Spinoza’s Anxiety and the Liberal Stability Fetish

Or, How the Disappearance of Justice Gave Rise to a Politics Where Power Is Always Right, Dissent Is Always Error, and the State Cannot Be Questioned

There is a particular kind of cowardice that dresses itself up as rationalism, and Spinoza wears it like armor. The fear sits just beneath the text—that if power had to answer to anything beyond itself, it might not hold. So he removes the question. He defines peace as submission and calls it reason. There is no theory of justice, no standard by which the regime might be measured or condemned. The only measure that matters is stability, and the only threat to stability is the subject who hesitates. Already, by the time politics arrives, the terms are fixed. The citizen has ceded everything—every right, every defense, every judgment. And in the place where judgment might have been, he installs necessity. The state, for Spinoza, is a machine that persists, and its persistence alone is treated as proof of its legitimacy. That is the first substitution—legitimacy for duration, judgment for endurance. The second is even more violent: reason, redefined as acquiescence.

What’s quite disturbing about Spinoza is that, once again, he offers absolutely no valid theory of justice at all. There’s no normative account of what makes a regime good, only a metaphysical commitment to what makes it endure. Legitimacy isn’t tied to procedure, representation, equality, or any recognizable political value. It’s reducible to stability. That’s it. And because of that, Spinoza ends up building a theory where the state doesn’t just suppress opposition—it invalidates the very grounds on which opposition could be articulated. You don’t get to ask whether the regime is right or wrong. You don’t even get to stage that question. In Spinoza’s world, the collective will has already absorbed all such contestation in advance, because any power that persists is, by definition, legitimate.

There is no ambiguity present. No question of whether power might sometimes be illegitimate. No pause at the possibility that the sovereign might err, not factually, but structurally—that it might be founded on a wrong, or maintained by injury. What matters is not what the sovereign does but that it remains. This is the move that ought to be recognized for what it is: a retreat from—what he considers—ethics into metaphysics. And yet even this is too generous. Because ethics, for Spinoza, has already been consumed by order. The good is not contested; it is operational. And anything that threatens the smooth function of the collective is dismissed as irrational, and thus, unworthy of protection. The subject who resists is either mistaken or sick. In neither case do they require a hearing. This is the logic of rational repression—where power cloaks itself in the language of necessity.

And so the political, as such, disappears. Not abolished, but preempted. By the time Spinoza allows us to speak, we have already given everything up. “All their power,” he writes, “absolutely submitted” (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus [TTP], 125). The totality of the subject’s right—whatever claim they might make to self-defense, to judgment, to the naming of harm—is absorbed into the sovereign without residue. There is no negotiation. No remainder. And no contradiction. What could fracture this unity? Spinoza leaves us no tools. Because to fracture would be to reintroduce conflict, and conflict implies choice. But Spinoza does not want the citizen to choose. He wants them to recognize and to yield. The command is always already reasonable, because reason is what remains after all other modes of evaluation have been extinguished.

In this schema, the idea of justice is not just missing—it is actively foreclosed. A theory of justice would require a standard external to power, a position from which to say: this is not right. But for Spinoza, there is no outside. The state is not just the container of political life; it is its origin. Its actions cannot be unjust, because there is no metric by which to measure them other than their ability to maintain themselves. The well-being of the people is not an object of concern but a retroactive designation. If the people are governed, and if the state continues to exist, then the people are, by definition, well. This is why he can say—without irony—that even irrational commands must be followed. The irrationality of the sovereign is its ultimate test… not a threat to reason. Reason survives not by contesting stupidity but by submitting to it when it bears the seal of law.

The problem with grounding politics in metaphysics is that metaphysics does not recognize interruption. Spinoza’s political vision depends entirely on the idea that collective life can be governed by the same principles that govern bodies in motion: inertial, continuous, self-maintaining. This is not a politics that prepares for rupture—it is a politics that denies rupture can exist. And when rupture does occur—when the subject refuses, when the regime fractures, when violence emerges from within rather than from without—Spinoza has no conceptual vocabulary to describe it. All he can do is pathologize it. The breakdown of order becomes a form of irrationality, a sickness to be corrected rather than a signal of injustice. But a system that cannot acknowledge its own contradictions without branding them as disease is not stable—it is paranoid and perpetually anxious. It must always guard against the moment when the metaphysical cover slips and politics, in all its contingency, reappears.

This is precisely where Spinoza's Ethics begins to turn against itself. “Whatever is granted in the nature of things which we judge to be evil… we may remove from us in the safest and most certain way possible” (Ethics, 192). Here, judgment is permitted—but only insofar as it produces removal. There is no space in this sentence for interpretation, for critique, for the possibility that what appears as evil may in fact be a structural response to exclusion. Instead, the subject is authorized to act only in the service of their own rational preservation, and this preservation is indistinguishable from elimination. It is a justification for harm that does not require the language of justice, because it has already framed the problem in terms of survival. And survival, in Spinoza, is always already aligned with the state.

