Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza

Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza PDF Author: Filippo Del Lucchese
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441153799
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Get Book Here

Book Description
Conflict, Power and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza explores Spinoza's political philosophy by confronting it with that of Niccolò Machiavelli. Filippo Del Lucchese conducts a study of the relationship between Machiavelli and Spinoza from a perspective at once philosophical, historical and political. The book begins by showing how closely tied the two thinkers are in relation to realism. Del Lucchese then goes on to examine the theme of conflict as a crucial element of an understanding of Machiavelli and Spinoza's conceptions of modernity. The book concludes with an examination of the concept of 'multiplicity' and 'plural' expressions of politics, namely Machiavelli's popolo and Spinoza's multitudo. Overall, the Machiavelli-Spinoza axis offers a fruitful perspective through which to analyse the relationship between contending ideas of modernity from a historical point of view, and provides an original point of departure for discussing some key theoretical, political and juridical notions that have resurfaced in contemporary debates.

Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza

Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza PDF Author: Filippo Del Lucchese
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441153799
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Get Book Here

Book Description
Conflict, Power and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza explores Spinoza's political philosophy by confronting it with that of Niccolò Machiavelli. Filippo Del Lucchese conducts a study of the relationship between Machiavelli and Spinoza from a perspective at once philosophical, historical and political. The book begins by showing how closely tied the two thinkers are in relation to realism. Del Lucchese then goes on to examine the theme of conflict as a crucial element of an understanding of Machiavelli and Spinoza's conceptions of modernity. The book concludes with an examination of the concept of 'multiplicity' and 'plural' expressions of politics, namely Machiavelli's popolo and Spinoza's multitudo. Overall, the Machiavelli-Spinoza axis offers a fruitful perspective through which to analyse the relationship between contending ideas of modernity from a historical point of view, and provides an original point of departure for discussing some key theoretical, political and juridical notions that have resurfaced in contemporary debates.

Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence

Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence PDF Author: Yves Winter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108580718
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Get Book Here

Book Description
Niccolò Machiavelli is the most prominent and notorious theorist of violence in the history of European political thought - prominent, because he is the first to candidly discuss the role of violence in politics; and notorious, because he treats violence as virtue rather than as vice. In this original interpretation, Yves Winter reconstructs Machiavelli's theory of violence and shows how it challenges moral and metaphysical ideas. Winter attributes two central theses to Machiavelli: first, violence is not a generic technology of government but a strategy that tends to correlate with inequality and class conflict; and second, violence is best understood not in terms of conventional notions of law enforcement, coercion, or the proverbial 'last resort', but as performance. Most political violence is effective not because it physically compels another agent who is thus coerced; rather, it produces political effects by appealing to an audience. As such, this book shows how in Machiavelli's world, violence is designed to be perceived, experienced, remembered, and narrated.

Spinoza's Political Psychology

Spinoza's Political Psychology PDF Author: Justin Steinberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108577695
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book Here

Book Description
Spinoza's Political Psychology advances a novel, comprehensive interpretation of Spinoza's political writings, exploring how his analysis of psychology informs his arguments for democracy and toleration. Justin Steinberg shows how Spinoza's political method resembles the Renaissance civic humanism in its view of governance as an adaptive craft that requires psychological attunement. He examines the ways that Spinoza deploys this realist method in the service of empowerment, suggesting that the state can affectively reorient and thereby liberate its citizens, but only if it attends to their actual motivational and epistemic capacities. His book will interest a range of readers in Spinoza studies and the history of political thought, as well as readers working in contemporary political theory.

Spinoza's Authority Volume II

Spinoza's Authority Volume II PDF Author: A. Kiarina Kordela
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350011053
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
Spinoza's political thought has been subject to a significant revival of interest in recent years. As a response to difficult times, students and scholars have returned to this founding figure of modern philosophy as a means to help reinterpret and rethink the political present. Spinoza's Authority Volume II makes a significant contribution to this ongoing reception and utilization of Spinoza's 1670s Theologico-Political and Political treatises. By taking the concept of authority as an original framework, this books asks: How is authority related to law, memory, and conflict in Spinoza's political thought? What are the social, historical and representational processes that produce authority and resistance? And what are the conditions of effective resistance? Spinoza's Authority Volume II features a roster of internationally established theorists of Spinoza's work, and covers key elements of Spinoza's political philosophy.

Spinoza’s Authority Volume I

Spinoza’s Authority Volume I PDF Author: A. Kiarina Kordela
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472593219
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Get Book Here

Book Description
Spinoza's political thought has been subject to a significant revival of interest in recent years. As a response to difficult times, students and scholars have returned to this founding figure of modern philosophy as a means to help reinterpret and rethink the political present. Spinoza's Authority Volume I: Resistance and Power in Ethics makes a significant contribution to this ongoing reception and utilization of Spinoza's political thought by focusing on his posthumously published Ethics. By taking the concept of authority as an original framework, this books asks: How is authority related to ethics, ontology, and epistemology? What are the social, historical and representational processes that produce authority and resistance? And what are the conditions of effective resistance? Spinoza's Authority features a roster of internationally established theorists of Spinoza's work, and covers key elements of Spinoza's political philosophy, including: questions of authority, the resistance to authority, sovereign power, democratic control, and the role of Spinoza's "multitudes".

Becoming Political

Becoming Political PDF Author: Christopher Skeaff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022655550X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this pathbreaking work, Christopher Skeaff argues that a profoundly democratic conception of judgment is at the heart of Spinoza’s thought. Bridging Continental and Anglo-American scholarship, critical theory, and Spinoza studies, Becoming Political offers a historically sensitive, meticulous, and creative interpretation of Spinoza’s texts that reveals judgment as the communal element by which people generate power to resist domination and reconfigure the terms of their political association. If, for Spinoza, judging is the activity which makes a people powerful, it is because it enables them to contest the project of ruling and demonstrate the political possibility of being equally free to articulate the terms of their association. This proposition differs from a predominant contemporary line of argument that treats the people’s judgment as a vehicle of sovereignty—a means of defining and refining the common will. By recuperating in Spinoza’s thought a “vital republicanism,” Skeaff illuminates a line of political thinking that decouples democracy from the majoritarian aspiration to rule and aligns it instead with the project of becoming free and equal judges of common affairs. As such, this decoupling raises questions that ordinarily go unasked: what calls for political judgment, and who is to judge? In Spinoza’s vital republicanism, the political potential of life and law finds an affirmative relationship that signals the way toward a new constitutionalism and jurisprudence of the common.

Spinoza, the Epicurean

Spinoza, the Epicurean PDF Author: Dimitris Vardoulakis
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474476074
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
By radically re-reading the 'Theological Political Treatise', Dimitris Vardoulakis argues that Spinoza's Epicurean influence has profound implications for his conception of politics and ontology. This reconsideration of Spinoza's political project, set within a historical context, lays the ground for an alternative genealogy of materialism.

Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation

Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation PDF Author: Christopher Holman
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487519109
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
Presenting a detailed reinterpretation and reconstruction of the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation uses original readings of Machiavelli’s texts to develop a new theoretical model of democratic practice. The book critically and creatively juxtaposes certain concepts drawn from Machiavelli’s work in order to produce new political insights. Christopher Holman identifies two unique ideas in Machiavelli through his rearrangement of Machiavellian concepts. The first, drawn primarily from The Prince, is an image of the individual human being as a creative subject that seeks the exteriorization of desire via political creation. The second, drawn primarily from The Discourses on Livy, is an image of the democratic republic as a form of regime in which this desire for creative self-expression is universalized, all citizens being able to affirm their psychic orientation toward innovation through their equal access to political institutions and orders. Such institutions and orders, to the extent that they function as media for the expression of a fundamental human creativity, must be arranged so that they are capable of continual interrogation and refinement. In the final instance, a new ethical ground for the normative defense of democratic life is constructed, one grounded in the orientation of individual beings toward novelty and innovation.

Spinoza

Spinoza PDF Author: Andre Santos Campos
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1845408896
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book Here

Book Description
Spinoza is among the most pivotal thinkers in the history of philosophy. He has had a deep and enduring influence on a wide range of philosophical subjects, and his work is encountered by all serious students of Western philosophy. His Ethics is one of the seminal works of metaphysical, moral, religious and political thought; his Theological-Political Treatise inaugurated a novel method of biblical exegesis; and both his political works developed the pre-eminence of democracy above all other regimes. Nevertheless, the significance of Spinoza's philosophy is matched by its complexity. His system presents a considerable challenge for the modern student; his language is frequently opaque, while the esoteric themes explored in his work often require elucidation. Spinoza: Basic Concepts intends to overcome most of such difficulties. Each essay in this collection explores a key concept involved in Spinoza's thinking, relating it to his understanding of philosophy, outlining the arguments and explaining the implications of each concept. Together, the chapters cover the full range of Spinoza's interdisciplinary system of philosophy.

Potentia

Potentia PDF Author: Sandra Leonie Field
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197528260
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
We live in an age of growing dissatisfaction with the standard operations of representative democracy. The solution, according to a long radical democratic tradition, is the unmediated power of the people. Mass plebiscites and mass protest movements are celebrated as the quintessential expression of popular power, and this power promises to transcend ordinary institutional politics. But the outcomes of mass political phenomena can be just as disappointing as the ordinary politics they sought to overcome, breeding skepticism about democratic politics in all its forms. Potentia argues that the very meaning of popular power needs to be rethought. It offers a detailed study of the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza, focusing on their concept of power as potentia, concrete power, rather than power as potestas, authorized power. Specifically, the book's argument turns on a new interpretation of potentia as a capacity that is dynamically constituted in a web of actual human relations. This means that a group's potentia reflects any hostility or hierarchy present in the relations between its members. There is nothing spontaneously egalitarian or good about human collective existence; a group's power deserves to be called popular only if it avoids oligarchy and instead durably establishes its members' equality. Where radical democrats interpret Hobbes' "sleeping sovereign" or Spinoza's "multitude" as the classic formulations of unmediated popular power, Sandra Leonie Field argues that for both Hobbes and Spinoza, conscious institutional design is required in order for true popular power to be achieved. Between Hobbes' commitment to repressing private power and Spinoza's exploration of civic strengthening, Field draws on early modern understandings of popular power to provide a new lens for thinking about the risks and promise of democracy.