Political Treatise

Baruch Spinoza

The ideas

24 ideas. Scroll sideways for the next one.

• Philosophers write as if people were already wise. They praise a human nature that is nowhere found. Then they wonder why their politics cannot be used.

• I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions.

• A dominion that needs honest men will not last. Order public business so that people cannot betray it even when they are greedy, angry, or afraid. The spirit in which they obey does not matter to the state’s safety.

• For liberality of spirit, or courage, is a private virtue; but the virtue of a state is its security.

• By nature you have as much right as you have power. That power is not only reason. Hunger, fear, and anger are nature too. What they move you to do is still done by natural right.

• It is not in anyone’s power to use reason always. Everyone still tries to stay alive. The law of nature forbids only what no one can or will do.

• One person cannot watch every side. Until people add their strength together, the right that belongs to each of them exists more in opinion than in fact. They need each other to eat and to think.

• People who hold general rights and are “all guided, as it were, by one mind” leave each person with less right the more the rest exceed him. He may do what the common law allows. He can be made to do what it orders.

• In a civil state you still act from hope or fear. The difference is that everyone fears the same things and shares one ground of safety. No one may live after his own mind by the commonwealth’s own ordinance. If everyone could, the commonwealth would be gone.

• Rewards and threats cannot make you believe that the part is greater than the whole. They cannot make you love whom you hate. A so-called right of that kind still binds no one.

• When a commonwealth makes most people indignant, those people conspire. Its right is the common power of the multitude. The more cause it gives them to join against it, the less independent it is.

• The end of a civil state is peace and security of life. When a country is full of fights and broken laws, look at how it is built before you blame its people. People have to be made into citizens.

• For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from force of character.

• A country kept quiet only by terror is free from war, not at peace. If people are led about like sheep and learn only slavery, that is a desert with a government name.

• A free multitude lives more by hope than by fear. A conquered one lives to escape death. Machiavelli’s book of the prince is most useful as a warning. Do not hand a free people absolutely to one man.

• One man’s power cannot carry a whole dominion. What looks like rule by one is often a hidden rule by a few, and that is the worst kind. Bind him like Ulysses at the mast, so a passing wish cannot undo the standing law.

• all have one common nature. Only we are deceived by power and refinement.

• Mercenaries live by war. Give them pay and idle time, and they become the only free people in the country. Citizens who keep their own arms are defending their own lives. They do not need to be paid to want peace.

• If too few hold the right to choose the rest, two or three clever men will own the state. A moderate country needs 5000 patricians so that 100 good minds never fail. Election, not blood, is what makes this form aristocracy.

• An aristocratic council never gives the right back to the multitude. That is why this form looks most complete. It is also why the people still have to be feared, and why they keep some liberty even without a written grant.

• A one-man dictator, even for a month, is already a king. The sword that repairs the constitution has to stay in a large council of old men who hold no other office. Then it scares the wicked and not the rest.

• men are so to be led, that they may think that they are not led, but living after their own mind, and according to their free decision.

• In a democracy the law itself makes you a voter. You are not waiting on a council’s favour. Anyone born to citizen parents, or who has earned the legal conditions, can demand the vote and cannot be refused except for crime.

• A last argument says women lack equal natural right because we nowhere see them rule. That reads who now holds power as the measure of who can. Right that is only power does not settle the question that way. The case for democracy breaks off there.

The book in short

In plain words

Grown-ups write rules for people who do not exist. They picture a kind, fair person who always thinks first. Then they look at the street and get angry. The street was never going to match the picture.

A country built on that picture cannot be used. It is a story about a golden time that never came. The people who actually run cities already know this. They plan for greed and fear because greed and fear show up every day.

Anger, envy, pity, and the wish to be first are not glitches. They belong to people the way storms belong to air. You can hate a storm. You still have to build a roof that can take it.

A country that lasts only if its officers stay honest will not last. Nobody is awake all the time. Nobody watches another person’s good more closely than their own, on the day it costs them. Order the work so that even a greedy person, even a frightened one, cannot easily wreck it. How they feel while they obey does not matter as much as this: the country stays standing.

Who is actually in the room?