There is a strange convergence here between the metaphysical and the administrative. Take his line from the Ethics, in which he clarifies that when the sovereign punishes a citizen, “we do not say that it is indignant with the citizen when it punishes him, inasmuch as it is not imbued with hatred to ruin the citizen, but with a sense of duty” (Ethics, 176–77). The state does not hate, but rather, it corrects. It does not oppress, it manages. But this is precisely what makes it so dangerous—its violence is always disavowed. There is no enemy, only the mistaken. There is no injustice, only error. The sovereign, in punishing, does not respond to harm—it simply maintains equilibrium. It is incapable of wrongdoing because wrongdoing itself becomes unintelligible. What the citizen experiences as domination is recoded as pedagogy. The pain is simply a failure to understand the necessity of the lesson.

But even more revealing is the Tractatus passage in which he describes the nature of democratic sovereignty: “The supreme power is not constrained by any law; everyone is obliged to obey it in everything… We are obliged to carry out all the supreme power’s commands, even the stupid ones; because the only alternative is to be enemies of the State, and to act contrary to reason” (TTP, 125). Charitably, I shall call attention to this slight threat of annihilation. Obey, or be cast out of reason itself. It is here that the fantasy of stability begins to turn violent. Because reason is no longer an epistemic ideal, for it becomes a tool of state discipline. To disobey is to become unrecognizable, to lose one's standing as a subject. And so the line between subject and enemy collapses. Anyone who resists—even in the name of justice, even against demonstrable stupidity—must be made unintelligible.

That he attempts to resolve this by redefining obedience as freedom is almost too perverse to require commentary. “Someone who obeys the supreme power in everything shouldn’t be called a ‘slave’... but rather a ‘subject’” (TTP, 126). The slave, he says, acts for the good of another. But the subject—though equally obedient—is redeemed by the fiction that the state represents the people. The pain is the same. The dispossession is the same. But it is rebranded. A semantic correction in place of an actual one. Spinoza wants the citizen to believe that if their chains are forged in the name of the republic, they are no longer chains. That if the command is issued without hatred, it cannot be cruel. But this is the heart of the anxiety: that justice has been replaced by efficiency, and that violence is only recognized when it fails to reproduce order.

What Spinoza cannot admit—but what Hobbes and Schmitt seem to grasp all too well—is that the state is not born out of harmony but of fear. Spinoza insists that a person operating under mere natural right will seize anything they believe useful, whether guided by reason or appetite. He even grants that the individual may regard as an enemy anyone who tries to stand in the way. This allowance sets a precedent that does not vanish when the subject transfers power to the sovereign. The impulses that justify violence in the individual—force, deception, entreaty—become integrated into the body of the state. Spinoza’s treaty with rationalism, in other words, leaves room for the very appetites he pretends to tame.

Take his description of an enemy as “whoever lives outside the State in such a way that he doesn’t recognize its sovereignty” (TTP, 127). That phrase describes an absence of contract. Instead of labeling aggression or harm, Spinoza defines the enemy by whether the subject acknowledges the state’s authority. A refusal to submit becomes the definitive mark of enmity. The rhetorical leap is immediate: an enemy emerges from jurisdictional difference, not from a moral breach. What ought to be a question of justice becomes a question of territory and permission.

Hobbes, at least, reflects openly on the terror that arises from centralizing power. He knows that the Leviathan’s might rests on fear. Further, Schmitt addresses the friend-enemy distinction as foundational to politics and does not shy away from the potential violence that entails. Spinoza, by contrast, presents a picture of political life that tries to sidestep these tensions through an appeal to reason. He asserts that reason demands compliance. Yet compliance, for him, is not a guarded choice but the only choice. There is no second path. Disobeying the state is not a counterclaim that might reveal a deeper injustice. It is merely an irrational act. Any conflict with the sovereign dissolves into a misunderstanding.

This mechanism appears secure at first. Spinoza can claim that those who remain inside the state benefit from its rational dictates, while those who reside beyond it lack that framework and become enemies by definition. The contradiction arises when individuals within the state see their “rational” life overshadowed by commands they can neither judge nor refuse. Even a “stupid” order is supposed to be enforced for the sake of stability. Stupidity is not an ethical category for him, nor is it a flaw that delegitimizes the command. It is a minor inconvenience compared to the value of a functioning system. The subject is instructed to obey because survival hinges on that. Yet the same treatise that proclaims the right to remove any obstacle to one’s preservation also claims that the only enemy worth naming is the person who stands outside the civic contract. In practice, the state can interpret any internal dissent as evidence of a mind that will not recognize its authority. If you harbor reservations about the sovereign’s pronouncements, you are already gesturing beyond the boundaries of submission. You are one step away from being classified as an outsider with no claim to the protection of that collective.

