BdSpinoza

Studie naar Spinoza en Machiavelli op komst

Bij Continuum Publishing Corporation ging ik even kijken of er al nieuws was over de komende Spinoza-encyclopedie, die eerder wel op de site stond, maar daar weer was afgehaald. Er stond niets. Wel zag ik de aankondiging van een wellicht interessante monografie die op 17 aug. 2009 zou zijn uitgekomen (volgens Amazon op 15 september verschijnt).

Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza - Tumult and Indignation by Filippo Del Lucchese

Conflict, Power and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza explores Spinoza’s political philosophy by confronting it with that of Niccolò Machiavelli.

Filippo Del Lucchese conducts a study of the relationship between Machiavelli and Spinoza from a perspective at once philosophical, historical and political.

The book begins by showing how closely tied the two thinkers are in relation to realism. Del Lucchese then goes on to examine the theme of conflict as a crucial element of an understanding of Machiavelli and Spinoza’s conceptions of modernity.

[Van hier] Aanvulling: inmiddels bij Bloomsbury volgens welke het 12-22-2011 verschenen zou zijn [cf.].

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Hier de informatieve eerste pagina van een zeven pagina’s tellend review door Martin Saar in European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 19, Issue 4,  pages 647–654, December 2011 [Cf.]

A certain dissatisfaction with liberal political thought has led many contemporary authors to search for alternative political concepts and vocabularies. While for some this has meant moving beyond the prominent sources of the Western political canon, others have proposed to take a closer look and discover alternative visions of politics within that very tradition. In his difficult and dense but elegantly written book, Filippo Del Lucchese follows the second path. The political theories of Machiavelli and Spinoza, he argues, can provide rich resources to think politics 'realistically', as a site of contingency and conflict, especially when both authors are read in conjunction. This is the promise of nothing less than a different approach to modern politics, or, as Lucchese prefers to phrase it, of an 'alternative modernity' (p. 2).

Starting with this assumption, Del Lucchese explicitly places himself alongside Louis Althusser, Antonio Negri and Vittorio Morfino who have all made similar proposals regarding the link between Machiavelli and Spinoza but did not always give it systematic treatment. Filling this gap is a major contribution to political theory, historically practiced. A second, more limited, but also important goal of this book is the correction of a certain received image of Spinoza as an arch-rationalist with infinite reliance on the power of reason, rational institutions and the rule of law. Reading Spinoza as responding to Machiavelli and as clearly taking up many of his rather radical insights, Del Lucchese can argue for a quite different understanding of what Spinoza's contribution to political thought might amount to. Neither harmony, rational reconciliation or peace are then to be seen as the centerpieces of Spinoza's political vision but conflict, tension and struggle. In both ambitions, arguing for an alternative political outlook and giving an original reading of the political Spinoza, this book is successful and rewarding.

The book contains seven chapters in three parts which are organized around the themes realism, conflict, and multitude. In a first step (chapters 1-2), very roughly speaking, Lucchese introduces Machiavelli and Spinoza as realistic, anti-utopian thinkers whose political theories possess a polemical and critical character. In the second step (chapters 3-5), he shows them to rely on basically conflictual visions of political life, according to which the health and productivity of a polity is dependent on its capacity to live with fundamental tensions and struggles. In the last step (chapters 6-7), Lucchese reconstructs (and defends) both authors' complex conceptions of the people, or the multitude, as the collective agent of politics. This reveals how both of them, and Spinoza especially, make an original philosophical contribution to the question of democracy. All three parts begin with a very short thematical introduction, all seven chapters start with Machiavelli and move on to the discussion of the ways the Machiavellian themes are treated and developed by Spinoza. In the third part it becomes most apparent that the latter is the main hero of the book and this might explain why he is interpreted in much more detail and it is also only in relation to him that alternative interpretations are discussed. And, indeed, a rather unfamiliar Spinoza is to be encountered on the comparative stage Del Lucchese sets for us.

spinoza | 12-09-2009 | 17:46 | Link | Reacties (2)