Treat a country the way you treat weather. Not better people. Better roofs.

Religion tells you to love the person next to you as yourself. That teaching is loud in a quiet room. It is weak in a court, and weaker in a palace. Reason can slow a temper. The path it points is steep. Anyone who thinks a crowded city will live by pure reason is watching a play.

The private good of a brave person is one thing. The good of a country is that it holds. A brave officer can still leave a hole. A well-built country can be run by mixed people and not fall down through that hole.

As far as you can push

In the open, with no common law, you may do what you can do. That is the whole of your right. It is not a prize for being wise. A hungry move and a careful move both count, because both come from the same nature: the drive to stay alive.

That sounds huge. It is also thin. One person cannot watch every side. Sleep comes, then sickness, then someone stronger. Until people add their strength, each person’s right is mostly talk. It lives in opinion more than in fact.

Two people who push a cart together can move what neither can move alone. Ten can do more than two. The more who join to guard the same fields and the same houses, the more they can actually hold. People need that join to eat. They also need it to think. A life spent only on defence leaves no room for a mind.

Moving like one mind

Picture two people in an empty field, arguing over a well. Each is judge of the fight. Each uses whatever strength is to hand. The one who wins, wins. That is the open state.

Now picture the same two inside a town that has a common law. The well is no longer theirs to seize. The town’s rule says whose it is. Each person has less private right, because the rest together are stronger than either one. What the common law allows, a person may do. What it orders, a person can be made to do.

You still think your own thoughts. You still act from hope or fear. The change is this: everyone in the town fears the same punishments and shares the same ground of safety. That is the civil state.

The town cannot, by its own rule, let every person live as their own judge. If it does, the town is gone. Things fall back to the field and the well.

Wrong, in the strict sense, is not a feeling. It is doing what the common law forbids. Justice is the steady will to give each person what that law says is theirs. Outside the town, the field does not come already labelled yours or mine.

What no threat can buy

A country is strong as far as its people are strong together. So there are things it cannot order, even when it wants to.

No prize and no punishment can make you believe that a part is bigger than the whole. No prize can make you love a person you hate. There are acts most people rank worse than dying: harming your own parents, giving evidence that destroys you, not trying to stay alive. A so-called right to order those things binds no one. It is like saying a person has a right to be out of their mind.

When a country makes most of its people furious, those people join. They join from shared fear, or to answer a shared hurt. The country’s right is that shared power. Give them cause to turn it against the rulers, and the country is smaller than it was.

Two countries stand toward each other the way two people stand in the open field. War needs one will. Peace needs two. A deal lasts while fear of harm or hope of gain lasts. When that is gone, the link breaks by itself.

A country also harms itself. If it robs its own people, if it treats them so badly that fear turns to rage, the civil state becomes an enemy state. Then the old deal is not saved by a court. It is broken the way fights are broken: by force.

A quiet that is not peace

The point of a civil state is peace and a safe life. That is the aim, not a beautiful speech.

When a country is full of fights and broken laws, do not start by blaming wicked people. Passions are the same everywhere. If one country has more wrecking than another, look at how it is built. People are not born ready to be citizens. They have to be made so.

A land can be still because everyone is too afraid to pick up a weapon. That land is free of war. It does not have peace. Peace is a kind of strength: the steady will to do what the common rule requires. If people are walked like sheep, and all they learn is how to be owned, that place is a desert with a government name.

A free crowd lives more by hope than by fear. It wants to use life. A conquered crowd lives more by fear than by hope. It wants not to die. The second is not a country of citizens. It is a holding of slaves.

One man cannot carry a whole country. His power is too small. He finds generals and friends. What looks like rule by one is often rule by a hidden few. That hidden few is the worst kind of few, because no one can see whom to hold to account. Machiavelli wrote about how a hungry prince keeps power. The useful reading is a warning. Do not hand a free crowd absolutely to one man. He will have to fear them. He will look after himself first.

Tied to the mast

Ulysses knows a song will pull him off course. He has his crew tie him to the mast. When the song comes, he shouts to be cut free. The crew keep the first order. They are still obeying him. They are obeying the standing order, not the shout.

