Power and the Multitude : A Spinozist View

Kwek, Dorothy H. B

Power and the Multitude : A Spinozist View

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Kwek_0-288278.pdfGröße: 426.03 KBDownloads: 691

Datum

2015

Open Access-Veröffentlichung

Open Access Green

Sammlungen

Geschichte

Publikationstyp

Zeitschriftenartikel

Publikationsstatus

Published

Erschienen in

Political Theory. 2015, 43(2), pp. 155-184. ISSN 0090-5917. eISSN 1552-7476. Available under: doi: 10.1177/0090591714537080

Zusammenfassung

Benedict Spinoza (1634–1677) is feted as the philosopher par excellence of the popular democratic multitude by Antonio Negri and others. But Spinoza himself expresses a marked ambivalence about the multitude in brief asides, and as for his thoughts on what he calls “the rule of (the) multitude,” that is, democracy, these exist only as meager fragments in his unfinished Tractatus Politicus or Political Treatise. This essay addresses the problem of Spinoza’s multitude. First, I reconstruct a vision of power that is found in the Ethics but that tends to be overlooked in the scholarly literature: power is not just sheer efficacy or imposition of will, but rather involves a capacity for being-affected; I call this the conception of power as sensitivity. The second part of my argument shows how, given Spinoza’s emphatic political naturalism, the conception of power as sensitivity can be extended to his political philosophy to shed light on what Spinoza calls potentia multitudinis, or “the power of the multitude”—a term found solely in the Political Treatise and nowhere else in his oeuvre. This juxtaposition reveals significant qualifications to the liberatory potential of the multitude currently claimed in the scholarly literature.

Fachgebiet (DDC)

900 Geschichte

Schlagwörter

Spinoza, multitude, power, Political Treatise, receptivity, ethics

Zitieren

ISO 690

KWEK, Dorothy H. B, 2015. Power and the Multitude : A Spinozist View. In: Political Theory. 2015, 43(2), pp. 155-184. ISSN 0090-5917. eISSN 1552-7476. Available under: doi: 10.1177/0090591714537080

BibTex

@article{Kwek2015Power-31294,
  year={2015},
  doi={10.1177/0090591714537080},
  title={Power and the Multitude : A Spinozist View},
  number={2},
  volume={43},
  issn={0090-5917},
  journal={Political Theory},
  pages={155--184},
  author={Kwek, Dorothy H. B}
}

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