I have been arguing thus far that the Theological Political Treatise is organized according to the dialectic of authority and utility. A problem emerges when we consider that a practical judgement about utility arises as a response to given circumstances, and if the circumstances are so manifold and unpredictable that they cannot be organized under steadfast rules, then practical judgement or phronesis can never aspire to either certainty or truth. It is, as Hannah Arendt puts it, a judging ‘without banisters’. Any particular calculation of utility – be it at a personal or communal level – can never know for sure that its inferences are correct, since it needs to extract the criteria for judging from the unpredictable and uncodifiable situation it assesses.

Spinoza turns this feature of the calculation of utility into a mechanism that allows him to trace the operation of the dialectic of authority and utility. This is possible because the dialectic is not concerned with the truth or falsity of judgements that pertain to action. Instead, it concerns the effects of action. And such effects are registered when mistakes are made just as much – if not more – than when the correct decisions are taken. The first two chapters of the Theological Political Treatise suggest that the effects of these mistakes can be productive – and what they produce is authority. Subsequently, these mistakes are carried out in the definition of the people as described in the third chapter of the Treatise.

To discern these productive mistakes, we need to recall Lucretius's distinction between potestas – the kind of power that is artificial and that is instituted, as well as the kind of power that authority enjoys – from potentia – the ontological or ‘natural’ power that indicates the potentiality or capability of entities. All three mistakes – about the production of authority in the first two chapters and the production of the people in the third chapter – consist in misunderstandings about potentia, and thereby affect the interplay of potentia and potestas, which produces significant effects for the dialectic of authority and utility.

Schematically, the errors are as follows: The first error is made by the people. They mistake revelation as a kind of special knowledge that is superior to the natural knowledge shared by all. Thus they erroneously attribute a superior potentia to the prophets, which creates their authority.

Spinoza does a remarkable job in presenting the dialectic of authority and utility in the Theological Political Treatise. Not only does this revive an epicurean politics; in addition, it provides a compelling account of a democratic politics that relies on agonism. In this account, the conflict between authority and utility can never be quenched, which makes it the driver of politics. This conflict emerges as more fundamental than any form of government, or than any arrangement of representation, or than any way in which there is a separation of powers within the state.

Through this dialectic of authority and utility, Spinoza participates in the materialist tradition of modernity, not by slavishly following previous ideas but by appropriating and reformulating them. The significant contribution of the Theological Political Treatise is that it develops a typology of authority that highlights the importance of democracy for an epicurean politics. The distinction between personal authority, didactic authority and the authority to abrogate provides Spinoza with the basis to both describe and critique constituted power and to delineate a form of agonistic politics characterized by the intensification of the freedom to calculate one's utility.

Further, the reliance of Spinoza's politics on the anthropological principle – or the propensity to calculate one's utility in relation to the utility of the entire community – has a contemporary relevance that is, it seems to me, of urgent significance. There are at least three reasons that this is the case.

First, the anthropological principle, as I describe it, requires that there are two distinct, but not separate, paths to political virtue, the path of the emotions and the path of reason. It seems to me that it is hugely significant to consider a democratic politics that does not forget the import of the emotions in the construction of the political. There has been an inordinate emphasis on deliberation and process in the way that the democratic is understood. The problem with such an overreliance on reason is that it finds it hard to explain so much of the political that is dominated, for the most part, by the emotions.

What is the relation of priority between authority and utility, the two terms of the epicurean dialectic? Does authority cause utility or is it the other way round? What comes first, authority or utility? Spinoza's conception of democracy stands or falls with this problematic. If authority means that which is impervious to argumentation and if democracy requires the freedom to decide about collective actions, then the priority of authority would suggest that democracy is merely a consequence of authority. It is not easy to reverse the relation, since what does it mean to have democracy before the instituted kind of power modelled on authority's structure of command and obedience? That is, how can we conceive of democracy before written law?

The relation between authority and utility may seem to mirror one of the major issues in the interpretation of the Theological Political Treatise, namely, whether the prosperity and well-being of the community and the state are ensured by obedience or reason. The vast majority of commentators on Spinoza's Treatise feel compelled to take either side. As I suggested in the Introduction, I present the relation of authority and utility as a dialectic to bypass the disjunction of – or, differently put, to overcome the false binary of – either obedience or reason. Nonetheless, the dialectical relation cannot evade the problematic of what comes first, authority or utility.

