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Potentia : Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics by Sandra Leonie Fielden is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Potentia : Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics about?

We live in an age of growing dissatisfaction with the standard operations of representative democracy. The solution, according to a long radical democratic tradition, is the unmediated power of the people. Mass plebiscites and mass protest movements are celebrated as the quintessential expression of popular power, and this power promises to transcend ordinary institutional politics. But the outcomes of mass political phenomena can be just as disappointing as the ordinary politics they sought to overcome, breeding skepticism about democratic politics in all its forms. Potentia argues that the very meaning of popular power needs to be rethought. It offers a detailed study of the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza, focusing on their concept of power as potentia, concrete power, rather than power as potestas, authorized power. Specifically, the book's argument turns on a new interpretation of potentia as a capacity that is dynamically constituted in a web of actual human relations. This means that a group's potentia reflects any hostility or hierarchy present in the relations between its members. There is nothing spontaneously egalitarian or good about huma

Who reads Potentia : Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics?

Author

Sandra Leonie Fielden

Publisher

Oxford University Press, Incorporated

Published

2020

Language

EN

ISBN

9780197528259

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Philosophy, Science, Political Science