A king is not a god. A passing wish should not undo the standing law. Every law can be his public will. Not every will of his should become a law.

The same thinking builds the rest of the roof. Citizens keep their own arms. Paid strangers who live by war become the only free people in a country at war. In peace they have too much idle time, and they start to love the next fight. People who fight for their own houses fight for their own lives. They do not need to be paid to want the fighting to end.

Councils have to be large. If too few people choose the rest, two or three clever ones will own the state. A big room is slower. It is also harder to buy. Votes that almost no one supports should not count. Hope of a seat, for a few years, not for life, binds people to the room itself.

After a king dies, the country is, in a way, without a mind. The standing right goes back to the crowd. A son does not inherit a country the way he inherits a house. A house stays inside a living law. The king’s will was that law.

People have one common nature. Fine clothes fool us. Rulers grow proud. Crowds look wild when they are shut out of the real work and then blamed for guessing wrong. Doing the country’s business in secret is useful in a war. Doing all of it in secret, in peace, is how a few plot against their own people.

The vote the law already gave you

There is a third form. In it, the law itself makes you a voter. You are not waiting for a small room to name you as one of the best. If you were born to citizen parents, or you have met the legal tests, you can demand the vote. Crime can take it. A council’s taste cannot.

That form is the most complete on paper, because no extra will stands between you and the right. The account of how to build it breaks off almost as soon as it starts. The promised chapters on laws never come.

What remains is enough to carry. Build for the people in the room. Right goes as far as power, and power grows when people join. Peace is not a hush. It is a shared life with a roof that does not need saints to stay up.

The long read

A letter goes out from The Hague not long before the writer dies. Six chapters are already done, he says. He is on the seventh, proving how a monarchy should be built so it does not slide into tyranny. After that, aristocracy, then popular government, then laws. He never reaches the last of those. What we have is a torso: a method, a theory of right, a picture of the civil state, two fully drawn constitutions, and a democracy that breaks off in the fourth section.

The work is not a memoir of 1672, and it is not a commentary on the earlier Theologico-Political Treatise. It is a geometry of dominion. Passions are treated as weather. Right is treated as power. The question is not who deserves to rule. The question is how a multitude can be made to move as if by one mind without being turned into sheep.

Passions as weather. Philosophers, he says, have written satire and called it ethics. They invent a human nature that is nowhere found, then they attack the one that is. Statesmen have done better, because experience was their teacher. Nothing useful in politics is likely to be new. The useful forms already exist. The work is to deduce them from human nature the way one deduces properties from a figure.

That deduction needs a peculiar calm. I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions. Love, hate, anger, envy, ambition, pity: not vices, but properties, as heat and storm belong to air. Inconvenient, necessary, caused. Understanding them is as much a pleasure as knowing the things that flatter the senses.

Men are necessarily liable to passions. They pity the sick and envy the well. They want others to live after their own mind. Religion teaches love of neighbour, and that teaching has force in temples and on deathbeds, and almost none in the law-court or the palace. Reason can moderate the passions. The road it points is steep. Anyone who thinks a multitude distracted by politics will live by the bare dictate of reason is dreaming of a stage-play.

From that, a design rule. A dominion whose well-being depends on any man’s good faith will be unstable. Public affairs must be so ordered that those who administer them, whether led by reason or by passion, cannot easily act treacherously. The spirit in which they obey does not matter to the state’s safety. For liberality of spirit, or courage, is a private virtue; but the virtue of a state is its security.

Right is power. Natural right is not a moral claim sitting above the world. It is the laws of nature themselves, the power of nature, which is the power of God, absolutely free. Every natural thing has as much right as it has power to exist and operate. Whatever a person does after the laws of his nature, he does by the highest natural right.

If human nature were so made that people lived by reason only, that right, as special to mankind, would be determined by reason only. They are not so made. They are led more by blind desire than by reason. So natural right must be limited by every appetite that determines them to action, not by reason alone. The desires that do not arise from reason are, as actions, more like passive affections. They are still effects of nature. The ignorant man is as much a part of nature as the learned one.

