Arturo Rojas-Alvarado

The issues addressed here are part of a broader research project on the relationships among justice, sedition, and political order in the political philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. The problem begins with an opposition between notions of justice associated with sedition and those proper to the state, arguing that Spinoza prioritizes political order and conceives justice as intelligible only from within the civil state (TP 2/23). In order to answer the question of why seditions cannot be considered just, this paper focuses on clarifying what this philosopher understands by justice.

This study is based on Spinoza’s claim that justice and injustice are conceivable only within the State, which implies that movements antagonistic to it cannot properly be called just. Nevertheless, Spinoza argues that the emergence of seditions is not the responsibility of the subjects but of the State’s deficient constitution. Accordingly, this research asks: why, from the standpoint of Spinoza’s political philosophy, are seditions not just? To answer this question, it argues that, in the TP, political order constitutes justice, in contrast to the imaginary notions of justice characteristic of sedition. To demonstrate this, the notions of justice, sedition, and political order are reconstructed through an exegetical analysis of Spinoza’s philosophical system. The study begins with an examination of justice, conceived ontologically as a being of imagination. This interpretation is grounded in the scope of right in the state of nature, which excludes any account of justice within nature itself. Justice is then shown to be a way of imagining relations among things. On this basis, the role of imagination in human knowledge and its deployment in politics is examined. The relationship between justice and the common good is subsequently analyzed, arguing that the rational individual seeks what is useful and thereby establishes a form of human association in which the common good is preserved through a disposition to render to each his due, understood as a disposition to obey civil justice. The study then turns to Spinoza’s conception of sedition, beginning with his rejection of such movements as forms of barbarism and political division. It proceeds to examine the principal affective causes of sedition, locating them in fear and hope, indignation, and the longing for revenge. These motives are shown to originate in the sad passions, although this account does not rely on a Manichaean opposition between good and evil. Rather, these passions are evaluated according to the way they affect the realization of the ends of the civil state. It is further shown that Spinoza does not advocate authoritarian regimes. Finally, the study addresses the problem of political order by returning to the relationship between right and power in the state of nature in order to explain how political power arises from the power of the multitude. It then examines how institutional mechanisms govern the human affects to establish the conditions of justice within the State. Lastly, together with Spinoza’s rejection of tyranny, it analyzes the true end of the civil state as the establishment of the conditions for peace and human freedom. The study concludes that Spinoza does not regard sedition as just, since justice cannot be constituted collectively outside political order.