Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza

Filippo Del Lucchese is Adjunct Professor and Visiting Researcher in English and Comparative Literary Studies at Occidental College, USA, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Picardie, France.

"Filippo Del Lucchese illuminates the axis of political philosophy that links Machiavelli to Spinoza through wonderfully rich and original readings of their texts. In the process he demonstrates that the Machiavelli-Spinoza axis provide a powerful alternative to dominant notions of European modernity: a vision of political life based not on contract and unity but on conflict and multiplici." - Michael Hardt, Duke University, USA, co-author of Empire and Multitude Reconstructs a moment in the history of thought with great rigour, a reconstruction that is an important contribution to the reactivation of an 'alternative modernity' and, more generally, to the underground current of materialist thought. Del Lucchese transforms a series of concepts (law, conflict, the occasion, democracy, multitute, 'commonality) that are absolutely contemporary ... The book is also acutely sensitive to its intervention in the present, its persuasive textual analyses framed with and against contemporary political thought.' - Radical Philosophy

• Introduction; 1. Realism; i. The sky, the Sun, the Elements, Man: Necessity and Occasion in the Realism of Machiavelli and Spinoza; ii. 'Freedom' and the 'Common Good', or, in other words, Tyranny; 2. Conflict; i. Spoliatis Anna Supersunt, Furor Anna Ministrat: Philosophy as Resistance; ii. Jerusalem and Rom;iii. Iustitia and Army; 3. Multitude; i. Quid Corpus Possit Nemo Hucusque Determinavit: the Spinozist 'war cry'; Individual Multiple Being; Bibliography.