This is my fourth book of writings devoted to Baruch Spinoza (1632–77). The previous volumes were L’anomalia selvaggia (originally published in 1981; see Negri 2006a), Spinoza sovversivo (1992), and Spinoza et nous (2010). This is a body of work that, in a nutshell, seeks to relate Spinoza to two historical episodes: the period around 1968 (and up to the present), when the recovery of Spinoza’s thought made it possible to re-establish the idea of democracy and the common; and a second history, that of Spinoza in the seventeenth century, where the Spinozist break with the liberal political paradigm immediately became a sign of freedom and indicated a path towards constructing democratic order in the modern period – a path that differed from the bourgeois and capitalist path.

In Part 1 I bring together three essays in which, through a critical reading of a number of authors, I suggest that we might see ’68 as a ‘good moment’, propitious to the operation – conducted by a number of ‘joyous Spinozans’, thanks to Spinoza’s thought – of affirming democratic thought and of encouraging struggles open to the desire for happiness. The studies by Matheron, Deleuze and Gueroult, followed shortly by those of Macherey, Balibar and Moreau as well as by my own, were fundamental to that moment. This is true in particular of Matheron’s work, which opens three new strands in Spinozist research: one of time, duration and eternity; another of potenza [power] and action; and yet another of the relationship between the body and the mind (as suggested by Chantal Jacquet). It would be possible to produce an extensive commentary on each of these themes and to follow their development by Matheron and his students. But here I need only emphasise how materialism, seen through the epistemological and ontological lens of Spinozism, was able to abandon its traditional foundation in dialectic and to embark on a project that was simultaneously constitutive and subjective. Thus Spinozism corresponds to a call for insurrection and to the new figure of class struggle that, from 1968 on, was no longer willing to squeeze through metaphysical straits towards teleological destinations.

It is interesting that Matheron’s analysis achieves these political objectives through extreme philological rigour. It is not by chance that Matheron is mentioned as a student of Gueroult’s, a distinguished example of philological prowess. But he was nobody’s pupil: his philology has an autonomous soul and renders political the bifurcation that Spinoza introduced into modern philosophy. This same bifurcation was also present in the philosophy of 1968, where Spinozism was reborn in opposition to Heideggerism, implementing political realism in the face of the mysticism that had been the end point of the metaphysics of modernism and of Schmittian cynicism in political thought. Here I wish to stress the importance of the rediscovery of Spinoza in the 1960s and 1970s: in the exit from traditional Marxism, it was Spinozism that rejected all the variants, strong or soft, of Krisis thinking. Instead of celebrating, with a modicum of angst, the need to return to order and to submit to the crude exercise of the economic weapons of capitalism, instead of accepting a conception of being in which the memory of a time of struggle could be erased, one could begin to reconstruct a revolutionary perspective on the terrain of Spinozism, because – as Matheron and his pupils taught – being is a dispositif for the destruction of sadness, desire is a dispositif of collective construction of freedom and joy, and absolute democracy (in other words, the democracy of struggles) is the only conceivable form of freedom and equality.

Thus I have outlined the general horizon in which my work on Spinoza took shape. In the first part of the present collection I retrace the elements of this general perspective, examining in particular the relationship between Spinoza and Deleuze. I emphasise that this relationship was fundamental in creating the fabric on which Deleuze and Guattari enacted (between Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus) the critique of contemporaneous capitalism; in their reading of Spinoza we find a verification of his rupture with the historical and philosophical tradition. On the one hand, the Deleuzian reading had the merit of asserting the potenza of singularities against the ethics of individualism and against the totalitarianism of commodities consubstantial with bourgeois culture. This is what the spirit of May 1968 (and of the following years) sought to abolish, and the work of Deleuze and Guattari represented a weapon to that end. On the other hand, in the context of the new readings made at the time, the malicious definition of Spinoza’s ontology contrived by Hegel and designed to normalise the subversive power of Spinoza’s work was set aside. Spinoza’s world was supposedly acosmic, and characterised by temporal immobility. Actually Spinoza seems to ignore the word ‘time’: the fact is that he transforms the traditional metaphysical definition, according to which time is a measure. He opts for time-life [tempovita]; he fixes this concept between lived reality and the imagination. For Spinoza, time does not exist except as liberation. And the liberated time is ‘productive imagination’ rooted in ethics as a capacity to create being. Liberated time is neither becoming nor dialectics nor mediation – it is being that is constructed, dynamic creation, imagination realised. Time is not measure but ethical action. Thus imagination discloses hidden dimensions of Spinozist being – that ethical being that liberates new production. There is, then, no utopia in Spinoza, just as there is no teleology. There is the world as it is. I propose here to speak of disutopia, by which I mean the capacity to derive, from within contingency, the relation between the difficulty of living and the dynamic of emancipation, and yet also – and above all – the passion to follow the traces of the potenza of being and to carry out the never-ending project of organising the infinite.

