The paper seeks to examine Spinoza’s theoretical relationship to slavery through a historical and political perspective. Early modern natural law tradition, in which (as Grotius argued) slavery was consistent with natural justice and the slave could freely sell their own liberty forces us to confront the paradoxical ways in which modern notions of freedom were articulated in relation to increasingly abstracted uses of slavery. I focus my attention on Spinoza’s paradoxical formulation of servitude. The source of Spinoza’s characterisation of slavery is found in Chapter 16 of the TTP, positing the foundations of the state in terms of mutual utility rather than a Hobbesian absolute transference of right to a sovereign authority. Yet Spinoza defines the figure of the slave as someone who fails to actively pursue their utility. Inscribed at the very heart of Spinoza’s political vision is an unsettling reality – the condition of slavery reveals itself to be a permanent condition and limit of the political, the ever-present possibility of a catastrophic collapse of social relations and the inability to form secure and durable relationships with others.
