I. I do not intend to treat the question of democracy in Spinoza and Hobbes in its totality, for it is much too vast. It is well known, for example, that Hobbes preferred monarchy to democracy, whereas the opposite is true for Spinoza. And it would be easy to show in detail how Spinoza, on this point, goes to the trouble of refuting one by one the arguments put forward by Hobbes, drawing much inspiration, moreover, from the refutation already given of them in Pieter de la Court's Politike Weegschal. But this is not the aspect of the problem that I will examine here; I will be content to presuppose it. The problem I would like to raise concerns not the judgement passed by Hobbes and Spinoza on the practical advantages and disadvantages of democracy, but the theoretical role democracy would ultimately play in their respective doctrines of the foundations of political legitimacy in general. Put differently: to what extent, in both Hobbes and Spinoza, is the recourse to democracy indispensable for founding theoretically the legitimacy of all other forms of sovereignty? And we will see that, on this subject, Hobbes and Spinoza followed trajectories at once parallel and inverse: parallel with regard to their premises and inverse with regard to their conclusions.

But in order to really understand the meaning of this problematic, we must first say a few words about its origin. This origin, in a sense, precedes the very appearance of the notions of sovereignty and social contract. It is to be found in a very old principle traditionally taken as a commonplace: the principle according to which a political community as such, insofar as it is a collective person, has the highest conceivable human authority over its own members. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, tells us that the consent of the entire multitude has more power [pouvoir], in legislative matters, than the authority of the prince itself, for the prince is only authorised to legislate to the extent that it represents the multitude, insofar as it assumes its juridical personality (in quantum gerit personam multitudinis). To be sure, in Aquinas, there is neither sovereignty nor social contract. But, as soon as these two notions appeared in correlation, they would combine with this traditional principle in order to make possible the establishment of the common problematic that Hobbes and Spinoza would have to take up.