Multitude

Multitude is a term for a group of people who cannot be classed under any other distinct category, except for their shared fact of existence. The term has a history of use reaching back to antiquity, but took on a strictly political concept when it was first used by Machiavelli and reiterated by Spinoza. The multitude is a concept of a population that has not entered into a social contract with a sovereign political body, such that individuals retain the capacity for political self-determination. A multitude typically classified as a quantity exceeding 100. For Hobbes the multitude was a rabble that needed to enact a social contract with a monarch, thus turning them from a multitude into a people. For Machiavelli and Spinoza both, the role of the multitude vacillates between admiration and contempt. Recently the term has returned to prominence as a new model of resistance against global systems of power as described by political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their international best-seller Empire (2000) and expanded upon in their Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004). Other theorists recently began to use the term include political thinkers associated with Autonomist Marxism and its sequelae, including Sylvère Lotringer, Paolo Virno, and thinkers connected with the eponymous review Multitudes.

The concept originates in Machiavelli’s Discorsi. It is, however, with Hobbes's recasting of the concept as the war-disposed, dissolute pole of the opposition between a Multitude and a People in De Cive, that Spinoza’s conceptualization seems, according to Negri, contrasted.

The multitude is used as a term and implied as a concept throughout Spinoza's work. In the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, for instance, he acknowledges that the (fear of the) power (potentia) of the multitude is the limit of sovereign power (potestas): ‘Every ruler has more to fear from his own citizens […] than from any foreign enemy, and it is this “fear of the masses” […that is] the principal brake on the power of the sovereign or state.’ The explication of this tacit concept, however, only comes in Spinoza's last and unfinished work known as the Political Treatise:

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