Spinoza’s pursuit of absolute stability begins to resemble perpetual vigilance. He imagines a polity in which the free exercise of natural right is ceded to a single entity, yet that single entity carries with it the same prerogatives found in the state of nature. The paradox is that rational organization must accommodate the capacities and appetites that it sought to neutralize. In awarding the sovereign the license to treat any unrecognized authority as an enemy, he legitimizes the aggression that emerges from appetite and fear, now on a larger scale. And again, when Hobbes embraces the grim impetus of the Leviathan, he admits there is a cost to security and that fear is indispensable in forging unity… Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction openly acknowledges conflict as the core of the political. Spinoza tries to skip this cheap (by inflationary standards) admission fee. He rearranges conflict into mere ignorance. Dissent, if it appears at all, appears as a glitch that rational power will correct through punishment or persuasion. The result is a facade of calm that rests on a steady willingness to cast out anyone who fails to comply. No robust theory of justice enters here because justice would imply a standard outside the system. Such a standard could question whether the sovereign’s actions align with the good. In Spinoza’s picture, that question does not arise, so justice remains invisible.

Spinoza acknowledges the totality of submission the citizen owes the state, but he tries to neutralize its implications by renaming it. Complete obedience, he insists, does not make one a slave—it makes one a subject. The structure of domination remains untouched; only the vocabulary shifts. This doesn’t seem to be a rethinking of power but, instead, a rhetorical move designed to suppress the perception of subjection. If the citizen consents, and if the state claims to act for the whole, then even irrational or destructive commands become intelligible as rational imperatives. Refusal becomes unintelligible. “Someone who obeys the supreme power in everything shouldn’t be called a ‘slave’... but rather a ‘subject’” (TTP, 126). What if the order is exploitative or destructive? The text turns to survival. Spinoza instructs us to remove whatever threatens our existence “in the safest and most certain way possible” (Ethics, 192). The inference is that the state, now identified with reason, occupies that place of safety. No matter how it behaves, turning away from it is an act of self-sabotage. That reflex effectively silences the call for justice, because it positions the state’s demands as coextensive with rational self-preservation. Resistance is exiled to the realm of the irrational.

What’s left, then, is a theory that mistakes coercion for clarity. And Spinoza, in refusing to construct any account of justice, ends up with nothing but obedience. Not even as an ethical ideal, but as the basic structure of political intelligibility. One obeys not because the command is right, but because there is no concept of “right” left to appeal to once reason has been fused to order. He gives us a politics emptied of contestation, where submission is renamed rational alignment and the state becomes a site where disagreement is metabolized into error. And yet—and this is the pressure point—he still wants to believe this passes for legitimacy. That a subject who follows all commands, even the stupid ones, is not a slave but a rational participant. But this is only sustainable if you believe that justice has no claims outside of survival. That power, when made consistent, is indistinguishable from the good.

This is why he becomes so useful to the liberal tradition, even if they no longer cite him outright. The modern state inherits this refusal to think politics through the category of justice. It preserves his fear of interruption, of rupture, of antagonism that cannot be spoken away. Liberal governance may speak of pluralism and participation, but it still operates according to Spinoza’s logic: peace is preferable to all else, and obedience—even when misguided—is rational so long as it upholds the structure. Spinoza provides a metaphysical alibi for that preference. And so when liberal states encounter demands they cannot incorporate—when voices refuse to translate their pain into procedural language or institutional form—they fall back on the same structure: reject the claim as unreasonable, reframe the conflict as disorder, and recommit to the regime in the name of peace.

But peace, here, is not the absence of violence. It is the ongoing disqualification of any speech that risks unmaking the given. The voice that calls the regime into question must be re-coded as unintelligible. As madness, as disruption, as ideology. Spinoza provides the conceptual machinery for this: he erases the enemy by refusing their political standing altogether. There are no internal enemies, only subjects who have failed to understand. No opposition, only defect. No injustice, only instability. And instability, by definition, must be eradicated. What results is not a political order in any meaningful sense, but a tightly regulated system of survival that treats any invocation of justice as a kind of error.

Which is precisely why Hobbes and Schmitt remain so important. Sure, not because they offer a better outcome (although I disagree), but because they refuse the delusion. Hobbes begins from fear and never lets us forget it. Schmitt starts from the political and insists on the irreducibility of enmity. Neither tries to overwrite the contingency of authority with the language of reason. And in that refusal, they preserve something that Spinoza cannot: the fact that politics is not a mechanism, but a condition of struggle. It is not about correct reasoning—it is about who has the right to speak, to decide, to define. Justice, if it is to exist at all, must come from this struggle. Not from the optimization of systems, not from metaphysical axioms, and certainly not from obedience to a regime that declares itself rational.

Spinoza’s anxiety, then, is the anxiety of the regime that cannot bear to be judged. The regime that insists it is always already justified, that disagreement is noise, and that violence is only violence when it fails. He wants peace without conflict, law without exception, and consent without dissent. And in trying to protect politics from disorder, he ends up evacuating it entirely. What remains is sedation, not governance. Not reason, but rationalized fear. A politics where justice has no place—because to recognize it would be to admit that things might have to be otherwise. And that is the one possibility Spinoza cannot allow.