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‘Citizen jurisprudence’ and the people’s power in Spinoza

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Contemporary Political Theory Aims and scope

Abstract

Despite the increasing attention devoted to the theme of political judgment, the question of how to theorize judgment as specifically democratic remains elusive. This article shows the promise of Spinoza for approaching such a vexing issue. Through a combined reading of his major political and metaphysical texts, I develop a new concept of political judgment that I call ‘citizen jurisprudence’. Citizen jurisprudence is at once a right (jus) and a power (potentia) that is internally related to the ‘power of the people’. Put another way, citizen jurisprudence is the figure and effect of democracy understood in an expansive sense: not solely as a state form but as an activity of equally free (sui juris) individuals determining the sense and the scope of common affairs. An account of this concept simultaneously nuances Spinoza’s current profile as a political thinker and contributes to efforts within contemporary political theory to recuperate the radical potential of judgment as a mode of democratic agency.

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Notes

  1. Setting out from a reappraisal of Spinoza's conception of the ‘freedom to philosophize’, I show elsewhere how his writings – in a systematic challenge to inherited images, institutions and justifications of sovereignty – cast the problem of judgment as inseparably linked to a political project of popular empowerment. The present article is an attempt to draw out some of the contemporary political–theoretical implications of that problem and project.

  2. Balibar offers a particularly insightful analysis of why, on Spinozist grounds, freedom of judgment cannot be reduced to an abstract entitlement, or merely formal ‘right’. But his largely appreciative critique assumes, nonetheless, that Spinoza's juridical formulation of libertas judicandi is plagued by ‘an intrinsic weakness’ that Spinoza rectifies when he turns later to theorize politics in terms of the effective power (potentia) of the multitude, which Balibar describes as ‘the real conditions of freedom’, and ‘the true matter of politics’ (2008, pp. 117, 120).

  3. For the Latin, I have consulted Spinoza (1925).

  4. In my view, this is distinct from the claim that freedom of judgment is a virtue for the state, that is, that toleration of judgment is a virtue. For such an argument, see Rosenthal (2003) and Steinberg (2010).

  5. For a similar definition of ‘jurisprudence’, but developed in a Deleuzian vein, see Lefebvre (2008, pp. 53–59).

  6. Much of the contemporary interest in this specific area of Spinoza's thought is indebted to Deleuze's pathbreaking (if controversial) reading of the common notions as containing the elements of a practical wisdom of empowerment, a reading that Deleuze first develops in his 1968 and 1970 books on Spinoza (Deleuze, 1988, 1992). Balibar (2008) and Negri (2003) represent other important efforts to read the common notions in this ‘practical’ vein; their interpretations could be viewed as attempts to make more explicit than Deleuze's reading the political implications of the common notions.

  7. For the sake of consistency with Spinoza (and the English translation), I use the masculine pronoun throughout.

  8. This subversion of the late medieval idea of public reason is a point of continuity between Spinoza and Kant. See Vatter (2008) for a genealogy of this idea.

  9. For a recent argument that democracy for Spinoza is the political expression of his ‘intuitive science’, see Del Lucchese (2009).

  10. Rancière (2010a, p. 28) uses a similar formulation to characterize the specificity of politics.

  11. I owe the framing of this point to Stephen Connelly.

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Skeaff, C. ‘Citizen jurisprudence’ and the people’s power in Spinoza. Contemp Polit Theory 12, 146–165 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2012.29

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