The Problem of Political Obligation in Hobbes and Spinoza

Abstract

In the first part of this essay, I examine some difficulties in Hobbes’ theory of political obligation. Starting from Rousseau’s distinction between de facto and legitimate (legal) power, I analyze the specific way in which Hobbes tried to identify what he called “laws of nature”, understood as rational theorems capable of lending rational legitimacy to the Sovereign Power, and thus establishing a coincidence between what is rational and what is just. Next, I analyze Hobbes’ arguments against the “theory of the fool”, that is, of the individual who does not accept the confluence of rationality and legitimacy; with this argument, Hobbes tried to make clear the utopic weaknesses of those arguments. In the second part of the essay I show how Spinoza, starting from premises that bear apparent similarities to those of Hobbes, in fact radically reformulates this perspective, in order to propose a “realist”, though democratic, conception of the political processes of legitimation.