RICARDO POLIDORO MENDES

In their political works, Machiavelli and Spinoza turn to practice, to concrete experience among agents. By rejecting imaginary models and transcendent norms, both philosophers emphasize the political action by which actors order their experience by instituting political forms so that the social body lasts and is maintained. This action, therefore, is not the privilege of one actor or a few, because what is at stake for Machiavelli and Spinoza is political experience, that is, the action through which the multiplicity and diversity of agents of the social body in relation to each others it institutes social and political forms to order a common experience. Our proposal in this work, therefore, is investigate in Machiavelli and Spinoza works 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.