Liberty here is not a gap in necessity. It is a virtue, an excellence: the power to exist and operate according to the laws of one’s nature. The freer a person is conceived to be, the less he can be said to neglect reason or choose evil over good. God, who exists in absolute liberty, also understands and acts of necessity, from the necessity of his own nature. It is not in anyone’s power always to use reason. Everyone, learned or ignorant, still strives to preserve himself, and whatever he attempts, he attempts by supreme natural right. The law of nature forbids only what no one wishes or is able to do. It is not opposed to strife, hatred, anger, or treachery. When something in nature looks ridiculous or evil, that is because we know only a part, and we want the whole arranged according to our own reason.

Independence, in this vocabulary, is the power to repel violence and live after one’s own mind. You hold another when you bind him, disarm him, frighten him, or attach him by past favour. Fear and hope hold the mind as well as the body, and only as long as they last. The mind is independent so far as it uses reason. Those whose reason is strongest are most independent. A verbal promise binds only while the will of the one who gave it remains unchanged. He who can break faith has given a present of words, not a piece of his right.

Two who unite their strength have more right over nature than both separately. The more who join, the more right they have together. Insofar as men are tormented by anger, envy, or hatred, they are drawn apart. They are naturally enemies, because the one most to be feared is another person. While right is determined by each individual’s power, it is a nonentity, existing in opinion rather than fact. Without mutual help people can hardly support life or cultivate the mind. The natural right special to the human race can hardly be conceived except where people have general rights, combine to defend the land they inhabit, and live according to the general judgment of all. If that is why the schoolmen call man a sociable animal, he has nothing to say against them.

One mind. Where people have general rights and are all guided, as it were, by one mind, each individual has the less right the more the rest collectively exceed him. He has, in fact, no right over nature but what the common law allows. What the general consent orders, he is bound to execute, or may rightfully be compelled to. That right, determined by the power of a multitude, is called dominion. A council of the general multitude makes a democracy; certain chosen persons, an aristocracy; one man, a monarchy.

Wrong-doing, in the strict sense, cannot be conceived in the state of nature. Nothing is forbidden by the law of nature except what is beyond everyone’s power. Wrong-doing is action that cannot lawfully be committed, and that requires a general decree. Obedience is the constant will to execute what that decree says is to be done. People also call “wrong” what is against sound reason, and “obedience” the will to moderate appetite. That speech would be fine if liberty were licence of appetite. It is not. The more a person can be guided by reason, the freer he is. A rational life is not well named obedience.

Justice and injustice, likewise, cannot be conceived except under dominion. Nature offers nothing that is this person’s rather than that one’s. Under dominion, common law determines what belongs to whom. The just person has a constant will to render to each his own.

The civil state. Under dominion the state is civil. The body subject to it is a commonwealth. People are citizens so far as they enjoy the civil law’s advantages, and subjects so far as they must obey. The right of the supreme authorities is simply natural right, limited now by the power of the multitude guided as by one mind. Each citizen has the less right the more the commonwealth exceeds him in power.

If a commonwealth grants someone the authority to live after his own mind, it has given away its right. If it grants that to everyone, it has destroyed itself and everything returns to nature. So it cannot be conceived that every citizen should, by the ordinance of the commonwealth, live after his own mind. The natural right of being one’s own judge ceases in the civil state. Natural right itself does not cease. People still act according to their own nature, from fear or hope. The difference is that in the civil state all fear the same things and share the same ground of security. That does not do away with private judgment. The person who obeys from fear or from love of quiet is still consulting his own safety.

Nor can every citizen be allowed to interpret the laws. That would make each his own judge again. What the state decides to be just and good must be held so decided by every individual. However iniquitous a subject thinks the decision, he is bound to execute it.

Is that contrary to reason? Reason teaches to seek peace, and peace cannot be kept unless the general laws are kept. The more a person is guided by reason, the more free he is, and the more constantly he will keep those laws. If he must sometimes do, by order, what he knows is repugnant to reason, that harm is compensated by the good of the civil state’s existing. Reason’s own law is to choose the less of two evils.

The most powerful commonwealth is the one founded and guided by reason, because its right is the power of a multitude led as by one mind, and that unity cannot be conceived unless the commonwealth pursues what sound reason teaches is to the interest of all.