In Part 2 (‘Spinoza Today’), I address problems related to a number of Spinozist concepts that have found a new life in our contemporary world: concepts such as ‘the potenza to act’, ‘multitude’, ‘necessity’ and ‘freedom’, ‘immateriality’, as well as other, more familiar concepts such as justice, love and hate. The rereading of these concepts in a Spinozist light opens new possibilities for understanding the present, which began and was defined after 1968, then developed in postmodernity. The Spinozist lexicon and ontology give us access to novelties that the end of modernity presents, and also to the often equivocal figures of postmodernity. To those who are interested, I hope to offer here new critical openings to complement the effort to understand the present that I attempted to develop in my more recent books – especially those written together with Michael Hardt (Empire, published in 2000, Multitude in 2005, Commonwealth in 2011 and Assembly in 2017).

Part 3 of the book (‘Spinoza in the Seventeenth Century’) gives us another history, no longer in the present but in the past: the seventeenth century. The materials I offer to the reader represent the historiographical presuppositions of my work on seventeenth-century political philosophy, on the birth of political modernity, and on Spinoza and Descartes. Here I focus on the historical assumption of a ‘bifurcation’ that governs the political philosophy of the modern age. My research from the 1960s onwards started from the realisation that, already in the moment of primitive accumulation (typical precisely of the seventeenth century), nascent capitalism was traversed by powerful contradictions. After the crisis of Renaissance culture, which had reached its peak at the end of the sixteenth century, the anxious desire for liberation, born in humanism and nourished by the reformed and Protestant sects, would soon be crushed by the reborn dogmatism of the churches and by the affirmation of the absolute monarchical state. The Netherlands in the seventeenth century (that period known as the ‘golden age’) was in the midst of a dramatic confrontation between democratic movements and the aristocratic elites who wanted to transform the republic into a monarchy. Resistance was harsh, and the transition to absolute monarchy that took place in the rest of Europe clashed here with an efficient force of opposition. The people’s passion, the capacity for economic success and the spirit of solidarity, freedom and equality were firmly rooted in the Netherlands. And Spinoza’s political thought (powerfully expressed in his metaphysics) was produced and lived in that libertarian anomaly. For Spinoza, freedom is wild, indomitable, and as luminous as Rembrandt’s light. I republish in this volume an article written in 1966, ‘Problems of the historiography of the modern state: France 1610–1650’, which analyses the birth of the modern state. In this article I show how the humanist Renaissance had expressed a radical revolution in values and how, in the first half of the seventeenth century, the emergence of the modern individual, the emergence of productive singularities and the first images of their collective essence came up against insurmountable obstacles. In countries such as France, where absolute monarchy imposed its order, the bourgeoisie restructured itself through crisis, through a negative dialectic that opposed it to the state – to that monarchical state that it certainly supported and developed, defending it against those who wanted to destroy it (for instance the never-ending popular uprisings of the time), but that it failed to appropriate to itself. In the Netherlands and, later, in England during the Glorious Revolution, it was, on the contrary, the resistance and the republican alternative that were on the front lines of the struggle to define the form of the state. Spinoza should be read in the context of this history, because he is an expression of it.

About ten years before my book on Spinoza, I had written a book on Descartes (Descartes politico o della ragionevole ideologia, originally published in 1970; see Negri 2006b). But the historical framework I evoked at that time was the same: the Thirty Years War, the peasant jacqueries, the economic and political crisis and, throughout all this, the growth of the bourgeoisie and the consolidation of royal absolutism. The historians whom I referenced in that text were Boris Porshnev, Lucien Febvre and Roland Mousnier. In the appendix to the English translation of this piece (2006b, pp. 317–38), I substantially updated the historical references. In this context, Descartes represents an acceptance of the present, the tormented internalisation of the defeat of the Renaissance and of the hopes of the bourgeoisie; he represents it by constructing an indefinite horizon, a relative mediation with the absolute, on the certainty of truth proved by doubt. He knows that free inquiry has been annihilated: Galileo was the latest victim of this process. Descartes was thus left with only the hope of freedom. His doubt expresses the potenza of a consciousness ready to enter into a relationship of mediation with the world – if the world opens up. With Descartes we enter into the time of interiority, of consciousness defeated, of recourse to a God who is transcendent and solitary – and of a ‘rational’ compromise with the absolute power of the monarch. Descartes represents the ideology of a bourgeoisie nostalgic for the potenza of its own humanist genesis, a bourgeoisie that had sought power and, with a realistic awareness of having been defeated, was now willing to negotiate with the absolute state. Spinoza, by contrast, embodies the historical anomaly of a resistant freedom.

