ABSTRACT
In the seventeenth century, when the passions were at their apex, little or nothing in human life fell outside their purview, a fact that helps to explain the sprawling and diffuse nature of early modern treatises on the passions. The strategic management and manipulation of the passions of individuals or social groups in the interest of the peace and stability of the state is of course a commonplace of the political thought of the period, and explains why many critics have analysed early modern thinking on the passions from the perspective of Foucauldian discipline. Even in Spinoza's mechanist physics, as Leo's contribution has shown, the concept of affects, central to Spinoza's understanding of nature and of human beings as part of nature, stands indebted to a rhetorical tradition going back, via the Renaissance rhetoric handbooks of humanists like Vossius, to Quintilian.
