Spinoza's Critique of Hobbes

Christian Lazzeri examines the relationship between the political theory of Hobbes and that of Spinoza. Arguing against longstanding one-sided interpretations, he shows how Spinoza both took up and modified, accepted and distanced himself from Hobbes’s ideas. This also brings out problematic aspects of Hobbes’s thinking from Spinoza’s perspective. Most importantly, Lazzeri traces how Spinoza constructed a political philosophy, not on the narrow basis of an autonomous political sphere constituted by the relationships between rational legal subjects to produce indivisible sovereignty, but rather on the broad basis of the complex web of social relations and a purely institutionalist framework.