Stephen Connelly
When students
(res)trained in law approach Spinoza’s theory of natural right (ius naturale)
they face precisely the formidable terminological barrier which Spinoza
endeavours to teach us how to break through. It is the same barrier which the
student of mathematics encounters when reading Euclid’s Elements, a work
that directly inspired Spinoza’s method. In both cases the language and method,
respectively jurisprudence and geometry, constitute tools by which we
construct a machine capable of participating (1) in the world intellect. The tools are not themselves the things
to be conceived.
Thus while several
legal and political historians have endeavoured to shoehorn Spinoza into the
history of natural right theories as an eccentric Hobbist who ‘said what Hobbes
should have said if he had been consistent’, this both denies the breadth of
Spinoza’s reading, which includes a great interest in Grotius and the De la
Court brothers (he knew the latter personally), and simply takes Spinoza’s
choice of words at face value. On this view, when Spinoza settles on the final
form of his theory in his unfinished Tractatus politicus (c.1676) one
might be beguiled by the impression that this theory of natural right serves
only as an appendix to Spinoza’s astonishing metaphysics, that is, as an
obsolete outgrowth that at best causes discomfort and is better removed.
Such an impression is
the objective expression of a diminished power of acting.
Here is the relevant
definition from the Tractatus politicus Ch.II[4]:
By the right of Nature, then, I understand the laws or rules of
Nature in accordance with which all things come to be, that is, the very power
of Nature. So the natural right of Nature as a whole, and consequently the
natural right of every individual, is coextensive with its power [potentia].
Consequently, whatever each man does from the laws of his own nature, he does
by the sovereign right of Nature, and he has as much right over Nature as his
power extends [quantum potentia valet].
This, or its
equivalent in the Ethics, tends to be quoted in the literature and then
followed by a panegyric to wild abandon and anarchic license, presumably by
people who have known neither. Yet very much as with Alfred North Whitehead,
the abandonment of mathematical method in a later prose work should be taken as
absolute; rather the method continues to inform the conceptual underpinnings.
Accordingly, we maintain that what we have here is an extremely concise
definition of natural right which brings in Spinoza’s entire metaphysics and
which constitutes a complete statement about being. This theory of natural
right is not peripheral, but central to Spinozism.
