Multitude (philosophy)

In philosophy, multitude refers to a collective of people defined by common mode of existence, not shared identity. In ancient and medieval philosophy, thinkers explored the nature and role of "the many", typically in social and political contexts (increasingly the latter during the Middle Ages). Niccolò Machiavelli often used it to refer to the common populace. The concept gained prominence in the 17th century through the work of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, who developed it as a technical term.

Focusing on mechanism in philosophy amid the Scientific Revolution, Hobbes sought to apply principles of classical mechanics to model human behavior and political organization. He saw the multitude as an unstable pre-political mass and said it benefited from cohesion and unification, which required the force of a social contract with a sovereign authority. At the time, there were disputes over absolute monarchy, which culminated in English Civil War.

In the prosperous, tolerant, and unstable Dutch Republic, Spinoza recognized the multitude's immanent potential for rational self-organization and collective power. While he saw it as foundational to democratic agency, he held reservations about its volatility, grounded in his theory of the affects. He stressed that the multitude's inadequate understanding made it liable to control by superstition or charismatic authority.

In contemporary philosophy, thinkers revived the concept mostly from Spinoza, while also drawing on the work of Karl Marx. Together, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri reinterpreted the multitude more globally as a plural, autonomous, and radically democratic, even revolutionary, subject. They saw it as capable of resisting imperialism and the exploitation of labor, and of transforming political systems and institutions more broadly.

Ancient background

Whether as a term or concept, the multitude is mentioned in general, philosophical, and religious texts from antiquity, including ancient philosophy. For example, it is mentioned in the Bible as well as in texts attributed to Thucydides, Plato (e.g., Euthyphro), Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero. It is also mentioned in medieval philosophy texts, for example, in the works of Averroes.

Medieval background

In medieval philosophy, Thomas Aquinas defined a people (Latin: populus) as an ordered multitude ("multitudo hominum sub aliquo ordinem comprehensorum"), not a disordered ("confusa") multitude lacking hierarchy or direction. Insofar as even the lowly class ("vilis populus") may be part of the ordered multitude, the sense is political, not social. Later theorists variously interpreted the matter, including Peter of Auvergne (in Quaestiones super libros Politicorum, 1296–1301), Marsilius of Padua (in Defensor pacis, 1324), and Bartolus de Saxoferrato (in De regimine civitatis).

In mid-13th century Italy, with the evolution of late medieval communes' political and legal practices, the institutionalized term "people" (popolo) obtained a more political and factional than social sense. In Italian city-states like Florence, Bologna, and Perugia, the "people" denoted citizens with political rights. Florence's 1293 Ordinances of Justice excluded magnates from government, and the "people" became less a social class than one crucial to regime change and relativized to (or even identified with) the ruling class.

Early modern philosophy

Hobbes

Impressed by Galileo Galilei's mechanics amid the Scientific Revolution, and against the backdrop of the English Civil War, including the Personal Rule, Hobbes theorized the multitude as a disorganized mass requiring the force of sovereign authority to unify. He saw the multitude as a rabble that needed to enact a social contract with a monarch, thus making them a people. Until then, he said, such masses retained individualistic capacity for political self-determination.

Spinoza

Selected Spinoza texts relating to the multitude or vulgus

Date	Title (Abbreviation)
1656/1657–	Tractatus de intellectus emendatione (TIE)
1660s–1675	Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata (E)
1665–1669	Tractatus theologico-politicus (TTP)
1675–	Tractatus politicus (TP)

The multitude (Latin: multitudo; Dutch: veelheid) is a key concept in Spinoza's political philosophy. He likely inherited the term partly from Hobbes, though he gave it a distinct meaning. It appears mainly in the mature Tractatus politicus (TP), after earlier, more negative uses in the Tractatus theologico-politicus (TTP). Spinoza also used the term in mathematical and metaphysical contexts, where it may appear as multiplicity. Spinoza wrote about the multitude with vacillating admiration and contempt. Spinoza wrote about the concept amidst war and civil conflict which informed and motivated his work.

It builds on his earlier use of vulgus (common people or crowd). In the TP, vulgus is largely replaced by terms like multitude, plebs (ordinary people or plebeians), and populus (people). While vulgus has been translated pejoratively (e.g., mob, rabble, or the vulgar), only mob is arguably acceptable in political contexts, as Spinoza used it for many he deemed unreliable in capability or judgment, including philosophers.

Historical context

Spinoza's concerns were shaped by civil instability in the Dutch Republic during the First Stadtholderless Period and after the Rampjaar. A period of relative freedom and tolerance yielded to civil disorder and war, including the Anglo-Dutch Wars and Franco-Dutch War. This culminated in Calvinist (Dutch Reformed Church) and Orangist mobs' lynching of Loevestein faction members Cornelis and Johan de Witt, later depicted in The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers.

Spinoza believed Calvinist ministers deliberately fomented moral panics among their congregations. He worked to counter the "prejudices of theologians", he wrote thinker Henry Oldenburg in 1665, as "the main obstacles to ... philosoph[izing]". He aimed to "expos[e] such prejudices and remov[e] them from the minds of sensible people", thereby "vindicat[ing] completely" the freedom to philosophize, which he saw as "suppressed by the excessive authority and egotism of the preachers".

Texts

TIE

In the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (TIE), the young Spinoza desired the improvement of the vulgus, later reconceived as the "multitude" in the TP. His evolving attitude reflected both the logical refinement of his thought and his historical context.

He saw the vulgus with concern and hope. Seeking the path to the good life (eudaimonia), he contrasted their immediate or ostentatious materialistic concerns with the pursuit of knowledge and love of God, "the end for which I strive". Rather than condemning them, he hoped "many should acquire [this view] along with me", arguing that better education, medicine, and social order would not only be virtuous, but also instrumental in raising the vulgus to higher pursuits and greater capabilities.

Ethics and TTP

In mid-1660s Amsterdam, amid political factionalism, riots, and war, Spinoza became fearful of the vulgus. He was especially concerned by the dominant role of religion in politics and its threat to philosophy, or freedom of thought. Pausing work on the Ethics to begin the Tractatus theologico-politicus (TTP), he sought to understand events through the concept of the multitude and, more broadly, to understand people's affects, or confused ideas and passions, in order to promote peace and more stable political institutions.

Spinoza used vulgus pejoratively in the Ethics, TTP, and elsewhere. In the Ethics, he described the vulgus as "terrifying if unafraid", showing concern for crowd psychology. Étienne Balibar, Warren Montag, Justin Steinberg, and Ericka Tucker interpret the phrase as deliberately ambiguous, referring both to the fear felt by the masses and the fear they inspire.

In the TTP, Spinoza called democracy the "most natural" and "best" form of state (civitas). He held that it was the form of state most likely to secure freedom and peace, which he regarded as the state's chief aims. This left a key tension in Spinoza's political philosophy, since democracy requires the vulgus, and posed the question: how does the vulgus give rise to the best state?

TP

In the Tractatus politicus (TP), Spinoza drew on the Ethics' theories of affects and power, seeking a way for the multitude, like individuals in the Ethics, to be ruled less by fear. Here the term denotes a large aggregate of people, organized or not, often moved by (shared) affect but ideally united by reason in a union of minds (acting with "one mind"). One reading of Spinoza's moral and political philosophy holds that our greatest good lies in "living in a community with other people, and binding ourselves to our fellow citizens ... 'to make us one people'". Doing so rationally and virtuously, however, is a supreme challenge. The individual's task in the Ethics, overcoming bondage to the passions, thus became the task of the entire community in Spinoza's mature political philosophy.

Whereas the TTP described democracy as the "freest" or "most natural" regime, the TP called it the "most absolute" or "best" because it best preserved natural rights and maximized the state's power. The state's chief aim accordingly shifted from freedom to prosperity and stability, both of which required "absolute" or sufficient sovereign power. Thus many twentieth-century commentators said Spinoza had effectively abandoned democracy, while others said he was refining his theories of affects, power, and the multitude, and that his characteristically archaic, semantically revisionist use of "absolute" likely referred not to unlimited power but to a sovereign authority superior to the church, defined in relation to (and sometimes limited by) the multitude, and necessarily limited or finite within immanent naturalism.

In the TP, the multitude's power arose from the aggregation and organization of individuals, and Spinoza, seeing natural right as coextensive with power, drew relations between individual and sovereign, and between multitude and state. The multitude's power depended not only on number but also on the manner of agreement among its individuals. Less adequate ideas and passive affects like fear diminished collective power, whereas more adequate ideas and active affects like joy increased it by fostering unity. To cultivate these conditions, Spinoza recommended democracy, broadly conceived, as the best form of government and favored large, deliberative, popular councils, postulating their epistemic advantages.

Reception

Spinoza's concept of the multitude differs from the later, radically democratic or even revolutionary interpretation by Hardt and Negri, who optimistically counter Spinoza's caution about the vulgus. On the Right, Leo Strauss emphasized Spinoza's fear of the masses, interpreting his political philosophy as guidance for an elite. Indeed, Spinoza asked unprepared commoners not to read his TTP, arguing it exceeded their capacities and would be misinterpreted, though the work is arguably his most positive about democracy.

Some secondary literature reflects Strauss's view, including that of Raia Prokhovnik, Alexandre Matheron, Steven B. Smith, and, to some extent, Balibar. Matheron, Prokhovnik, and Smith held that Spinoza ultimately rejected democracy in the TP. He may have seen aristocracy as the best possibility, Matheron and Prokhovnik said, given democracy's obstinate tension with reason. Smith identified this aristocracy as a philosophical clerisy. Tucker cast doubt on this interpretation, and many or probably most contemporary Spinoza scholars reject Strauss's views.

Balibar was more nuanced: he agreed that Spinoza expressed fear of the labile masses but argued that his pro-democratic arguments stood. Claiming consensus, Tucker emphasized that while Spinoza consistently expressed concern about the multitude, his attitude was complex, vacillating, and deeply connected with his views on democracy. She proposed that he ultimately developed a theory of the multitude as something to be understood, not feared, to sustain institutions, peace, and prosperity within democratic states.

Contemporary philosophy

Since the 20th century, the concept has been revived within broadly Marxist philosophy to describe a new model of resistance against global systems of power. Hardt and Negri describe it as such in Empire (2000), expanding upon this description in Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004). Other theorists to use the term include those associated with Autonomism, like Sylvère Lotringer and Paolo Virno. Still others are connected with the eponymous French journal Multitudes, including Laurent Bove and Pierre-François Moreau. In this context, it approximates transnational or global social movements.

Hardt and Negri

Negri describes the multitude in his The Savage Anomaly as an unmediated, revolutionary, immanent, and positive collective social subject which can found a "nonmystified" form of democracy (p. 194). In his more recent writings with Michael Hardt, however, he does not so much offer a direct definition, but presents the concept through a series of mediations. In Empire, it is mediated by the concept of Empire, the new global constitution that Negri and Hardt describe as a copy of Polybius's description of Roman government:

New figures of struggle and new subjectivities are produced in the conjecture of events, in the universal nomadism [...]. They are not posed merely against the imperial system—they are not simply negative forces. They also express, nourish, and develop positively their own constituent projects. ... This constituent aspect of the movement of the multitude, in its myriad faces, is really the positive terrain of the historical construction of Empire, ... an antagonistic and creative positivity. The deterritorializing power of the multitude is the productive force that sustains Empire and at the same time the force that calls for and makes necessary its destruction.

They were vague as to this "positive" or "constituent" aspect of the multitude:

Certainly, there must be a moment when reappropriation [of wealth from capital] and self-organization [of the multitude] reach a threshold and configure a real event. This is when the political is really affirmed—when the genesis is complete and self-valorization, the cooperative convergence of subjects, and the proletarian management of production become a constituent power. ... We do not have any models to offer for this event. Only the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes real.

In their sequel Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire they still refrain from a clear definition of the concept but approach the concept through mediation of a host of "contemporary" phenomena, most importantly the new type of postmodern war they postulate and the history of post-WWII resistance movements. It remains a rather vague concept which is assigned a revolutionary potential without much theoretical substantiation apart from a generic potential of love.

