Big Councils: Spinoza on the Epistemic, Ontological, and Affective Foundations of Democratic Power

• In Event: Perspectives on Democracy

Abstract

Spinoza's democratic theory offers a wealth of insights for contemporary democracy theory, but its strangeness and the difficulty of the foundations on which it is built, The Ethics, can be daunting. Written at the birth of liberalism and in the midst of debates about the nature of sovereignty, Spinoza's theory contains some valuable 'paths not taken’. His view may appear idiosyncratic when viewed from the 21st century, after liberalism and theories of sovereignty are more worked out and the positions named and categorized. From Spinoza’s
apparently incoherent or unworkable grab-bag of ideas include two that bear further examination: 1) that the more people there are involved in decision-making, the better that decision will be, and 2) that the most absolute or powerful form of state is democracy. Spinoza’s institutional proposal to realize the strongest possible state with the best possible policy is the creation of massive deliberative and (in a particular sense) representative bodies. These massive councils and the proportions proposed by Spinoza have not been part of the scholarly work in either Spinoza studies or in the history of political thought, and so the continuity between Spinoza's large councils and phenomena like the U.S. Founding and the founders' arguments about the size of a national representative body are nearly absent from scholarly debate in the United States, though the connections between them are important not just historically but in current debates on the expansion of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Author

• Ericka Tucker, Marquette