Spinozan (Trans)formation

Recent discussions have often associated the theme of political transformation in Spinoza with the phenomenon of revolution, which he analyzes as sometimes inevitable but generally undesirable. In this paper, I look more broadly at the theme of change in Spinoza’s political philosophy and focus the way he conceptualizes political formation as occurring in medias res. From this standpoint, there are isolated or pre-political individuals, and politics is subsumed within nature. Human beings always exist amidst other human beings and are always-already interacting with them, thereby generating order. Thus would-be founders and sovereigns act in always-already formed situations; they are artisans, working with concrete actualities, namely, human beings already shaped in causal environments or networks and producing effects, not creators absolutely de novo. Nor is there some a- or post-political phase of life. The upshot is that Spinozan politics concerns only better and worse orders, not the existence per se of civic order. I explore Spinoza’s emphasis on the affective basis of politics in light of his account of the causal complexity of imagination and its affects, and I consider the ways the art of politics is concerned with managing and shaping imagination in accord with what reason counsel.