ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide an interpretation of Spinoza's philosophy insofar as it pertains to the issue of ordering. It opens with some core presuppositions of Spinoza's philosophy before moving on to Spinoza's ideas regarding the two summands of ordering: institutional/formal aspect (the state and sovereignty) and content (law and politics). The key themes in the chapter are as follows. First, in terms of basic preconditions, affective capacity and immanent causality, the paramount importance of desire and the conatus principle must be elucidated. Transitioning to the social level, imagination as the basis for organic self-creation of the multitude also deserves analysis. The chapter focuses on the state and its order, seen as upholding a community and making people act as if they were rational, to sovereignty and the instable balance of power that it establishes, to law as a prosthetic device compensating for the inability of (most) humans to live in accordance with sound reason.
