What is the relation of priority between authority and utility, the two terms of the epicurean dialectic? Does authority cause utility or is it the other way round? What comes first, authority or utility? Spinoza's conception of democracy stands or falls with this problematic. If authority means that which is impervious to argumentation and if democracy requires the freedom to decide about collective actions, then the priority of authority would suggest that democracy is merely a consequence of authority. It is not easy to reverse the relation, since what does it mean to have democracy before the instituted kind of power modelled on authority's structure of command and obedience? That is, how can we conceive of democracy before written law?

The relation between authority and utility may seem to mirror one of the major issues in the interpretation of the Theological Political Treatise, namely, whether the prosperity and well-being of the community and the state are ensured by obedience or reason. The vast majority of commentators on Spinoza's Treatise feel compelled to take either side. As I suggested in the Introduction, I present the relation of authority and utility as a dialectic to bypass the disjunction of – or, differently put, to overcome the false binary of – either obedience or reason. Nonetheless, the dialectical relation cannot evade the problematic of what comes first, authority or utility.

Let me highlight some of the complexities of this problematic via Michel Foucault. He develops a theory of power understood as something constructed, as potestas, which in Foucault's terms includes what we call authority here. It is fundamental to this theory that there is no power as such, but it is rather always accompanied by resistance. His approach consists, as he puts it in his essay ‘The Subject and Power’, in