Let me highlight some of the complexities of this problematic via Michel Foucault. He develops a theory of power understood as something constructed, as potestas, which in Foucault's terms includes what we call authority here. It is fundamental to this theory that there is no power as such, but it is rather always accompanied by resistance. His approach consists, as he puts it in his essay ‘The Subject and Power’, in

The first part of the subtitle of the Theological Political Treatise may have been easily acceptable to Spinoza's contemporaries: the book shows that ‘Freedom of Philosophizing can be allowed in Preserving Piety and the Peace of the Republic’. In the aftermath of the Reformation, this sentiment would not have been unfamiliar. The secular ideal of the separation of ecclesiastical from temporal authority requires that there is a division between the inner self that is subject to faith and receives the message of Scripture, and the external self that is subject to the authority of the sovereign and to the laws of the state. Mirroring this logic, philosophers and deists of various hues claim a private right to the freedom to philosophize – a right that is distinct from their public obligations to the state.

Although the first sentence of the subtitle should have come as no surprise to the general educated reader in the seventeenth century, the sentence that follows would most likely have been unnerving. The book, indicates Spinoza, also wants to argue that ‘it is not possible for such Freedom to be upheld except when accompanied by the Peace of the Republic and Piety Themselves’. Here, the freedom to philosophize acquires a public dimension. It is as if Spinoza is suggesting that the freedom to philosophize requires as a necessary precondition a well-functioning state and a pious Church. It is as if, further, the external condition – the public dimension of life – cannot be separated from the internal life of the mind. Freedom to philosophize isdetermined by the material conditions in which it unfolds. Such a materialism is not widely embraced by seventeenth-century readers.

The cumulative effect of the chiasmus of these two sentences of the subtitle suggests a radical position. It suggests that the absence of the freedom to philosophize would threaten the existence of a state and would make the Church impious.

There is a distinctive change of tone in chapter 16 – the first chapter of the third part of the Theological Political Treatise. It is as if Spinoza suddenly becomes more direct, freer and bolder. He notes that ‘up to this point our object has been to separate philosophy from theology and to show that the latter allows freedom to philosophise for every individual’. This is the task that is announced as ‘finalized’ in chapter 14, and yet, as we saw, it is not finalized in the sense that faith and reason are separated; rather they are distinguished yet interminably entangled. This is the conclusion of a trajectory that includes the critique of personal authority in the first part of the Treatise, as well as the development in the second part of Reformed authority that is no longer opposed to the calculation of utility. Then, Spinoza explains what he intends to do in this third part: ‘It is therefore time to enquire what are the limits of this freedom of thought, and of saying what one thinks, in a well-conducted state.’ This part, then, will present the double sense of agonism that pertains to the freedom to philosophize, as we saw in the previous chapter, that is, the agonism against any false sense of meaning that promotes personal authority, and the transversal or chiasmus between the two paths that lead to the good and virtue. The latter, in particular, will be the focus of the third part. Spinoza further indicates how he will accomplish this task: ‘To approach this question in an orderly way, we must discuss the basis of the state, and prior to that … we must discuss the natural right of the individual’ (172). The first concern, then, is natural right.

Spinoza immediately proceeds to define right in terms of power. First, this definition is articulated in terms of nature: ‘Nature's right is co-extensive with its power [jus naturae eo usque se extendere, quo usque ejus potentia se extendit]’ (173/189). And then in terms of individuals: ‘the right of the individual is co-extensive with its determinate power [determinata potentia]’ (173/189).

To understand what Spinoza is aiming at as he returns to a discussion of the Hebrew state in chapters 17 and 18, we need to consider the structure of the third part of the Theological Political Treatise.

In chapter 16, Spinoza focuses on what I have called (since section 2 of Chapter 4) natural democracy. Immediately after defining democracy as ‘the most natural form of state’, Spinoza adds: ‘For in a democratic state nobody transfers one's natural right to another so completely that thereafter one is not to be consulted; one transfers it to the majority of the entire society [in majorem totius Societatis] of which one is part. In this way everyone remains equal, as they were before in a state of nature’ (179/195). The democratic state is characterized by the exercise of right in an organized political community. We could express this by saying that in such a society natural right is determinative of civil law. There is an equality of people in such a community. This is identical with the description of what I called natural democracy in Chapter 4. Spinoza then adds the following methodological remark: ‘And there is this further reason why I have chosen to discuss at some length only this form of state [solo imperio]: thereby my main purpose is best served, which is to discuss the utility of freedom in a commonwealth [de utilitate libertatis in Republica agere constitueram]’ (179/195). This is the only form of state that Spinoza discusses in chapter 16. The examination of natural right or how useful phronesis is to society only allows for an examination of democracy.

This methodological observation needs to be situated in terms of the distinction between the two regimes of power that Spinoza identifies in chapter 5 of the Theological Political Treatise, namely, natural democracy as the regime that relies on equality, and the state of authority as the regime that relies on obedience. As I explained in Chapter 4, both of these regimes of power require that the people calculate their utility. Further, as we saw Balibar arguing earlier, the good or political virtue can be attained by following either of two distinct paths: the path of reason or the path of the emotions.