What the sword cannot do. Subjects depend on the commonwealth so far as they fear it or love the civil state. Things no one can be induced to do by rewards or threats do not fall within its right. Belief is the first. No reward or threat can make a person believe that the whole is not greater than its part, or that God does not exist, or anything contrary to his sense or thought. Love and hate are next. Then the things human nature regards as worse than any evil: witnessing against oneself, torturing oneself, killing one’s parents, not striving to avoid death. To say the commonwealth has a right to order those is to say a person has a right to be mad. A right that can bind no one is a delirious fancy. Fools and the religiously scrupulous do not void the laws that restrain most citizens. Those without fear or hope are, so far, independent, and so far enemies, and may be coerced.

Third: things that cause indignation in the majority. People conspire through common fear or to avenge a common hurt. The commonwealth’s right is the common power of the multitude. The more cause it gives many to conspire, the more its power and right are diminished. A commonwealth, like a person, is the less independent the more it has to fear.

Religion is not thereby abolished. The mind, so far as it uses reason, depends on itself. True knowledge of God, love of God, and charity toward one’s neighbour cannot be subjected to dominion. The highest exercise of charity aims at keeping peace and joining in unity. External rites do no good or harm as regards that knowledge, and are not worth disturbing public quiet. The care of propagating religion belongs to God or to the supreme authorities. A private person, wherever he is, can worship with true religion and mind his own business.

Two commonwealths stand toward each other as two people in the state of nature, with this exception: a commonwealth can provide against being oppressed, as a mortal body cannot. They are naturally enemies. War needs only one will. Peace needs at least two. A treaty lasts as long as fear of hurt or hope of gain lasts. When that is gone, the link breaks of itself. A commonwealth that complains of being deceived should blame its own folly for trusting a party that had, as its highest law, the welfare of its own dominion. Good faith is not made void. Neither reason nor Scripture teaches one to keep one’s word in every case.

When a commonwealth does wrong. Supreme authorities are, as it were, the mind of the dominion. They alone lay down and interpret laws, judge, punish, wage war, and offer peace. A subject who enters on public business without the supreme council’s knowledge is a pretender to the dominion, even if he believes his design is for the best.

Is the supreme authority bound by laws? Can it do wrong? If “law” and “wrong” mean civil law, no. The commonwealth is not bound to please any but itself. If they mean the general rules of reason, then yes, in the sense in which doctors say nature does wrong. A commonwealth does wrong when it does, or suffers to be done, things that may cause its own ruin. It is most independent when it acts according to reason. It cannot make a table eat grass, and it cannot make people honour what disgusts them. If it slays and robs subjects, ravishes maidens, and the like, fear turns to indignation and the civil state into a state of enmity. Contracts by which the multitude transfers its right should be broken when the general welfare requires it. Only the holder of dominion may decide that. If breaking them changes common fear into indignation, the commonwealth is dissolved, and the contract is vindicated not by civil law but by the law of war.

Peace is not quiet. The end of the civil state is nothing else but peace and security of life. That dominion is best where people pass their lives in unity and the laws are kept unbroken. Seditious wars and contempt of law are to be imputed less to the wickedness of subjects than to the bad state of a dominion. For men are not born fit for citizenship, but must be made so. Passions are everywhere the same. If more offences are committed in one commonwealth than another, the former has not pursued unity, nor framed its laws with sufficient forethought. A civil state that has not done away with the causes of seditions, where war is a perpetual object of fear and the laws are often broken, differs little from the state of nature.

A commonwealth whose subjects are only hindered by terror from taking arms is free from war, not at peace. For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from force of character. Obedience is the constant will to execute what the general decree requires. A commonwealth whose peace depends on the sluggishness of subjects, led about like sheep to learn only slavery, may more properly be called a desert than a commonwealth. The life in view is a human life, defined not by circulation of blood but by reason, the true excellence and life of the mind.

The dominion meant here is one established by a free multitude, not one acquired by right of war. A free multitude is guided more by hope than fear. A conquered one, more by fear than hope: it aims at escaping death, where the free multitude aims at using life. Dominion got by war wants slaves rather than subjects. Right, generally regarded, may look the same in both. Ends, and the means of preservation, do not.

