In order to understand the relations between State and morality in Spinoza, it would suffice, in principle, to make two basic claims and to develop all that they imply. First claim: considerations regarding the State have their place in moral philosophy. Spinoza explicitly indicates this place; it appears in Scholium 2 of Proposition 37 of Part IV of the Ethics. Its context is well known. The preceding propositions had established in what the Supreme Good of human beings who live under the guidance of reason consists, both on the individual level and on the interhuman level. The propositions that follow will show what means we have at our disposal in order to attain this Supreme Good and what are the obstacles that oppose it: they will show, in other words, what is good and what is bad. And, between these two groups of propositions, we have, precisely, this scholium. Whence we can infer that the object it mentions, that is to say political society, is considered by Spinoza as the condition without which it would be impossible for us to have these means at our disposal of accessing the Supreme Good and to eliminate these obstacles. And this is indeed the case: what highlights the place assigned to politics in Part IV are the reasons for which moral philosophy is necessarily led to take interest in the State, insofar as it discovers therein that upon which the realisation of its project depends.

And yet it also must be said that Spinoza himself does not at all present things in this way. In fact – and this is the second claim – Scholium 2 of Proposition 37 is presented with all the appearances of a digression: its content does not depend in any way upon what immediately preceded it; or, more precisely, it is deduced exclusively from those among the preceding propositions that concern neither the Supreme Good nor the desires of the reasonable human being, but that are simply direct consequences of the theory of the passions laid out in Part III. This does not mean that this scholium does not have theoretical foundations in the system. Quite the contrary. But it does mean that the theoretical foundations of political science have no relation, or at least no direct relation, to the practical reasons for which the philosopher is led to take interest in the object of this science.