It seems to me that I have deepened the analysis of the bifurcation between the absolute state and republican democracy that has dominated modernity and from which we still suffer. Now Spinoza (together with Machiavelli and Marx) represents a line of political immanentism that opposes critically the line of political transcendence represented by Hobbes–Rousseau–Hegel. This is potenza versus potere [power], immanence versus political transcendence: ‘For a free multitude is guided by hope more than by fear, whereas a multitude which has been subjugated is guided more by fear than by hope. The first want to cultivate life; the second care only to avoid death’ (Spinoza, Political Treatise, ch. 5: 6). Potenza thus asserts itself here against the religion of a sovereignty founded on fear – as would be the case in Hobbes – but also, implicitly, against the illusion of an abstract and transcendent political representation of the multitude – as will be the case in Rousseau; and against any dialectical apology, à la Hegel, for a civil society that is individuated as a moment of the absolute. The great clash between these two lines, represented at its peak by the opposition between Spinoza and Hobbes, is to be found in the debate on contractualism, that is, on the hypothesis of a contract-based genesis that lays the basis of political association and thus pushes humanity out of the state of nature. The Hobbesian contract hands over to the sovereign a relationship of domination that takes away all rights – save the preservation of life – from the citizens who adjudicate the contract. In Spinoza, on the other hand, the contract is conceivable only as an abstract hypothesis – on the contrary, the fact of association is itself what produces the government, or rather the engine of the development of a democratic government, defined as omnino absolutum imperium [power absolute in every respect]. Democracy is the absolute expression of the political, and the multitude organises itself spontaneously into a democracy.

No, the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty. (Theological–Political Treaty, ch. 20: 6)

Against the social contract of the liberals, which expropriates the autonomy of the citizen with the value of labour, Spinoza – like Machiavelli before and Marx after him – conceives of the democratic multitude as the base and the motor of free political life. In opposing the Machiavelli–Spinoza–Marx line to the Hobbes–Rousseau–Hegel line, I feel that I have not done much more than renew the secular proposal, dear to the Enlightenment, of the value of political knowledge – a proposal that affirms democratic radicalness, presents itself as an open temporality undoing identities, individualism and private property, and therefore asserts a republican and democratic passion.

A small parenthesis regarding Hegel. I should explain why, at this point in the collection, I have inserted the essay ‘Rereading Hegel, the philosopher of right’. This is an article written in 1967 in which I distanced myself from Hegel, although he had been a major focus of my studies during my first years of philosophical research. Indeed, my PhD thesis (published in Italian in Padova, in 1958) bore a title translatable as ‘State and law in the young Hegel’. The research for it was accompanied by an Italian translation of two early writings by Hegel, which I published under the title ‘Le maniere di trattare scientificamente il diritto naturale’ (‘The scientific modalities of treating natural right’) and ‘Sistema dell’eticità’ (‘The system of ethics’) in the volume G. W. F. Hegel, Scritti di filosofia del diritto (Laterza: Bari, 1962). I thought it would be appropriate to document in the present volume, in chapters 12 and 13, my rethinking of Hegel in the decade that followed, as an indication of the intensity of my break with metaphysical idealism and bourgeois political cynicism. Indeed, distancing myself from Hegel meant placing myself in a philosophical Kampfplatz [place of struggle] in which Spinoza was to be my support in the discovery of the concept of absolute democracy.

The essays gathered in Part 3, in addition to illustrating the historical antecedents of Spinoza’s thinking about the state, open the way to a series of comparisons with theoretical positions in Marxism that have accompanied my researches into the seventeenth century. The chapters on Macpherson, on Borkenau and Grossmann, and on Tronti belonged originally in the Italian edition of my L’anomalia selvaggia (Negri 1981), as appendix material. The appendix did not appear in the 1991 English translation (published under the title The Savage Anomaly) and was not subsequently reprinted. But these writings mark important polemical moments along my Spinozist path. They say ‘no’ to any transcendental, mechanist, or transcendent conception of power – respectively as in Hobbes, as in Grossmann (i.e. according to the dictates of economic determinism), or as in Tronti’s later writings (i.e. expressed in terms of ‘the autonomy of the political’). Power can be neither analysed nor defined in these terms; the history of power is always that of an antagonism, its nature is a nature determined by class struggle. All unitary conceptions of power are pure metaphysics, and every metaphysical idea is always invented or constructed for the purpose of founding and exalting power. ‘Politics of immanence, politics of transcendence’, the chapter that opens Part 3, provides an introduction to the great bifurcation of the seventeenth century, summarises it and projects it forward to the present day. From that point on, one is compelled to take sides.

Paris, December 2017