Spinoza's Political Psychology
The Taming of Fortune and Fear

A comprehensive and novel interpretation of Spinoza's political writings that reveals the significance of the affects for political life.

Justin Steinberg (Author)

9781316506523, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 17 September 2020

251 pages, 1 b/w illus. 4 tables
23 x 15 x 1 cm, 0.37 kg

Spinoza's Political Psychology advances a novel, comprehensive interpretation of Spinoza's political writings, exploring how his analysis of psychology informs his arguments for democracy and toleration. Justin Steinberg shows how Spinoza's political method resembles the Renaissance civic humanism in its view of governance as an adaptive craft that requires psychological attunement. He examines the ways that Spinoza deploys this realist method in the service of empowerment, suggesting that the state can affectively reorient and thereby liberate its citizens, but only if it attends to their actual motivational and epistemic capacities. His book will interest a range of readers in Spinoza studies and the history of political thought, as well as readers working in contemporary political theory.

1. Metaphysical psychology and ingenia formation
2. Eliminating juridical constraints and naturalizing right
3. The continuity thesis and the aim of government
4. The politics of hope and fear
5. Statecraft and the taming of fortune
6. From superstition and persecution to true religion and toleration
7. The affective and epistemic cases for democracy
8. Salvation, eternity, and the state.

Subject Areas: Social & political philosophy [HPS], Western philosophy: c 1600 to c 1900 [HPCD]