A re-reading of Spinoza's philosophical and political writings within the historical context of the development of the modern state and its attendant political economy.

Spinoza is the anomaly. In the century that saw the birth of bourgeois ideology and the bourgeois State, Spinoza discovered an alternative mode of thought and practice, a nondialectical path to social organization and liberation. Spinoza's work illuminates an alternative to the bourgeois arc of Modern thought that extends from Hobbes to Rousseau and Hegel. Spinozian ontology presents an absolutely positive and univocal conception of being, founded on the material power of its own constitutive force. It is a "savage" conception in that it rejects any preformed model of order, any external organization, any hierarchy, and insists instead on being continually remade through a constitutive process on the immanent field of forces. This "savage" metaphysics prepares the terrain for a radically democratic vision in which social order is constituted exclusively by the collective practices and desires of the multitude. Negri brings this Spinozian anomaly alive in the context of some of the most lively contemporary debates: on the desire at the heart of power, on the imagination central to rationality, on the formation of democracy. In the seventeenth century Spinoza was indeed a savage anomaly; today Negri shows us that history has caught up with his untimely, democratic vision.
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