The title of chapter 4 announces that it is concerned with ‘divine law’. The opening couple of sentences draw a distinction between divine and human law:

It is striking what is elided in this distinction. Specifically, it does not say that the source or origin of divine law is revelation and that of human law is legitimacy or the sovereign as the one who has the authority to legislate. Further, the definition does not define the law in terms of command and obedience.

The reason for these omissions is that these traditional avenues of approaching the law are not open to Spinoza. Revelation, according to chapter 1, is a communication with God that is mediated through the proph-ets’ interpretation, which makes it a human construct. And the command and obedience model cannot account for divine law, since God or nature is understood in strictly impersonal terms by Spinoza. Instead of the traditional routes of approaching legality, Spinoza has recourse to a qualitative distinction between the absolute necessity of divine or natural law, and the dependence of human law on the will of a polity to preserve itself.

The title of chapter 4 announces that it is concerned with ‘divine law’. The opening couple of sentences draw a distinction between divine and human law:

No sooner has Spinoza solved one problem than another arises. The qualitative distinction between necessity and will may be challenged on the grounds that human will cannot be separated in reality from the necessity of nature. What we will and do forms part of the concatenation of causes and effects that constitute the totality of nature.

It would be convenient to regard chapters 14 and 15 of the Theological Political Treatise as merely transitional chapters that summarize and at most refine the arguments of the previous thirteen chapters. There is a modicum of truth in this. For instance, the figure of the sceptic drawn in chapter 7 is here developed in detail. But the important interpretative and discursive reason for viewing these chapters as transitional would be to explain the persistence of one of the major exegetical disagreements about the Treatise, namely, the question whether Spinoza believes that the state ought to be based on piety and obedience, or whether alternatively it should be grounded on the exercise of reason. It is in these two chapters that Spinoza directly confronts the question of the relation of faith as based on the imagination and the emotions, and reason as based on the pursuit of truth. If these are transitional chapters, then it would be understandable that they do not settle the relation of faith and reason, which in turn justifies the persistence of this disagreement in the reception of the Treatise.

As opposed to that view, I hold onto the centrality of these chapters for Spinoza's political enterprise. I will show that, even though Spinoza announces the clear separation of faith and reason in the title of chapter 14, still the fact that their relation remains complicated is critical for his conception of neighbourly love and for how the ‘freedom to philosophize’ is to be understood. The intricate relation between faith and reason as presented here also paves the way for the most critical move we will discover in the last two chapters of the Treatise that articulates Spinoza's conception of democracy, as I will explain. Finally, the way Spinoza presents the relation of faith and reason can be understood – or, more emphatically, is only understandable – within the framework of his epicureanism.

‘Finally’? The Politics of the Distinction between Faith and Reason

The title of chapter 14 could not appear clearer on the question of the relation between faith and reason.

Having presented the two regimes of power – natural democracy and the state of authority – following the two paths to the good – the path of rationality and the path of the emotions, respectively – we now find ourselves in a position to inquire about the relation between these two regimes and their co-articulation in two paths. Any answer to the question about the relation between the two paths needs to start from Spinoza's insistence in chapter 17 that neither path is pure. Thus, the opening sentence of the chapter refers back to the previous chapter, saying that the ‘picture presented in the last chapter … though it comes quite close to actual practice and can increasingly be realised in reality, must nevertheless remain in many respects no more than theory [in multis mere theoretica]’ (185/201). Later, immediately after defining the theocracy of the Hebrew state as the coincidence of civil and religious law, Spinoza observes that nonetheless this is ‘a matter of theory rather than fact [omnia opinione magis, quam re constabant]’ (189–90/206). Thus, both paths to communal virtue made available through the political application of the anthropological principle are, on their own, more theory than praxis. In actuality, neither can be realized in a pure form. Or, differently put, no state can be a pure democracy or a pure authority.

If the two paths are not pure, then they contaminate each other by veering into each other's paths. Each path is not the realization of its end, but a process in which the negotiation with the other path is critical. Thus, the path of reason that is characterized by the operation of right through the calculation of utility is constantly in complex relations with the path of the emotions relying on the imitation of the affects as well as on obedience to authority. We see, then, that the relation between the two paths is Spinoza's way of staging the dialectic of authority and utility at two levels simultaneously – both at the level of political regimes, and at the anthropological level. This suggests that both paths can operate simultaneously in the same actual regime of power, or in the same state. Some people follow the dictates of the sovereign through the exercise of their phronesis, others simply because they obey.

Spinoza is pointedly silent about his philosophical allegiances. The only time he lets his guard down is in a letter to Boxel from September 1674 in which he positions himself in the epicurean camp (Ep. 56). Given this, it is surprising that in the multitude of Spinozas in the reception of his work an epicurean Spinoza is nowhere to be found – with a few exceptions that I discuss in the next section.

