Sobre a definição de democracia no tratado teológico político

This paper examines briefly the meaning of the definition of democracy in Chapter 16 of the Theological-Political Treatise. At first, I make a little history of the studies made in the last century concerning the way in which Spinoza wrote his political discourse. Then, I will treat the question around the geometric logic that structures Spinoza’s political discourse and defines the essence of democracy. According to the sixteenth chapter, we can say that the essence of democracy is both ontological and historically prior to the essences of other systems and that this priority, for the examination of Jewish history, is also chronological. This may mean that after the Theological-Political Treatise the whole politics in Spinoza is based on the definition of the essence of democracy