RICARDO POLIDORO MENDES

In their political speeches, Machiavelli and Spinoza turn to practice, to concrete experience among agents. By rejecting imaginary models and norms transcendent to the social body, philosophers shed light on the political action by which actors order their experience by instituting political forms so that the social body lasts and is maintained. In this sense, this instituting action is not an isolated fact. The operation of agents does not cease once an order is established, rather, they continue to operate in relation to the established forms while also establishing new forms in accordance with the changes in the social body and the demands of the times. Political action, therefore, establishes a history of the social body because it establishes a dynamic between agents that unfolds over the duration, in the distension of political life. Thus, our proposal in this work is to return to the works of Machiavelli and Spinoza in order to investigate this political action, especially in the people, in the case of Machiavelli, and in the multitude, in Spinoza, to understand how they institute political forms and, thus, , a history of the social body.