Christopher Skeaff’s Becoming Political is primarily an interpretive argument that traces the treatment of judgment in Benedict Spinoza’s ethical and political philosophy. Skeaff uses this Spinozist reading to address a timely issue: criticisms of populism that blame the demos for a lack of judgment. Political judgment, according to Skeaff, takes place all the time and is, in fact, constitutive of political life as such.

The first two chapters explain how Spinoza’s conception of affect leads to a distinctive conception of judgment. Affects (such as sadness or joy) are traces of our encounters with other things and humans. These encounters affect us in both body and mind. Hence affects are at once somatic, corporeal, psychic, and intellectual. The affective dimension in judgment leads invariably to variance in judgment, which arises due to specificities of historical and individual circumstances. The potential for conflict, however, is balanced by the fact that a capacity for affecting and being affected also generates human powers. Such interdependence means that even if, as Spinoza (in)famously put it, the “big fish has every right to eat the little fish,” power is not necessarily always characterized by exclusion or domination but by a “joining of forces” that “preserve[s] the vitality or development of power (potentia)” (p. 31) through political society. For Skeaff, the persistence of affect in judgment explains why norms (of judging) cannot simply be “impartial.” It also explains why the norm always remains immanent to the plane of judgment and why judgment does not simply involve the application of a norm or law, but is inherent in the very creation and constitution of laws and norms. This is articulated in Skeaff’s concept of “vital republicanism.”

The third chapter gives us a clearer view of what Skeaff means by vital republicanism. It is republican, because pace Skinner and Pettit, the authorship of laws underwrites true freedom (citizens obey self-generated laws, not human beings), and the rule of law limits state power (p. 63). It is vital because the authorship of laws is part of our capacity for norm creation, a vital human power.

Chapter 4’s close reading of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus or Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) explores how civil religion can serve as a cornerstone of vital republicanism, generating true solidarity, or “a condition for public happiness” (p. 113). However, Skeaff is unclear about whether “public happiness” is the same thing as the sum total of happinesses of individual citizens and subjects or is something different. He is also unclear about whether the principles of justice and charity, which he discusses primarily in relation to Hebraic theocracy in the TTP, should be guiding principles for other civic religions as well. As an interpretive idea, “civil religion” is interesting. As a practical or political strategy, however, it is baffling. It may deter those who already profess a faith, as well as those who do not, for different reasons. This is even before we get into the problems of the category of “religion” (Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, 2003).

Given the role of affect in judgment, Spinozist justice cannot be a simple “attunement of right and fact” nor “conformity” to an existing, external rule or norm (p. 134), as Skeaff argues in chapter 5. Justice is the practice and action of the “just man,” one who “gives to each his due because he knows the true reason for the laws and their necessity” (TTP 4.7, p. 134). Consequently, political judgment “is a practice where individuals link law as a principle (ratio) or premise of equal empowerment … to a set of political circumstances, thus building a case for the reciprocal connections between a specific right and what it entails for the community” (p. 134). The question is, how does justice expand from the action (and thought) of a single “just man” to embrace what Arendt calls “action in concert” of several fallible, but here nonetheless principled, just persons? Between political judgment on an individual level and a collective or communal idea (and action), there lies a vast distance that Skeaff seems to have largely overlooked. I suspect that this is due to Skeaff’s equivocation of the word “common” when referring to Spinoza’s idea of “common notions.” Spinoza uses the term “common notion” to describe a kind of adequate thought or idea, but here Skeaff has taken it to mean a shared idea. Common notions, in Spinoza’s view, may be “shared” or common in the sense that anyone who thinks adequately, say about the properties of a triangle, has “the same idea.” But people who share a political ideal share an idea in a very different sense (the Movement for Black Lives that Skeaff cites is a good example). Even if we grant Skeaff the claim that common notions have “an immediately ethical-political dimension” (p. 126), the fraught transitions from such ethico-politico content in an individual’s thinking to collective thought, and thence, to action, must still be demonstrated rather than assumed. (This is something Hasana Sharp does admirably in Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, 2011.)

Becoming Political promises to make a distinctive contribution to the field of political theory by its novel joining of republican theory, biopolitical literature, and Spinozist philosophy. It nudges republican theory to give more consideration to the relational and affective elements of judgment that go into the authorship of laws. Its close reading and interpretation of Spinoza’s conception of judgment contribute to the burgeoning, transdisciplinary phenomenon of “affect studies.” This is the first book- length treatment of judgment in Spinoza’s philosophy, but it does not add much that is substantively new to the secondary literature on Spinoza. A significant amount of its interpretive work is drawn from existing scholarship, though perhaps this retreading is necessary for an audience not yet familiar with Spinoza.

Early on, Skeaff promises that “the republican features of Spinoza’s thought throw new light on the emancipatory role that law might play in the formulation of an affirmative biopolitics” (p. 7). His treatment of biopolitical literature, however, is cursory. The book’s tendency to pick up a key idea from authors such as Roberto Esposito and Georges Canguilhem, only to drop it after a couple of paragraphs, muddles Skeaff’s own argument. For instance, Skeaff uses Canguilhem’s concept of “vital normativity” to refer both to the judgment of individuals and to shared, political, public judgment, thus eliding both in subsequent discussions. This is not to say that individual judgment and communal or political judgment cannot have something in common. However, an analytical distinction still should be made to give an adequate account of the processes through which the first may transmute into the second. A more sustained engagement might have helped Skeaff more clearly delineate his own ideas.

Skeaff writes with verve, and it is a shame that the book falls short of its promise. Becoming Political provides a readable if somewhat repetitive introduction to the idea of political judgment in Spinoza’s philosophy.