17th century
A01=Christopher Skeaff
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association
Author_Christopher Skeaff
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benedictus de spinoza
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HPS
Category=JPA
Category=QDTS
choice
common will
communal
community
COP=United States
critical theory
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democracy
democratic
dutch
enlightenment
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eq_nobargain
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free
freedom
judgement
judging
Language_English
PA=Available
philosophical
philosophy
political science
politics
power
powerful
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
rationalism
rationalists
republic
republicanism
ruling
self
softlaunch
sovereignty
universe
western thinkers
Product details
- ISBN 9780226555478
- Weight: 369g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 25 Jun 2018
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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In this pathbreaking work, Christopher Skeaff argues that a profoundly democratic conception of judgment is at the heart of Spinoza’s thought. Bridging Continental and Anglo-American scholarship, critical theory, and Spinoza studies, Becoming Political offers a historically sensitive, meticulous, and creative interpretation of Spinoza’s texts that reveals judgment as the communal element by which people generate power to resist domination and reconfigure the terms of their political association. If, for Spinoza, judging is the activity which makes a people powerful, it is because it enables them to contest the project of ruling and demonstrate the political possibility of being equally free to articulate the terms of their association. This proposition differs from a predominant contemporary line of argument that treats the people’s judgment as a vehicle of sovereignty—a means of defining and refining the common will. By recuperating in Spinoza’s thought a “vital republicanism,” Skeaff illuminates a line of political thinking that decouples democracy from the majoritarian aspiration to rule and aligns it instead with the project of becoming free and equal judges of common affairs. As such, this decoupling raises questions that ordinarily go unasked: what calls for political judgment, and who is to judge? In Spinoza’s vital republicanism, the political potential of life and law finds an affirmative relationship that signals the way toward a new constitutionalism and jurisprudence of the common.
