Coining collective identities: the multitude in De cive and Tractatus politicus

Kasper Juel Gregersen

doi:10.1515/sats-2012-0010

Article

Coining collective identities: the multitude in De cive and Tractatus politicus

Kasper Juel Gregersen

Published/Copyright: December 18, 2012

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From the journal SATS Volume 13 Issue 2

Abstract

‘The multitude’ is a popular notion in recent leftist political philosophy, with two of its most prominent proponents, Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno, claiming its origin in Hobbes’ De cive (DC) and Spinoza’s Tractatus politicus (TP). Approaching the notion as a mode of collective identity typically contrasted with the concept of a people, this paper pursues the intellectual history of the multitude to stage the scene for a contextualized and differentiated assessment of its meaning in 17th century political discourses on social order. It gives a semantic mapping of the term ‘multitude’, followed by a comparative analysis of ‘multitudo’ in DC and TP. Conclusively, it is argued the multitude was a common concept with various connotations of the time and it plays a pivotal role in DC and TP in the guise of two distinct conceptualizations, which suggets that it is historically misleading to assert an unequivocal concept of multitude.

Keywords: collective identity; Hobbes; multitude; people; social order; Spinoza; state

Published Online: 2012-12-18

Published in Print: 2012-12

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/sats-2012-0010

Keywords for this article

collective identity; Hobbes; multitude; people; social order; Spinoza; state