Potentia: Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics

The book "Potentia: A New Interpretation of Popular Power" by Sandra Leonie Field argues that the power of the people should be unmediated, but the outcomes of mass political phenomena can be just as disappointing as ordinary politics. 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. Field argues that for true popular power to be achieved, conscious institutional design is required.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 312 pages
\n Publication date: 22 September 2020
\n Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
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We are living in a time of increasing dissatisfaction with the traditional workings of representative democracy. According to a long radical democratic tradition, the solution is the unmediated power of the people. Mass plebiscites and mass protest movements are celebrated as the epitome of popular power, promising to transcend ordinary institutional politics. However, 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 definition 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 revolves around a new interpretation of potentia as a capacity dynamically constituted within 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 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 pop.

\n Weight: 476g\n
Dimension: 156 x 235 x 18 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9780197533864\n \n