Ethics and Politics in Spinoza and Sartre

Gaye Çankaya Eksen examines the philosophical relation between Spinoza and Sartre and presents a rigorous study of their respective political and ethical theories. Inspired by an enigmatic line in the work of the distinguished Spinoza scholar, Alexandre Matheron, Eksen explores the social contract theory of Thomas Hobbes to argue that Spinoza and Sartre produce strikingly similar rejections of the classical account of the passage from the state of nature to civil society. Despite the obvious and well-known differences between the two thinkers who are separated by centuries of philosophical history, Eksen persuasively argues that both Spinoza and Sartre develop sophisticated political theories from their shared emphasis on the irreducibility of the singular existence of each human being. Politics, for these two thinkers, becomes the domain of ongoing struggles to realise, in ever greater ways, human freedom.