THE GROUNDING OF THE POLITICAL STATE IN SPINOZA

Abstract

It still seizes our attention that an author considered in his time as subversive and who was expelled from his community, is after all the creator of the limits to the political state. It seems he should have been the destroyer of all order when he is precisely the one who inspired an order but limited. His conception of the political state does not mean, as it does in Hobbes, abandoning the state of nature but rather the metamorphosis of the latter into the former, since what was modified, the natural state, remains in the modified, the political state. He recognises uniquely that to the extent in which it is not possible to ensure our survival in the natural state alone, therefore it requires the institutionalisation of the political state, although this cannot be built by breaking with the reason for its creation which is none other than ensuring our physical survival, the increase in our wealth and the generation of the conditions that make the cultivation of reason possible.

The ideas of an author like Spinoza were relevant to resolve the problem of the grounding of the state from the beginning of modernity. His presence in Western legal political thought is impressive, he is from the outset, with Hobbes, but contrary to Hobbes, and moreover highlighting the inadequacy of the central core of Hobbes’ argumentation, so that for Spinoza freedom of thought demanded freedom of expression. From then on he will always be with us, although in a larva-like manner, as every time that they approach to justify the legal-political order in some way or other, the shade of Spinoza can be glimpsed. Spinoza outlines the modern order, he traces it, although it is also true that from that very moment they try to forget him, in the sense that the majority of main authors, Kant and Hegel for example, although they do not curb his proposal, however at times one may think that they do, what is certain is that they did not develop what Spinoza leaves in blossom.