Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza on fear: the relationship between democratic politics and passions

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore the significance of fear and its political corollaries in the thought of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza in order to analyse its impact on democracy as a theoretical political problem. When comparing Hobbes and Spinoza, most interpretations, including those that identify some coincidences regarding the political meanings and effects of fear, tend to highlight their differences more than their similarities. However, the study of this emotion constitutes a privileged point of departure to approach these authors’ political theories from a different perspective. To this effect, first we will succinctly characterize their doctrines of affect; then, we will compare such doctrines, focusing on one particular affect: fear and in the third and final section, we will present the article’s main argument, exploring the corollaries for contemporary political theory of Hobbes and Spinoza’s conceptualizations of fear.