see Secretan 1987). It was available in Latin by 1668. I think it virtually certain that Spinoza knew Leviathan at least by the time he was composing the final draft of the Theological-Political Treatise. I abbreviate Leviathan as L, and cite it by chapter and paragraph. I abbreviate De Cive as DCv, and cite by chapter and section. The edition of Leviathan which I recently pub­lished with Hackett (1994) indicates the major differences between the English and Latin editions of Leviathan.

[6] Cf. Theological-Political Treatise xvi.2—4. For the distinction between weaker and stronger senses of right (jus), cf. Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis, I.i.3—4. Comparable passages in Hobbes would be L xiv.4, though Hobbes does not use the language of natural rights in connection with animals, and apparently grounds the natural right of every man to every thing on the right of self-preservation (L xiv. r ). There will be more on this below.

[7] This seems a reasonable inference from his account of what people are like in civil society. See particularly Chapters xv—xix of The Prince (Machiavelli). I have discussed this in Curley 1991a.

[8] Relevant here is a controversial sentence in the final paragraph of Chap-ter xviii of Machiavelli's Prince: "In the actions of all men, and espe­cially of princes, who are not subject to a court of appeal, always look to the end" (Machiavelli 1992: 49). I take this to imply: (a) that whatever standards of behavior apply to princes apply to anyone similarly situ­ated, i.e., to anyone not subject to a sovereign capable of adjudicating disputes, and hence, to human beings in a state of nature; (b) that although the sentence is descriptive, not prescriptive, it does indicate that Machiavelli believes that people will generally apply a consequentialist standard to human behavior. That Machiavelli would endorse the use of such consequentialist standards seems clear from Discourses I.ix (to be discussed below).

[9] Presumably his consequentialism would also imply the legitimacy of discouraging forms of religion which may be harmful to the state (as he appears to think that Christianity is, in Discourses Il.ii).

[10] Cf. Social Contract I.viii: "freedom is obedience to a law one prescribes to oneself." But in Rousseau this freedom appears to be consequent on membership in any legitimate civil society, whether the form of govern­ment is democratic or not. In fact Rousseau seems to have thought that as a form of government democracy was fit only for gods, not for men (cf. the Social Contract III.iv) and that the best form of government was an aristocracy (Lettres écrites de la montagne vi; III,808–9 of the Pléiade edition). It is against the natural order that the greater number should govern and the smaller number be governed. In Machiavelli the contrast is not democracy vs. monarchy or aristocracy, but republican or popular government vs. princely rule, and the assumption is that there is more freedom in republican government. Cf. Discourses I.iv–v, I.xvi–xviii, and II.ii.

[11] Cf. DCv x.8, for an attack on the view that there is more liberty in a democracy than in a monarchy.

[12] Cf., for example, Theological-Political Treatise xvii.13—i6, or Political Treatise i.5.

[13] For a suggestive treatment of these issues, see Ryan 1983.

[14] Cf. Negri 1991. Though I accept Negri's phrase, I reject what he seems to mean by it: "that in posing spes against metus, libertas against su­perstitio, the republic against the monarchical absolute, Spinoza proposes and renews concepts that the entire century is moving against" (page 122). To see Spinoza as standing in romantic isolation against the dominant intellectual tendencies of his century is to neglect the strength of the contemporary republican tradition (here see Mulier 1980) and to ignore the extent to which Hobbes anticipates Spinoza's critique of revelation (on which, see Curley 1992).

[15] Cf. the famous statement in Letter 50: "As far as politics is concerned, the difference between myself and Hobbes, which you ask about, consists in this: that I always keep natural right intact, and that I maintain that in any state whatever, the supreme magistrate has no more right over his subjects than he has an excess of power over them, which is always the situation in the state of nature." Similarly in the Political Treatise iii.3: "the right of nature does not cease in the civil order."

[16] In what follows I partly rely on (and partly, I hope, improve on) things I have said in more detail in two recent articles: Curley 1990, and Curley 1991b.

[17] In the comparable passage in De Cive (DCv i.7–10) Hobbes deals with this by arguing that the right to preserve yourself entails a right to judge what means are necessary to self-preservation. But even this seems to require, as a condition for my rightfully taking, say, the life of an un­armed prisoner, that I believe, in good faith, that he is a danger to my preservation. Perhaps that is why Hobbes drops this line of defense in Leviathan. Cf. Hobbes's Elements of Law I.xix.2, and my discussion of this and other passages in Curley 1991b. See also the useful discussions in Spinoza 1958: 13-14 and Den Uyl 1983: 11-14.

[18] As Hobbes will argue in L xx.11. In "Of Liberty and Necessity" Hobbes says that "Power irresistible justifies all actions, really and properly, in whomsoever it be found; less power does not, and because such power is in God only, he must needs be just in all actions, and we, that not comprehending his counsels, call him to the bar, commit injustice in it" (English Works IV, 250). In Leviathan (xxxi.5) Hobbes does not explicitly deny that any man's power can be irresistible, but he does treat the hypothesis as counterfactual ("if there had been any man of power irre­sistible . . . "). By contrast, in DCv i.14 and in the Elements of Law (I.xiv.13), Hobbes understands the notion of irresistible power in such a way that a man can possess it (e.g., when the other person is an infant or temporarily indisposed). I think, then, that Matheron is wrong to say that Hobbes does not make any use, even surreptitiously, of the maxim that might makes right (Matheron 1985, see particularly page 151).

