It is significant, it is often said, that the drafting of the Political Treatise was interrupted precisely at Chapter XI: it is as if, crushed by the aporias of an inconsistent theory of democracy, Spinoza had given up. And we are indeed in the presence, if not of a contradiction, at least of an apparent paradox. In the ideal Spinozist monarchy, the king's council had to include representatives of all of the categories of citizens, but it was added, without any justification, that certain inhabitants are unable to belong to the civic body: in addition to foreigners, fugitives from justice, the mute and the mad, servants and other such individuals are to be excluded. In the ideal aristocracy, again without the slightest justification, the same people are stripped of the right to present their candidacy for the assembly of patricians;if the mute and the mad were no longer mentioned, we must allow that this was undoubtedly an oversight. As for the ideal democracy, which, however, we were told would be studied in the broadest possible form, the only thing we ultimately learn about it is that the same exclusions are maintained more or less as such; the exclusion of women and children is added, but it is clear enough that it was implicit in the two preceding constitutions. Spinoza, this time, agrees at last to explain himself; he even does so rather extensively concerning women. But his explanation seems at first so weak, so flat, exhibiting an empiricism and a conformism so foreign to the usual inspiration of the doctrine, that one believes one understands both why he had waited so long to give us an explanation and why he was unable to continue: bad conscience, one might be tempted to think; a confused feeling of an irreducible discordance between what the principles would have made it possible to rigorously deduce, and the extra-philosophical necessities that imposed the obligation to deduce them. The situation is banal, and many have become accustomed to it; at least Spinoza had the integrity to stop there and just die!

Perhaps. But perhaps it would also be worth not deciding so quickly, on Spinoza's behalf, on what is implied in the principles of his politics. That his politics, in a sense, is of a fundamentally democratic inspiration, is hardly contestable; but the whole question is of knowing in what sense.