Article ID: CBB765288492

From the King’s Two Bodies to the People’s Two Bodies: Spinoza on the Body Politic (2020)

unapi

In this article, using Spinoza’s treatment of the image of the political body, I aim to show what happens to the concept of a healthy commonwealth linked to a monarchist model of political order when transformed into a new context: the emergence of a democratic political order. The traditional representation of the body politic becomes problematic when people, understood as individual natural bodies, are taken as the starting point in political theory. Spinoza’s understanding of the composite body, and the assumption that each body is composed, raises the question of the stability or instability of this composition. This has implications for the way one looks at the political order’s conditions of possibility, I argue, and at the same time reveals the imaginary nature of the political body.

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Article Vasileios Syros (2020) The Body Politic from Medieval Lombardy to the Dutch Republic: An Introduction. Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period (pp. 1-7). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB765288492/

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Authors & Contributors
Richard Velkley
DeFranco, Daniel J.
LeBuffe, Michael
Schliesser, Eric
Scruton, Roger
Popkin, Richard Henry
Concepts
Philosophy
Ethics
Theology
Natural philosophy
Philosophy and religion
Mind and body
Time Periods
17th century
20th century
18th century
Places
Netherlands
Europe
France
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