[19] Cf. Alexandre Matheron in Matheron 1969: 290.

[20] I have discussed this in much more detail in Curley 1991b. Also inter­esting in this connection is Pufendorf's critique of Spinoza in De jure naturae et gentium (II.ii.3, and III.iv.4), which I have discussed in an article to appear in the proceedings of the Cortona conference on the reception of the Theological-Political Treatise, edited by Paolo Cristof­olini. One point Pufendorf sharply criticizes is Spinoza's identification of the power of nature with the power of God.

[21] Note that Spinoza begins Chapter iv by distinguishing between laws which describe how all or some members of a species act and laws which prescribe a certain kind of conduct. Only the latter are properly called laws. It is an interesting question how far the assumption that only commands are properly called laws was common in the natural law tradition. Certainly Hobbes and Suarez make this assumption (cf. Levia­than xxvi.2 and xv.41; and De legibus II.vi). And Suarez claims to be following Aquinas, who had defined law as "a rule and measure of acts, whereby man is induced to act or is restrained from acting" (Summa theologiae I-ILxc.i [Aquinas 1964-6]). This suggests a prescription of some kind (if not a command, then a counsel). But by using the natural inclinations of creatures as a guide to what they ought to do, Aquinas arguably confuses the descriptive with the prescriptive (cf. Summa, I­II.94.2). This may be why Spinoza insists so strongly on distinguishing them. Again, if a command must proceed from a superior to an inferior (as Suarez argues, De legibus I.xxi.4), and if natural law is binding on God (as Grotius contends, in De jure belli ac pacis I.i.10), presumably it cannot be essential to natural law that it be a command. So far as I can see, the tradition does not speak with one voice on this issue, which may limit the effectiveness of Spinoza's argument.

[22] Ecclesiastes 9:1-3, cited twice in the Theological-Political Treatise, at V1.32, and in XIX.7.

[23] The phrase is Douglas Den Uyl's, in Den Uyl 1983: 7.

[24] See Curley 1973.

[25] I take it to be significant that the escape clause is omitted in the Latin Leviathan and even in a subsequent reference back to this passage in the English Leviathan (L xxvi.8).

[26] McShea is right to point out (McShea 1968: 167), however, that this statement about promises occurs in the context of a philosophy which makes the knowledge and love of God the highest good. (Cf. Ethics 4p28 and Theological-Political Treatise iv.9-16.)

[27] See, for example, Spinoza 1958: 25-7. We might also class Alexandre Matheron with Wernham, on the strength of his discussion in Matheron 1969: 307-30. But a subsequent article on this topic makes it clear that Matheron does not intend his theory to address the issue of the legiti­macy of the state, but only the issue of its historical origin. See Matheron 1990.

[28] My interpretation of Hobbes here is much influenced by the work of Quentin Skinner, e.g., Skinner 1974.

[29] I have discussed these issues in more detail in Curley 1990, Section 4.

[30] This may be unfair to Machiavelli. Chapter xvii of The Prince advises that it is hard to be both loved and feared, and that if forced to choose, a prince should prefer being feared to being loved. But Chapter xix counterbalances this with the advice that a prince need not worry too much about conspiracies "as long as his people are devoted to him; but when they are hostile, and feel hatred toward him, he should fear everything and everybody." Machiavelli concludes that one of the most important of a prince's concerns is "to keep the aristocracy from des­peration and to satisfy the populace by making them happy" (Machiavelli 1992: 51; cf. TP vii.12,14 — passages which contain several allusions to Tacitus).

[31] So I agree with Matheron when he writes "Spinoza always thought that the existence and legitimacy of political society derive, ulti­mately, from the consent of the subjects; if you wish to call that 'contract,' he was always a contractualist [not only in the Theological-Political Treatise, but even in the Political Treatise] . . . if you wish to call 'contractualism' the doctrine according to which the conclusion of an agreement would give rise, by itself alone, independently of any subsequent variation in the relations of forces, to an irreversible obliga­tion, he was never a contractualist not only in the Political Treatise, but even in the Theological-Political Treatise]" (Matheron 1990: 258). The contractualism Matheron is interested in is a theory according to which (questions of legitimacy to one side) political society is in fact founded in a historically actual state of nature, by a deliberate, ra­tional, collective decision, and not by a dynamic process involving the interplay of the passions, in which the imitation of the affects plays a key role. This is the contractualism he finds in the Theological-Political Treatise, and not in the Political Treatise. At the moment I am not persuaded that Matheron is right to find the evolution he claims, since it seems to me that Spinoza is quite pessimistic about human rationality even in the Theological-Political Treatise (cf. TTP xvii.14–16). My main point is that Hobbes sometimes inclines toward a contractualism of the kind which (according to Matheron) Spinoza always embraced. Hobbes is not always a contractualist of the kind Spinoza never was.