Machiavelli has set forth at large how a prince whose motive is lust of mastery should establish and keep dominion. The design is hard to be sure of. If it was a good one, it was to show how little foresight there is in removing a tyrant while leaving the causes that made him one, and how cautious a free multitude should be of entrusting its welfare absolutely to one man, who must look after himself and plot against the multitude rather than consult it. Spinoza is the more led to that reading because Machiavelli was known to be favourable to liberty.

The king at the mast. People come together not at the suggestion of reason but of some common passion: common hope, common fear, or the desire to avenge a common hurt. They naturally aspire to the civil state, because no one in solitude is strong enough. Quarrels change the form of a dominion. They almost never dissolve it. To preserve a dominion is to preserve its existing form without notable change.

Human nature is not so constituted that people most desire what is most useful. A dominion must be so ordered that all, governing and governed, whether they will or no, shall do what makes for the general welfare. Nothing that affects the general welfare should be entirely entrusted to anyone’s good faith. No one is so watchful that he never falls asleep. It is folly to require of another what one can never obtain from oneself: that he be more watchful for another’s interest than his own.

Experience is thought to teach that peace comes of conferring the whole authority on one man. The Turks have stood long. Popular states have been short and seditious. If slavery, barbarism, and desolation are to be called peace, people can have no worse misfortune. There are usually more quarrels between parents and children than between masters and slaves. That does not make it wise to turn a father’s right into a right of property. Slavery, not peace, is furthered by handing the whole authority to one man. Peace consists not in mere absence of war, but in a union of minds.

One man cannot by himself hold the supreme right of a commonwealth. Right is limited by power alone, and one man’s power is inadequate. A king looks out generals, counsellors, friends. What is thought a perfect monarchy is in actual working a hidden aristocracy, and therefore the worst of all. A boy king, a sick king, an old king, is king on sufferance. The more absolutely the right is transferred to the king, the less independent he is, and the more unhappy his subjects. A monarchy must be built so that the monarch is most independent when he most consults the multitude’s welfare.

The foundations are a machine, not a sermon. Cities fortified; a militia of citizens only, none exempt, no mercenaries; clans with an equal vote; the soil public, let at a yearly rent, so that in peace people are free of other taxes and all have nearly equal risk in war; a large council of citizens, not for life, from which the king may not decide without first hearing; the king as the mind of the commonwealth, the council as the senses; judges too numerous to bribe, voting by ballot; no peacetime military pay, because the chief reward of military service is liberty; war only for the sake of peace; the dominion indivisible; no public temples built at public expense, and no laws about opinions unless they are seditious.

The first proof is that laws can be so fixed that not the king himself can abolish them. Persians worshipped kings as gods and still the kings could not revoke established laws. The foundations are to be considered eternal decrees of the king, so that his ministers obey him in refusing to execute orders contrary to those decrees. Ulysses had himself bound to the mast. His comrades were executing his own order when they would not untie him for the Sirens’ song. Kings are not gods. every law be an explicit will of the king, but not every will of the king a law.

A free multitude, if it can agree with itself, will never transfer its right to a few or to one except what it cannot itself have: the ending of controversies and despatch in decisions. To choose a king for the sake of war, and so choose slavery in peace, is manifest folly. Democracy has this advantage, that its excellence is greater in peace than in war. The king’s utmost right, once the council exists, is to choose among the opinions the council offers, not to decree against the mind of all at once. An opinion with fewer than 100 votes is void, so the larger cities cannot be ignored.

Counsellors must not be for life. Hope of the office is itself a bond. Mercenaries make a state of war in which only the soldiery enjoy liberty. After the king’s death the commonwealth is in a manner dead, and authority returns to the multitude. The king’s will is the civil law itself. Children are heirs to property by civil law, which is everlasting as the commonwealth is. They are not, by that fact, heirs to dominion. The right of worshipping God no one can transfer.

all have one common nature. Only we are deceived by power and refinement. Haughtiness is a property of rulers. The mob inspires fear if it is not frightened, yes: liberty and slavery are not easily mingled. The populace lacks judgment in part because the chief business is transacted behind its back. It is supreme folly to wish to transact everything in secret and expect people not to judge ill. Those who can treat secretly of affairs of state plot against the citizens in peace as they plot against the enemy in war. Secrecy is often serviceable. Without it a dominion can still subsist. To entrust affairs absolutely to any man is incompatible with liberty.

