Power and the Multitude
A Spinozist View
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6352302 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dorothy H B Kwek (Universität Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany), Dorothy Kwek (0000-0002-0542-5783, University of Konstanz, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 155-184 |
| Publication date | 2015-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Political Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0090-5917 • E-ISSN: 1552-7476 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591714537080 |
| OpenAlex | W2164838929 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
| References cited | 9 |
Benedict Spinoza (1634–1677) is feted as the philosopher par excellence of the popular democratic multitude by Antonio Negri and others. But Spinoza himself expresses a marked ambivalence about the multitude in brief asides, and as for his thoughts on what he calls “the rule of (the) multitude,” that is, democracy, these exist only as meager fragments in his unfinished Tractatus Politicus or Political Treatise. This essay addresses the problem of Spinoza’s multitude. First, I reconstruct a vision of power that is found in the Ethics but that tends to be overlooked in the scholarly literature: power is not just sheer efficacy or imposition of will, but rather involves a capacity for being-affected; I call this the conception of power as sensitivity. The second part of my argument shows how, given Spinoza’s emphatic political naturalism, the conception of power as sensitivity can be extended to his political philosophy to shed light on what Spinoza calls potentia multitudinis, or “the power of the multitude”—a term found solely in the Political Treatise and nowhere else in his oeuvre. This juxtaposition reveals significant qualifications to the liberatory potential of the multitude currently claimed in the scholarly literature
Ambivalence · Argument (complex analysis · Democracy · Epistemology · Multitude · Naturalism · Physics · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Law · Medicine · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Psychology · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought
Affective Arrangements
Affect Matters
The egoistic teacher
Benjamin and Spinoza
Thinking with Spinoza about education
Ideology and the ‘Multitude of the Classroom’
The Importance of Being Useless
I trust (you) therefore I am! From trust to post-trust
Tarde's ancestors. Imitation and crowds from Hobbes to Locke
The age of the crowd
Individual and Community in Spinoza's Social Psychology
Spinoza, the Anti-Orwell
Why Spinoza Today? Or, “A Strategy of Anti-Fear”
Spinoza
Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics
Radical Enlightenment
Who's Afraid of the Multitude? Between the Individual and the State
The Philosophy of the Enlightenment
| Unique citing works | 9 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2025 (9) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 9 |