[32] Kissinger does not hesitate to characterize Bismarck's approach to poli­tics as Machiavellian (page 906), though he also reports that Bismarck was a great reader of Spinoza (page 894). Did the influence of Spinoza on Kissinger really make it "peculiar" for Ms. Fallaci to associate him with Machiavelli?

[33] An example is the interpretation of Walzer 1973 (specifically, pages 175-6). Cf. Isaiah Berlin: "It is important to realise that Machiavelli does not wish to deny that what Christians call good is, in fact, good, that what they call virtue and vice are in fact virtue and vice" (Berlin 1982: 46). Berlin's Machiavelli does, nevertheless, reject Christian ethics in favor of a rival ("Roman or classical") morality (page 54)

[34] Berlin tacitly recognizes this when, in paraphrasing this passage, he consistently puts the term "excuse" in single quotes: "The end 'excuses' the means, however horrible these may be in terms of even pagan ethics, if it is (in terms of the ideals of Thucydides or Polybius, Cicero or Livy) lofty enough. Brutus was right to kill his children: he saved Rome" (Berlin 1982: 64; cf. page 62). Another symptom of this is the fact that Walker feels obliged to use the term "justify" for "scusare" in this passage (Machiavelli 1975: 132).

[35] As Leo Strauss argued, in Strauss 1984:11.

[36] It seems a curious fact that Hobbes never mentions Machiavelli. (At any rate, there is no entry for Machiavelli in Molesworth's indices of either the English or the Latin works.) We might suppose that this was because of Machiavelli's reputation. But Francis Bacon (whom Hobbes served for a while as secretary) was not afraid to praise Machiavelli:

We are much beholden to Machiavelli and other writers of that class, who openly and unfeignedly declare or describe what men do, and not what they ought to do. For it is not possible to join the wisdom of the serpent with the innocence of the dove, except men be perfectly ac­quainted with the nature of evil itself. (From De augmentis scientiarum VII.ii, translated by F. R. Headlam, cited by Adams in the Norton Criti­cal Edition of The Prince, page 270)

Spinoza is generous in his praise of Machiavelli (TP v.7, x.1).

[37] Cf. Hampton 1986 Chapters vii–viii, and my discussion of her book in Curley 1990: 205–11.

[38] The phrases are Negri's, Negri 1991: 116-17. Haitsma Mulier is very helpful on this theme. Cf. Mulier 1980: 181—5.

[39] As when he argues in Theological-Political Treatise xviii.28–37 (in the manner of Machiavelli) that it is extremely dangerous for any state to attempt a fundamental change in its form of government, moving either from a republican form of government to a monarchy or vice versa. Cf. The Prince, Chapter v.

[40] I have given a conservative, literal translation of this passage, but Mi­chael Grant's freer translation of the italicized clause would suit my purposes even better: "If Tiberius, in spite of all his experience, has been transformed and deranged by absolute power . . ." (Tacitus 1989: 225). On Tacitus's overall influence on Spinoza, see Wirszubski 1955. I am indebted for this reference to F. Akkerman, "Spinozas Tekort aan Woorden," in Akkerman 1980.

[41] Cf. his comment on Vespasian in The Histories I.1: "He alone, unlike all the emperors before him, was changed for the better by his office]."

[42] Preface to the first edition, 1670, Théâtre complet, Garnier, page 254.

[43] I suggest that Racine believes Nero's decline to be inevitable, once he takes the fatal step of murdering his half-brother (and potential rival for power), Britannicus. He conveys this by presenting Nero at an early, comparatively innocent stage of his reign, and having both Burrus and Agrippina predict, with prophetic accuracy, his future crimes and ulti­mate suicide. Cf. II.1337–76, 1673–94. This is similar to the effect of the speech Tacitus composes for Lucius Arruntius, predicting the corruption of Caligula.

[44] Matheron 1985: 176. I note that Kissinger expressed a similar view in his analysis of the situation in Europe in the early nineteenth century: "The Napoleonic Empire for all its extent demonstrated . . . the tenuousness of a conquest not accepted by the subjugated people" (A World Restored:Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-1822, Houghton Mifflin, page 4; cf. page 21). In Kissinger 1968, Kissinger makes an analogous point at the level of international relations: "The stability of any international system depends on at least two factors: the degree to which its components feel secure and the extent to which they agree on the 'justice' or 'fairness' of existing arrangements" (pages 899-900).

[45] The quotation is from the Troades 258-9, and is used by Spinoza in Theological-Political Treatise v.22, and xvi.29.

[46] Cf. particularly Theological-Political Treatise vii.12,14. The latter passage is particularly interesting for its use of Tacitus (Histories I.xxv) to illustrate the proposition that once political power has been vested en­tirely in one man, it is all the easier to transfer it to another. Spinoza cites the same passage in a note he added to Theological-Political Trea­tise xvii.3.

[47] As Aristotle says that any man must be who is capable by nature of living outside any political community (Politics 1253a1-3).

[48] Spinoza also alludes to this passage in Political Treatise V.4. Stanley Karnow took the famous line "solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant" as the motto for his history of Vietnam (Vietnam, a History, New York: Viking Press, 1983).