Indignation and the Conatus of the Spinozist State

Abstract

Does Spinoza, like many of his contemporaries, present a social contract theory of the genesis of the State and political society? In this essay, Matheron seeks to argue that, despite some textual indications to the contrary, Spinoza’s final and unfinished political work, the Political Treatise, does in fact present an account of a non-contractual theory of the genesis of political society, one that, when interpreted correctly, actually suggests that political society is always and everywhere already constituted necessarily. Matheron thus interprets Paragraph 1 of Chapter VI and its language of naturaliter convenire to mean neither, as Hobbes would say, that humans require an artificial contract to establish political society, nor because humans naturally reason that society will be advantageous to them. On the contrary, Matheron argues that Spinoza describes a purely passional genesis of the State, one which requires appeals to neither contracts nor calculus, but requires only the internal dynamics of indignation. This, however, has the striking conclusion of there being something ‘radically evil’ in even the best constituted States.