Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Notes on Translation and Acknowledgements
- A Revolutionary Beatitude: Alexandre Matheron’s Spinozism
- I Spinoza on Ontology and Knowledge
- 1 Idea, Idea of the Idea and Certainty in the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione and the Ethics
- 2 Essence, Existence and Power in Part I of the Ethics: The Foundations of Proposition 16
- 3 Physics and Ontology in Spinoza: The Enigmatic Response to Tschirnhaus
- 4 The Year 1663 and the Spinozist Identity of Being and Power: Hypothesis on a Development
- 5 Eternal Life and the Body According to Spinoza
- 6 Intellectual Love of God, Eternal Part of the amor erga Deum
- II Spinoza on Politics and Ethics
- 7 State and Morality According to Spinoza
- 8 Ethics and Politics in Spinoza (Remarks on the Role of Ethics IV, 37 Scholium 2)
- 9 Indignation and the Conatus of the Spinozist State
- 10 Passions and Institutions According to Spinoza
- 11 The Problem of Spinoza's Evolution: From the Theologico-Political Treatise to the Political Treatise
- 12 Is the State, According to Spinoza, an Individual in Spinoza’s Sense?
- 13 The Ontological Status of Scripture and the Spinozist Doctrine of Individuality
- 14 Spinoza and Power
- 15 Spinoza and Property
- 16 Spinoza and Sexuality
- 17 Women and Servants in Spinozist Democracy
- 18 The ‘Right of the Stronger’: Hobbes contra Spinoza
- 19 The Theoretical Function of Democracy in Spinoza and Hobbes
- 20 Spinoza and the Breakdown of Thomist Politics: Machiavellianism and Utopia
- Appendix 1 Interview with Laurent Bove and Pierre-François Moreau
- Appendix 2 Chronology of Works by Matheron
- Works Cited
- Index
17 - Women and Servants in Spinozist Democracy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Notes on Translation and Acknowledgements
- A Revolutionary Beatitude: Alexandre Matheron’s Spinozism
- I Spinoza on Ontology and Knowledge
- 1 Idea, Idea of the Idea and Certainty in the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione and the Ethics
- 2 Essence, Existence and Power in Part I of the Ethics: The Foundations of Proposition 16
- 3 Physics and Ontology in Spinoza: The Enigmatic Response to Tschirnhaus
- 4 The Year 1663 and the Spinozist Identity of Being and Power: Hypothesis on a Development
- 5 Eternal Life and the Body According to Spinoza
- 6 Intellectual Love of God, Eternal Part of the amor erga Deum
- II Spinoza on Politics and Ethics
- 7 State and Morality According to Spinoza
- 8 Ethics and Politics in Spinoza (Remarks on the Role of Ethics IV, 37 Scholium 2)
- 9 Indignation and the Conatus of the Spinozist State
- 10 Passions and Institutions According to Spinoza
- 11 The Problem of Spinoza's Evolution: From the Theologico-Political Treatise to the Political Treatise
- 12 Is the State, According to Spinoza, an Individual in Spinoza’s Sense?
- 13 The Ontological Status of Scripture and the Spinozist Doctrine of Individuality
- 14 Spinoza and Power
- 15 Spinoza and Property
- 16 Spinoza and Sexuality
- 17 Women and Servants in Spinozist Democracy
- 18 The ‘Right of the Stronger’: Hobbes contra Spinoza
- 19 The Theoretical Function of Democracy in Spinoza and Hobbes
- 20 Spinoza and the Breakdown of Thomist Politics: Machiavellianism and Utopia
- Appendix 1 Interview with Laurent Bove and Pierre-François Moreau
- Appendix 2 Chronology of Works by Matheron
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
It is significant, it is often said, that the drafting of the Political Treatise was interrupted precisely at Chapter XI: it is as if, crushed by the aporias of an inconsistent theory of democracy, Spinoza had given up. And we are indeed in the presence, if not of a contradiction, at least of an apparent paradox. In the ideal Spinozist monarchy, the king's council had to include representatives of all of the categories of citizens, but it was added, without any justification, that certain inhabitants are unable to belong to the civic body: in addition to foreigners, fugitives from justice, the mute and the mad, servants and other such individuals are to be excluded. In the ideal aristocracy, again without the slightest justification, the same people are stripped of the right to present their candidacy for the assembly of patricians;if the mute and the mad were no longer mentioned, we must allow that this was undoubtedly an oversight. As for the ideal democracy, which, however, we were told would be studied in the broadest possible form, the only thing we ultimately learn about it is that the same exclusions are maintained more or less as such; the exclusion of women and children is added, but it is clear enough that it was implicit in the two preceding constitutions. Spinoza, this time, agrees at last to explain himself; he even does so rather extensively concerning women. But his explanation seems at first so weak, so flat, exhibiting an empiricism and a conformism so foreign to the usual inspiration of the doctrine, that one believes one understands both why he had waited so long to give us an explanation and why he was unable to continue: bad conscience, one might be tempted to think; a confused feeling of an irreducible discordance between what the principles would have made it possible to rigorously deduce, and the extra-philosophical necessities that imposed the obligation to deduce them. The situation is banal, and many have become accustomed to it; at least Spinoza had the integrity to stop there and just die!
Perhaps. But perhaps it would also be worth not deciding so quickly, on Spinoza's behalf, on what is implied in the principles of his politics. That his politics, in a sense, is of a fundamentally democratic inspiration, is hardly contestable; but the whole question is of knowing in what sense.
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- Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza , pp. 260 - 279Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020