Spinoza, Right and Absolute Freedom

Against jurisprudential reductions of Spinoza’s thinking to a kind of eccentric version of Hobbes, this book argues that Spinoza’s theory of natural right contains an important idea of absolute freedom, which would be inconceivable within Hobbes’ own schema. Spinoza famously thought that the universe and all of the beings and events within it are fully determined by their causes. But, although this book demonstrates how Spinoza constructs a system in which right is understood as the work of machines, the argument of this book is that Spinoza thus opens up right to a future of determinate interventions – much as when an engineer, working with already-existing materials, improves a machine. As such, an idea of freedom emerges in Spinoza: as the artful rearrangement of the given into new possibilities.