It might seem that nothing is more straightforward than the first two paragraphs of Chapter I of the Political Treatise. Spinoza, rejecting his predecessors wholesale, divides them into two groups: the philosophers, on the one hand, whose many theories have as a common denominator their being perfectly inapplicable; and the ‘politicians’ on the other hand, who, without any theory, knew how to draw from their own practice a certain number of lessons that were very pertinent but too limited in scope. And his ambition, proclaimed in the next five paragraphs, is to present for the first time a theory that would be adequate to practice. A banal pretension, it might be said: what political thinker did not propose to overcome the opposition between a doctrinaire irrealism and an unprincipled empiricism? But there are a thousand ways to undertake such an overcoming; Spinoza’s, as we will see, involves an approach ‘as difficult as it is rare’! And above all, banalities themselves have their histories: the dichotomy in question here, far from having always been insisted upon as though it went without saying, only gained its meaning in light of a problematic that, in the seventeenth century, was entirely novel. The interest of these two paragraphs emerges precisely when we give an account of this problematic, coupled with a reflection on its genesis – and at the same time, implicitly, with a reflection on the conditions of the possibility of Spinozism.

‘Philosophers’, Paragraph 1 says. Which ones? All of them, apparently. If not, Spinoza would have spoken of ‘some’ of them, or of ‘the majority’ of them. A bit further on he would use that kind of language, but only with regard to their ethics (plerumque pro Ethica Satyram scripserint), being careful to specify that what he says about their politics admits of no exception (nunquam Politicam conceperint, etc.).

Now this doesn't come without some problems; for at first glance, the content of this initial paragraph hardly seems to lend itself to such a generalisation. Spinoza, in a first step, indicates to us what constitutes, according to him, the theoretical foundation of the politics of philosophers; his description, once we allow for the requirements of polemic, ultimately provides a good account of the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas;