Democracy as the Most Natural Regime

Spinoza's defense of democracy as the political form most aligned with collective power and rational freedom

I. The Regime That Nature Prefers

Spinoza makes a claim that was radical in his century and remains uncomfortable in ours: democracy, as Spinoza argues in Chapter 16 of the Theological-Political Treatise, is the most natural form of government. He does not mean that democracy is the most efficient, the most stable, or the most virtuous. He means that it is the form of government that most closely approximates the condition of human beings in the state of nature, before they have surrendered any of their power to a sovereign.

This is a surprising argument. Most political philosophers of Spinoza's time, and many since, have argued that democracy is artificial, that it requires a special kind of citizen, that it depends on conditions that must be carefully cultivated. Spinoza reverses the logic. For him, monarchy and aristocracy are the artificial forms. They require the artificial concentration of power in the hands of a few. Democracy is what remains when you stop artificially concentrating power. It is the default, not the exception.

The argument rests on Spinoza's understanding of natural right, power, and the formation of political society. To understand why democracy is the most natural regime, we must first understand what Spinoza means by right, what he means by the social contract, and why the transfer of power that creates a state is never absolute.

II. Right Is Power

Spinoza's political philosophy begins with a definition that eliminates the distinction between is and ought. Right is power. Whatever a being can do, it has the right to do. The fish has the right to swim because it has the power to swim. The bird has the right to fly because it has the power to fly. The human being has the right to do whatever his power enables him to do.

This is not a moral claim. It is a description of how nature works. In the state of nature, before the creation of political society, there is no law, no justice, no right in the moral sense. There is only power, and whatever power can accomplish is by definition permitted. The strong devour the weak not because they have a moral right to do so but because they have the power to do so, and power is the only currency of the natural world.

Human beings, like all other beings, have the natural right to do whatever their power enables them to do. But human power, unlike the power of a fish or a bird, can be pooled. Two people working together have more power than either has alone. A hundred have more than two. A society organized for collective action has power that no individual could possibly possess. This is the origin of political society: not a moral contract but a pooling of power, driven by the recognition that collective power is greater than individual power.

III. The Transfer of Power

When individuals enter political society, they transfer some of their power to a sovereign. They agree to be bound by laws, to accept the decisions of a common authority, to refrain from using their individual power against each other. This transfer is what creates the state, and it is the foundation of all political obligation.

But Spinoza insists on a crucial point: the transfer is never absolute. No individual can transfer all of his power to the sovereign, because some powers are inalienable. You cannot transfer your power to think, because thinking is an activity of your own mind. You cannot transfer your power to feel, because feelings arise from your own body. You cannot transfer your power to judge, because judgment is an act of your own understanding. The sovereign may command you to believe something, but you cannot believe it merely because you are commanded. Belief follows understanding, not decree.

This inalienable residue of individual power is the foundation of Spinoza's argument for democracy. Because no one can transfer all of their power, the sovereign's power is always limited. The question is not whether the sovereign's power is limited, but how those limits are structured and whether the structure aligns with the nature of the individuals who compose the state.

IV. The Artificial Concentration of Power

Monarchy and aristocracy are forms of government in which power is artificially concentrated in the hands of one person or a few. This concentration is artificial because it does not reflect the actual distribution of power in the state of nature, where every individual possesses some degree of power and no individual possesses all of it. To create a monarchy, you must take the power that is naturally distributed among many and artificially gather it into one pair of hands.

This artificial concentration creates a permanent instability. The monarch rules alone, but he cannot govern alone. He must delegate. He must rely on advisors, generals, administrators, and enforcers. Each of these delegates possesses some of the power that the monarch has concentrated. Each has interests that may diverge from the monarch's. The monarch spends his reign managing the tensions created by the artificial concentration of power that made him monarch in the first place.

The result is a regime that is constantly at war with its own structure. The monarch fears his advisors, his generals, his own family. He governs through fear and is himself governed by fear. The regime is stable only so long as the monarch can maintain the illusion that power is concentrated in him, while in reality it is distributed among those he depends on, and they know it.

V. Democracy as Distributed Power

Democracy avoids this artificial concentration. In a democracy, power remains distributed among the many, as it is in the state of nature. The difference is that the distribution is organized. Individuals do not exercise their power as isolated units, each pursuing their own ends without regard for others. They exercise it collectively, through institutions that aggregate their preferences and translate them into law.

This is why Spinoza calls democracy the most natural regime. It does not require the artificial transfer of power from the many to the few. It requires only the organization of power that is already distributed. The democratic sovereign is not a single person or a small group. It is the body of citizens, acting collectively. The laws that govern them are laws they have made, directly or through representatives. The power that constrains them is power they have authorized.

This does not mean that democracy is perfect or that it always functions well. Spinoza is clear-eyed about the defects of democracy: the ignorance of the multitude, the susceptibility to demagogues, the tendency toward faction and instability. But these defects are not arguments against democracy. They are arguments for making democracy work better, because the alternatives are worse.

VI. Freedom of Thought

Democracy, for Spinoza, is not merely a procedure for making decisions. It is a condition for the development of reason. The purpose of the state is not to make people obedient. It is to enable them to live securely enough to develop their understanding. A state that suppresses thought may achieve order, but it achieves order at the cost of the very thing that makes human life valuable.

This is why freedom of thought is not ornamental to Spinoza's politics. It is essential. The state that fears inquiry confesses its own irrationality, because truth has nothing to fear from examination. A government that makes its people quiet, frightened, and incurious has not achieved peace. It has achieved a more efficient bondage.

Democracy, by distributing power rather than concentrating it, creates space for thought. When power is concentrated, dissent is a threat to the sovereign. When power is distributed, dissent is one voice among many, no more threatening than any other. The democrat can disagree with the government without being disloyal to the state, because the state is not identical with the government. It is identical with the body of citizens, of which the dissenter remains a member.

VII. The Most Natural Regime

Democracy is the most natural regime because it requires the least artifice. It does not require the pretense that one person embodies the will of all. It does not require the fiction that a small group possesses wisdom inaccessible to others. It does not require the suppression of disagreement to maintain the illusion of unity. It accepts the natural distribution of power and organizes it, rather than attempting to concentrate what cannot genuinely be concentrated.

This is not a utopian claim. Spinoza does not imagine that democracy will produce a perfect society. He imagines that it will produce a society in which human beings can develop their reason more fully than in any alternative. The measure of a regime is not its glory or its efficiency. It is what it does to the power of the people who live under it. Democracy, for all its defects, does less to diminish that power than any other form of government.

For the free person is not the person who obeys the right ruler.

The free person is the person who lives under laws he has reason to accept, and democracy is the regime in which that reason is most widely available.