VIII Freedom and Order

EVEN to-day the social instincts are not strong enough to prevent unsocial behavior. “Men are not born fit for citizenship, but must be made so.”¹ Hence custom and law. Each man, in his sober moments, desires such social arrangements as will protect him from aggression and interference. “There is no one who does not wish to live, so far as possible, in security and without fear; and this cannot possibly happen so long as each man is allowed to do as he pleases.”² “That men who are necessarily subject to passions, and are inconstant and changeable, may be able to live together in security, and to trust one another’s fidelity,”—that is the purpose of law.³ Ideally, the state is to the individual what reason is to passion.⁴ Law protects a man not only from the passions of others, but from his own; it is a help to delayed response. How to frame laws so that the greatest possible number of men may find their own security and fulfilment in allegiance to the law,—that is the problem of the statesman. Law implies force, but so does life, so does nature; indeed, the punishments decreed by “man-made” states are usually milder than those which in a “state of nature” would be the natural consequents of most interferences; not seldom the law—as when it prevents lynching—protects an aggressor from the natural results of his act. Force is the essence of law; hence international law will not really be law until nations are coördinated into a larger group possessed of the instrumentalities of compulsion.⁵

It is clear that Spinoza has the philosophic love of order. “Whatever conduces to human harmony and fellowship is good; whatever brings discord into the state is evil.”⁶ But discord, one must repeat, is often the prelude to a greater harmony; development implies variation, and all variation is a discord except to ears that hear the future. The social sanction of liberty lies of course in the potential value of variations; without that vision of new social possibilities which is suggested by variations from the norm a people perishes. Spinoza does not see this; but there is a fine passage in the Tractatus Politicus⁷ which shows him responsive to the ideal of liberty as well as to that of order: “The last end of the state is not to dominate men, nor to restrain them by fear; rather it is so to free each man from fear that he may live and act with full security and without injury to himself or his neighbor. The end of the state is, I repeat, not to make rational beings into brute beasts or machines. It is to enable their bodies and their minds to function safely. It is to lead men to live by, and to exercise, a free reason, that they may not waste their strength in hatred, anger, and guile, not act unfairly toward one another. Thus the end of the state is really liberty.”

So it is that Spinoza takes sharp issue with Hobbes and exalts freedom, decentralization, and democracy, where Hobbes, starting with almost identical premises, concludes to a centralized despotism of body and soul. This does not mean that Spinoza had no eye for the defects of democracy. “Experience is supposed to teach that it makes for peace and concord when all authority is conferred upon one man. For no political order has stood so long without notable change as that of the Turks, while none have been so short-lived, nay, so vexed by seditions, as popular or democratic states. But if slavery, barbarism, and desolation are to be called peace, then peace is the worst misfortune that can befall a state. It is true that quarrels are wont to be sharper and more frequent between parents and children than between masters and slaves; yet it advances not the art of home life to change a father’s right into a right of property, and count his children as only his slaves. Slavery, then, and not peace, comes from the giving of all power to one man. For peace consists not in the absence of war, but in a union and harmony of men’s souls.”⁸

No; better the insecurity of freedom than the security of bondage. Better the dangers that come of the ignorance of majorities than those that flow from the concentration of power in the hands of an inevitably self-seeking minority. Even secret diplomacy is worse than the risks of publicity. “It has been the one song of those who thirst after absolute power that the interest of the state requires that its affairs be conducted in secret.... But the more such arguments disguise themselves under the mask of public welfare the more oppressive is the slavery to which they will lead.... Better that right counsels be known to enemies, than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.... It is folly to choose to avoid a small loss by means of the greatest of evils.”⁹

This is but one of many passages in Spinoza that startle the reader with their present applicability and value. There is in the same treatise a plan for an unpaid citizen soldiery, much like the scheme adopted in Switzerland; there is a plea against centralization and for the development of municipal pride by home rule and responsibility; there is a warning against the danger to democracy involved in the territorial expansion of states; and there is a plan for the state ownership of all land, the rental from this to supply all revenue in time of peace. But let us pass to a more characteristic feature of Spinoza’s political theory, and consider with him the function of intelligence in the state.