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Multitude is a term for a group of people who cannot be classed under any other distinct category, except for their shared fact of existence. The term has a history of use reaching back to antiquity, but took on a strictly political concept when it was first used by Machiavelli and reiterated by Spinoza. The multitude is a concept of a population that has not entered into a social contract with a sovereign political body, such that individuals retain the capacity for political self-determination. A multitude typically classified as a quantity exceeding 100. For Hobbes the multitude was a rabble that needed to enact a social contract with a monarch, thus turning them from a multitude into a people. For Machiavelli and Spinoza both, the role of the multitude vacillates between admiration and contempt. Recently the term has returned to prominence as a new model of resistance against global systems of power as described by political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their international best-seller ''Empire'' (2000) and expanded upon in their ''Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire'' (2004). Other theorists recently began to use the term include political thinkers associated with Autonomist Marxism and its sequelae, including Sylvère Lotringer, Paolo Virno, and thinkers connected with the eponymous review ''Multitudes''. ==History== The concept originates in Machiavelli’s ''Discorsi''. It is, however, with Hobbes's recasting of the concept as the war-disposed, dissolute pole of the opposition between a Multitude and a People in ''De Cive'', that Spinoza’s conceptualization seems, according to Negri, contrasted.〔Negri, ''The Savage Anomaly'', pp. 109, 140.〕 The multitude is used as a term and implied as a concept throughout Spinoza's work. In the ''Tractatus Theologico-Politicus'', for instance, he acknowledges that the (fear of the) power (potentia) of the multitude is the limit of sovereign power (potestas): ‘Every ruler has more to fear from his own citizens () than from any foreign enemy, and it is this “fear of the masses” (is ) the principal brake on the power of the sovereign or state.’ The explication of this tacit concept, however, only comes in Spinoza's last and unfinished work known as the ''Political Treatise'': It must next be observed, that in laying foundations it is very necessary to study the human passions: and it is not enough to have shown, what ought to be done, but it ought, above all, to be shown how it can be effected, that men, whether led by passion or reason, should yet keep the laws firm and unbroken. For if the constitution of the dominion, or the public liberty depends only on the weak assistance of the laws, not only will the citizens have no security for its maintenance (), but it will even turn to their ruin. () And, therefore, it would be far better for the subjects to transfer their rights absolutely to one man, than to bargain for unascertained and empty, that is unmeaning, terms of liberty, and so prepare for their posterity a way to the most cruel servitude. But if I succeed in showing that the foundation of monarchical dominion (), are firm and cannot be plucked up, without the indignation of the larger part of an armed multitude, and that from them follow peace and security for king and multitude, and if I deduce this from general human nature, no one will be able to doubt, that these foundations are the best and the true ones. The concept of the multitude resolves the tension that scholars have observed in Spinoza’s political project between the insistence on the benign function of sovereignty (as witnessed in the quotation above) and the insistence on individual freedom. It is, we see here, a truly revolutionary concept, and it is not difficult to see why Spinoza’s contemporaries (and, as for instance Étienne Balibar has implied, even Spinoza himself ) saw it as a dangerous political idea. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Multitude」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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