ABSTRACT
There are good reasons for taking the unusual step of including Spinoza in a book on the social contractarians. He employs a Hobbesian vocabulary – including the social contract – and radically changes the meaning of the central terms and concepts. In doing so, Spinoza produces a different image of what it is to be an individual or part of any social body. Spinoza can be used to think about how “developing into an individual” is achieved in a way that takes seriously the fact that it is impossible to be isolated from our environment and that, even as adults, we would not easily survive apart from others. In addition, he provides a conception of the imagination that feminists have found useful for thinking about social responsibility (Gatens and Lloyd 1999). This can also be mobilised to consider the effect of images such as the social contract and the fiction of property in the person. Whilst there has been much useful discussion about the imagination, I argue that Spinoza’s emphasis is upon reason and that he also provides a different (and useful) conception of reason from the other social contractarians.