I argue that Spinoza is an epicurean because he stages a dialectic between authority and utility. I do not mean a dialectics in the Hegelian sense, since it is not teleological. By dialectic I mean that the two terms, authority and utility, are in conflict but in such a way as to contribute to each other's determination, whereby it is impossible to thoroughly separate them. Like an old couple, they cannot stand each other even though they cannot do without each other.

The dialectic of authority and utility, specifically, stages the following conflict: Authority requires obedience whereas the drive to calculate our utility presupposes that we make our own practical judgements. Thus, under certain conditions, when authority takes over and suspends our judgements, Spinoza is pointedly silent about his philosophical allegiances. The only time he lets his guard down is in a letter to Boxel from September 1674 in which he positions himself in the epicurean camp (Ep. 56). Given this, it is surprising that in the multitude of Spinozas in the reception of his work an epicurean Spinoza is nowhere to be found – with a few exceptions that I discuss in the next section.

I argue that Spinoza is an epicurean because he stages a dialectic between authority and utility. I do not mean a dialectics in the Hegelian sense, since it is not teleological. By dialectic I mean that the two terms, authority and utility, are in conflict but in such a way as to contribute to each other's determination, whereby it is impossible to thoroughly separate them. Like an old couple, they cannot stand each other even though they cannot do without each other.

Why Does it Matter to Read Spinoza as an Epicurean?

Reading Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise as symptomatic of his epicureanism offers both a radical reconsideration of his work and suggests why he is still relevant to our contemporary political predicament. This double gesture – an historicization of Spinoza's argument so as to highlight his political relevance – is not uncommon. For instance, Gilles Deleuze in Expressionism in Philosophy reads Spinoza's materialism as a reversal of Platonism that leads to what he calls ‘the plane of immanence’, the basis of his own political philosophy. Or, Antonio Negri in The Savage Anomaly repositions Spinoza in a materialist tradition that privileges the idea of constituent power as a political force that is the linchpin of later writings such as Empire.

This historicized repositioning of Spinoza is in a certain sense prompted by the lack of work on the history of materialism. As Negri observes in a note to his Savage Anomaly, ‘materialism has not been historicized!’ There are historical accounts of Platonism, Aristotelianism and Stoicism. There are historical accounts of medieval schools of philosophy such as nominalism. And there are historical accounts of all major schools of modern philosophy – the social contract tradition, idealism, Hegelianism, phenomenology and so on. But there is no authoritative account of materialism from antiquity to the present, with the exception of Friedrich Lange's book from 1864, which is both outdated and inaccessible today.

This lack is both a hindrance and an advantage when writing on Spinoza. It is a hindrance in the sense that, to define the precise sense in which Spinoza is a materialist, we are forced to historicize our reading of Spinoza. As Lange establishes, the core idea of every form of materialism is the rejection of creation out of nothing, or the rejection of transcendence. But this can be understood in many different ways that lead to divergent positions. So scholars writing on Spinoza need to historicize their approach to determine the exact sense in which he is a materialist.

This can also be advantageous because it allows Spinoza's readers to position their reinterpretation of his materialism in such a way as to resonate with contemporary political issues. Materialism has always had an uncanny propensity to resonate with current political concerns.

The first part of the Theological Political Treatise is concerned with the genesis of personal authority exemplified by the prophets, who are defined in terms of the communication they effect. Theirs is a one-way communication through revelation: they interpret God's message for the people. But their authority is premised on a series of errors that also permeate the conceptions of identity of the people and the source of legality. Spinoza structures the second part of the Treatise by explaining how the errors that underlie the personal authority of the prophets are overcome.

This does not mean that Spinoza rejects authority as such. Rather, he develops a new notion of authority. This new notion of authority is informed by changes brought forward by the Reformation when authority's relation to communication shifts from the person – such as the absolute authority of the Pope to interpret Scripture – to the authority of Scripture itself, or sola Scriptura. The changed conditions about interpretation in the aftermath of the Reformation influence the notion of authority. I call this authority that is created in conjunction with hermeneutics Reformed authority.

It would be deficient, however, to resolve the intricacy of Spinoza's argument with reference solely to the historical context. Reformed authority is situated within the argumentative structure of the Theological Political Treatise. The notion of neighbourly love is pivotal in the Treatise's presentation of authority. In chapters 7 to 13, Spinoza returns three times to neighbourly love, mobilizing it in such a way as to function as the cypher of his conception of Reformed authority. The key to this conception, as it is exemplified by the first use, is that Reformed authority overcomes the distinctive error of the prophets in the course of establishing their own authority – namely, the error of imagining God as a ruler and lawgiver or ascribing potestas to the divine. Reformed authority no longer relies on a transcendent source to prop itself up. Rather, it relies on reason and as such it is an authority whose function is to teach; it is a didactic authority, as Spinoza calls it.