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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism
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Potentia - Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics (Hardcover)
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Potentia - Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics (Hardcover)
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We live in an age of growing dissatisfaction with the standard
operations of representative democracy. The solution, according to
a long radical democratic tradition, is the unmediated power of the
people. Mass plebiscites and mass protest movements are celebrated
as the quintessential expression of popular power, and this power
promises to transcend ordinary institutional politics. But the
outcomes of mass political phenomena can be just as disappointing
as the ordinary politics they sought to overcome, breeding
skepticism about democratic politics in all its forms. Potentia
argues that the very meaning of popular power needs to be
rethought. It offers a detailed study of the political philosophies
of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza, focusing on their concept
of power as potentia, concrete power, rather than power as
potestas, authorized power. Specifically, the book's argument turns
on a new interpretation of potentia as a capacity that is
dynamically constituted in a web of actual human relations. This
means that a group's potentia reflects any hostility or hierarchy
present in the relations between its members. There is nothing
spontaneously egalitarian or good about human collective existence;
a group's power deserves to be called popular only if it avoids
oligarchy and instead durably establishes its members' equality.
Where radical democrats interpret Hobbes' "sleeping sovereign" or
Spinoza's "multitude" as the classic formulations of unmediated
popular power, Sandra Leonie Field argues that for both Hobbes and
Spinoza, conscious institutional design is required in order for
true popular power to be achieved. Between Hobbes' commitment to
repressing private power and Spinoza's exploration of civic
strengthening, Field draws on early modern understandings of
popular power to provide a new lens for thinking about the risks
and promise of democracy.
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