This is a past event
Speaker: Mogens Lareke (CNRS, Lyon)
"Spinoza and Hobbes on the Social Contract"
Critics contemporary with Spinoza very quickly seized on the similarity of the contract theory outlined in chapter XVI of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) with the doctrines of Hobbes in De Cive (1642) and in the Leviathan (1650). But were Spinoza’s contemporary critics right? My aim in this paper is to show that Spinoza did have a conception of a social contract in fact very similar to that of Hobbes but that, within his overall political theory, he gave it a very different epistemological status and a very different function than did Hobbes. For Hobbes, the conception of the social contract was the upshot of what he saw as a rational demonstration of the commonwealth’s logical basis drawn from his definitions of natural right, natural law, and conception of human nature. For Spinoza, on the contrary, as I will argue, the doctrine of the social contract was a foundational narrative designed to structure the collective imagination of a people and orient their political beliefs toward true Freedom.
- Venue
- New Kings, NK7