Reception

In the Introduction to Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude, Lotringer criticized Hardt's and Negri's use of the concept for its ostensible return to dialectical dualism.

See also

• Feeding the multitude
• Global citizens movement
• Hoi polloi
• Mass movement
• Mass society
• Pluralism
• Populism

References

Bibliography

Primary texts (with commentary)

• Spinoza, Baruch (1988). Curley, Edwin (ed.). The Collected Works of Spinoza. Vol. 1. Translated by Curley, Edwin (2nd ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-07222-7. LCCN 84011716.
• Spinoza, Baruch (2016). Curley, Edwin (ed.). The Collected Works of Spinoza. Vol. 2. Translated by Curley, Edwin. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-16763-3.

Other texts

• Balibar, Étienne (1994). Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx. Translated by Swenson, James. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-90601-2. LCCN 93019168. OCLC 27894775.
• Chesters, Graeme; Welsh, Ian (2010). Social Movements: The Key Concepts. Routledge Key Guides. London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203840689. ISBN 978-0-415-43115-6.
• Landi, Sandro [in French] (2021). "Multitude, peuple, populisme chez Machiavel" (PDF). La Pensée (in French) (406). Éditions Fondation Gabriel Péri: 12–26. doi:10.3917/lp.406.0012. ISSN 0031-4773.
• Melamed, Yitzhak Y.; Sharp, Hasana, eds. (2018). Spinoza's Political Treatise: A Critical Guide. Cambridge Critical Guides. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-17058-2.
  • Steinberg, Justin. "Spinoza and Political Absolutism". In Melamed & Sharp (2018), pp. 175–189.
• Montag, Warren (1999). Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries. London and New York: Verso Books. ISBN 978-1-85984-701-5.
• Santos Campos, André, ed. (2015). Spinoza: Basic Concepts. Exeter: Imprint Academic. ISBN 978-1-84540-791-9.
  • Tucker, Ericka. "Multitude". In Santos Campos (2015), pp. 129–141.
• Koistinen, Olli [in Finnish], ed. (2009). The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza's Ethics. Cambridge Companions to Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-85339-2. LCCN 2009010978.
  • Steinberg, Diane. "Knowledge in Spinoza's Ethics". In Koistinen (2009), pp. 140–166.
• Steinberg, Justin (2009). "Spinoza on Civil Liberation" (PDF). Journal of the History of Philosophy. 47 (1): 35–58. doi:10.1353/hph.0.0082. ISSN 0022-5053.
• van Bunge, Wiep; Krop, Henri [in Dutch]; Steenbakkers, Piet; van de Ven, Jeroen, eds. (2024). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Spinoza (2nd ed.). London, New York, and Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-3502-5642-2.

External links

• Hardt & Negri's 'Multitude': the worst of both worlds by Thomas N. Hale and Anne-Marie Slaughter
• The Multitude Project
• Approximations: Towards an Ontological Definition of the Multitude by Antonio Negri
• Class or Multitude, article by Michael Albert. at the Library of Congress Web Archives (archived 2005-04-17)
• Raymond van de Wiel, "Remote History Re-emerges: The Multitude and Stoicism," (February 2007) [A critical history of the Multitude]
• Warren Montag, "Who's afraid of the Multitude? Between the Individual and the State," The South Atlantic Quarterly 104:4 (Fall 2005).
• Proletariat or Multitude? A Postanarchist Critique of Empire, article by Jason Adams at the Wayback Machine (archived 2004-04-01)
• Joseph Choonara, "Marx or the multitude?," International Socialism: A quarterly journal of socialist theory, issue 105 (Winter 2005) [review of Hardt and Negri's book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire].
• Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, Semiotext[e] (6 Feb 2004) ISBN 978-1-58435-021-7
• Nicolas Colin and Henri Verdier, "The Economics of the Multitude", ParisTech Review (7 June 2012) [interview following their book L'Age de la Multitude].
• Jacopo Galimberti, "What does a multitude look like?", in The Nomos of Images. Manifestation and Iconology of Law, ISSN 2366-9926, 3 December 2015, https://nomoi.hypotheses.org/263