The Arragonese, after casting off the Moors, built a constitution in which a council, not the king, was supreme interpreter of the laws, and every citizen could summon the king before it. They kept that liberty a long time. Ferdinand of Castile, asked to abolish it, said a kingdom is stable when its safety is as much the subjects’ interest as the king’s. Philip II later oppressed them as he did the United Provinces. The single rule followed in laying the foundations of monarchy: the multitude may keep ample liberty under a king if the king’s power is determined by the sole power, and preserved by the defence, of the multitude itself.

A council large enough. Aristocracy is dominion held by certain persons chosen out of the multitude, called patricians. The difference from democracy is that the right of governing depends on election only, not on a congenital or acquired right that one can demand. Even if the entire multitude is received into the patricians, if that right is not inherited the dominion is still an aristocracy.

Two, three, four persons holding it will split into factions. The factions are weaker the more who share the dominion. A moderate-sized dominion that needs 100 first-rate men needs about 5000 patricians, on the hypothesis that out of 50 who seek office one will be first-rate. Keep the proportion of patricians to multitude about 50 to 1. The danger is only in too few.

A sufficiently large council does not need counsellors the way a king does. Councils are everlasting. The power transferred to such a council never reverts to the multitude, as a king’s does at death. Every explicit will of a large enough council ought to be law. So this dominion is absolute, or nearest to the absolute. If there is any absolute dominion, it is that held by an entire multitude. Aristocracy, because it never reverts and does not consult the multitude, must be considered quite absolute. In practice it is not, because the multitude is a cause of fear to the rulers and therefore keeps some liberty, if not by express law then by tacit understanding. The best condition of this form is the one that most nearly approaches the absolute: the multitude is as little as possible a cause of fear, and retains no liberty except what the law of the dominion itself assigns. Then practice agrees with theory. Guilds that assert their own rights diminish the patricians’ hold.

The commons need not fear a hateful slavery merely because the council is absolute. The will of so large a council cannot be so much determined by lust as by reason. Men are drawn asunder by an evil passion. They can be guided as by one mind only so far as they desire things honourable, or that have at least an honourable appearance.

The machinery again: a city that is the head, well fortified; military not confined to patricians, because those who fight for altar and hearth fight with peculiar valour, and hope of advancement; a general chosen only in war, for a year at most, from the patricians, because a general who subdues an aristocracy upsets the form itself, as Rome showed; lands sold to subjects, not merely let, because subjects with no part in the dominion will forsake the cities in bad times if they can carry their goods; a second council of syndics, chosen for life from men of sixty or more, whose only duty is to keep the constitution, a civil dictator’s sword that is permanent without being a person; a senate for daily business, paid more from peace (a share of merchandise) than from war; voting by ballot; secretaries from the commons, rotated, so the state does not in fact run on a few clerks, as Spinoza thought the Dutch had; patricians of one simple general religion, with liberty of opinion, but small temples for other sects and the national rites in patrician hands.

A one-city aristocracy can be overpowered in a single strike. An aristocracy of several cities is better. Each city has as much right within its walls as it has power. Seeking equality between unequal cities is absurd. They are bound by a senate and a court, not as by a treaty but as one dominion. The Dutch thought it enough to abandon their count and behead the body. They never remoulded the limbs. The sudden overthrow of that republic came from the misformed state and the fewness of its rulers, not from time wasted in debate. While the Romans are debating, Saguntum is lost. While a few decide everything by their passions, liberty and the general good are lost. By consulting, listening, and debating, people grow more acute, and find what no one would have thought of at first.

