IV Is Man a Political Animal?

WHY is there a social problem? Is it because men are “bad”? Nonsense, answers Spinoza: the terms “good” and “bad,” as conveying moral approval and disapproval, are philosophically out of court; they mean nothing except that “each of us wishes all men to live according to his desire,” and consoles himself for their non-complaisance by making moral phrases. There is a social problem, says Spinoza, because men are not naturally social. This does not mean that there are no social tendencies in the native human constitution; it does mean that these tendencies are but a sorry fraction of man’s original nature, and do not avail to chain the “ape and tiger” hiding under his extremely civilized shirt. Man is a “political animal”; but he is also an animal. We must approach the social problem through a very respectful consideration of the ape and tiger; we must follow Hobbes and inquire into “the natural condition of man.”

“In the state of nature every man lives as he wishes,”¹—he is not pestered with police regulations and aldermanic ordinances. He “may do whatever he can: his rights extend to the utmost limits of his powers.”² He may fight, hate, deceive, exploit, to his heart’s desire; and he does. We moderns smile at the “natural man” as a myth, and think our forbears were social ab initio. But be it remembered that by “social” Spinoza implies no mere preference of society to solitude, but a subordination of individual caprice to more or less tacit communal regulation. And Spinoza considers it useful, if we are going to talk about “human nature in politics,” to ask whether man naturally submits to regulation or naturally rebels against it. When he wrote of a primitive non-social human condition he wrote as a psychologist inferring the past rather than as an historian revealing it. He observed man, kindly yet keenly; he saw that “everyone desires to keep down his fellow-men by all possible means, and when he prevails, boasts more of the injuries he has done to others than of the advantage he has won for himself”;³ and he concluded that if we could trace human history to its sources we should find a creature—call him human or pre-human—willing, perhaps glad, to have the company of his like, but still unattracted and unhampered by social organization.

We like to laugh at the simple anthropology of Spinoza and Rousseau; but the laugh should be turned upon us when we suppose that the historical motif played any but a very minor part in the discussion of the natural state of man. History was not the point at all: these men were not interested in the past so much as in the possibilities of the future. That is why the eighteenth century was so largely their creation. When a man is interested in the past he writes history; when he is interested in the future he makes it.

The point to be borne in mind, Spinoza urges, is that we are still essentially unsocialized; the instinct to acquire possession and power, if necessary by oppression and exploitation, is still stronger than the disposition to share, to be tolerant of disagreement, and to work in mutual aid. The “natural man” is not a myth, he is the solid reality that struts about dressed in a little brief civilization. “Religion teaches that each man should love his neighbor as himself, and defend the rights of others as earnestly as he would his own. Yet this conviction has very little influence over man’s emotions. It is no doubt of some account in the hour of death, for then disease has weakened the emotions, and the man lies helpless. And the principle is assented to in church, for there men have no dealings with one another. But in the mart or the court it has little or no effect, though that is just where the need for it is greatest.”⁴ He still “does everything for the sake of his own profit”;⁵ nor will even the unlimited future change him in that, for it is his very essence. His happiness is in the pursuit of his profit, his supreme joy is in the increase of his power. And a social order built upon any other basis than this exuberant egoism of man will be as lasting, in the eye of history, as a name that is writ in water.