J. G. A. Pocock – Spinoza and Harrington: An Exercise in Comparison

“It is a consequence, at all events, that Spinoza’s understanding of res publica was predicated exclusively upon the alienation of sovereignty into the hands of a one, a few, or a many; and if we confine the term ‘republic’ to the non-monarchical forms, these will appear (as they did to Bodin or Hobbes) nothing more than modes of locating a sovereignty which is essentially always the same. But this formalisation of sovereignty arose from conceiving it as a thing to be alienated, so that even its retention by the people had the effect of giving the people a dual personality. There was an alternative approach, in which self-government was conceptualised not as a jus but as a virtus, an attribute of personality which it was meaningless to think of giving away; and in this scheme monarchy, aristocracy and democracy appeared not as three incompatible modes of locating an alienated sovereignty, but as three modes of exercising power contained within the politeia itself. Since sovereignty was diffuse to the point where it was hardly defined as an original res at all, it was perfectly possible to think of three (or more) modes of exercising it as existing at the same time; and therefore there could arise theories of shared, mixed and balanced government, to which the epithet ‘republican’ could come to be attracted. It is these which are apparently not to be found in Spinoza. The Tractatus Politicus is incomplete, but I do not find any hint that the three modes of sovereignty were going to be exhibited in combination; and it is easy to fit Spinoza’s thinking into a juristic model which would make mixed government formally impossible. I will not ask †” since others must already know †” how far theories of mixed government became part of Netherlandish political discourse; but I will proceed to show that in English discourse such a theory assumed a central role, and could become at one and the same time a doctrine of conjoint sovereignty, which was monarchical, and one of the separation of powers, which was republican. This is why David Hume found it necessary to devote an essay to the question ‘whether the British government inclined more to absolute monarchy or a republic’, a problem which would have had a very different meaning if posed in Dutch or Walloon. Spinoza might have supposed that the Dutch government must be one or the other; scarcely that it was a mixture of the two.”

[442-443]

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