PHIL 348
Philosophy, Politics and Religion: Hobbes and Spinoza Revisited Today Spring 2016
Division II Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

“The mob has no ruler more potent than superstition.” (Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, preface) What are the connections between the political and the religious, and how to deal with them from a philosophical point of view? These are two of the most recurrent questions in Modern political philosophy, but they have in no way lost their actuality in our own time and society. Hobbes and Spinoza may both, each in their own specific way, be considered as two major figures of Modern Philosophy, where Hobbes is mainly seen as a pure political philosopher, while Spinoza has traditionally been read as a metaphysician. In a more recent reception however, focus has been put on Spinoza’s own political philosophy, showing both how his theory is influenced by Hobbes, and how it diverges from it on significant points. In both Hobbes and Spinoza, we find two fundamental theses concerning religion as a phenomenon, and concerning the connection between politics and religion. The first one is that religion – and religiosity in any form – is a strictly human phenomenon, that is, has fundamentally nothing to do with any transcendent reality. The second one is that religion has an exclusively political function, and that this function can be either positive or negative – that is, beneficial for the state, or harmful. The course proposes a joint reading of Hobbes and Spinoza, taking its point of departure in their common terminology and problems (conatus, materialism, affectivity, force and power, individual and multitude) in order to understand, in each of the two philosophers, the close connection between religion and politics understood as affectivity: the necessity of politics and the inevitability of religion, and their mutual implications. Beyond Hobbes and Spinoza, we will also investigate how their philosophies are highly relevant for contemporary political theorists such as Schmitt, Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Mouffe and Laclau and Balibar – and how, through them, it may be possible to still see both Hobbes and Spinoza as forceful alternatives for our thinking about the political and the religious today.