A dictator appointed at a fixed time is already a king, and a terror to all, including the good. The Romans made one only under accidental necessity, and even then the good disliked it. The syndics are that sword made civil: numerous, old, forbidden other office, not paymasters of the soldiery. They can restrain wickedness in its beginnings. They cannot, by themselves, prevent the vices of peace: leisure, ostentation, foreign manners, a slide from fierce to soft to slave. Sumptuary laws are a laughing-stock. They stimulate the desires they forbid. Those vices must be indirectly forbidden, by foundations that guide the majority not to live wisely (that is impossible) but by the passions from which the republic has most advantage. Lead people so that they think they are not led, but living after their own mind. men are so to be led, that they may think that they are not led, but living after their own mind, and according to their free decision. Rewards of virtue decreed by public law to particular men are signs of slavery. Equality, once cast off, takes general liberty with it.

If any dominion can be everlasting, it is one whose constitution remains unbroken. The constitution is the soul of a dominion. It cannot remain unconquered unless it is defended alike by reason and common human passion. Relying on reason alone, it is weak. These aristocracies, he claims, cannot be destroyed by any cause to which blame attaches, but only by some inevitable fate. Panic can still, as at Rome, throw all laws toward a man renowned for victories. In a rightly ordered republic of this kind, no one man can so distinguish himself that he has no rivals. The dispute has to go back to the existing laws.

The unfinished people. He passes at last to the third and perfectly absolute dominion, democracy. Here the law itself, not a council’s free choice, makes a person a voter. All born of citizen parents, or on the soil, or who have deserved well, or who have fulfilled the legal conditions, have a right to demand the vote and public office, and cannot be refused except for crime or infamy. A system that admits only elders, or first-born, or those who pay a certain sum, is still a democracy if the qualification is by law rather than by the council’s naming of “the best.” In practice patricians will always think those the best who are rich, related, or allied. If patricians were free of passion, no dominion could be compared with aristocracy. Experience teaches the contrary, above all in oligarchies, where a few intentionally keep the best men away.

The kind he intends to treat is the one in which all who owe allegiance to the country’s laws only, and are independent and of respectable life, have the vote. Foreigners are excluded as under another’s dominion. “Independent” excludes women and slaves, children and wards. “Respectable life” excludes those infamous from crime or a disgraceful livelihood.

Then the question: are women under men’s authority by nature or by institution? If by institution only, there is no reason to exclude them from government. Experience, he says, shows the origin is in their weakness. Nowhere do men and women reign together. The Amazons, in the old report, would not suffer men to stay. If by nature women were equal in force of character and ability, in which human power and therefore human right chiefly consist, some nations would be found where both sexes rule, or where men are ruled. Since this is nowhere the case, he asserts that women have not by nature equal right with men. Passion is added: men love women from lust, esteem their wisdom in proportion to beauty, and cannot bear to see them show favour to others. So both sexes cannot rule alike without great hurt to peace.

But of this enough. The argument stops, and laws never arrive. Popular dominion remains a heading and four sections.

The surviving claim is not that one form is holy. It is that right tracks power, that a multitude must be made into one mind without being made into a desert, and that the virtue of a state is not the private virtue of its officers. A constitution that relies on good faith will not last. A constitution that relies only on reason will not last. The ones that last are the ones that can use common passions, including ambition, fear, and the wish to be unled, as the material of peace.

One real line. “For liberality of spirit, or courage, is a private virtue; but the virtue of a state is its security.” — Spinoza, Political Treatise.

What didn’t hold. XI.4’s claim that women lack equal natural right, inferred from the absence of mixed or female rule, is where later readers push back: the observation describes who now holds power, and does not follow from identifying right with power. The democracy chapter is unfinished, so the perfectly absolute form is a torso, not a worked constitution. X.9’s deduction that a rightly founded aristocracy is everlasting except by fate is a claim inside the model, not a historical finding. The treatise does not found the state on a covenant: the words social contract, pact and covenant never appear, and the join is power added to power under a common passion. The contracts it does name, the multitude’s transfer of right and treaties between states, hold only while the fear or hope behind them holds. Readers who import the TTP’s founding covenant, or Elwes’s TTP line on liberty as the true aim of government, are reading another book. The end named here is peace and security of life.

For the little ones

This book as stories to read aloud, each with a note for the grown-up.