The idea of free will and affect in the political and legal concept of Benedict Spinoza

It is shown how Benedict Spinoza develops a model of social contract, law and state, based on the implementation of human will in accordance with the principles of freedom. The result is an address to the ideals of freedom, which we find both in “Ethics” and in “The Theological and Political Treatise”. It is concluded that the correlation established by Spinoza of the transition of a person from the level of “will to self-preservation” to the level of “will to self-improvement” with the transition of a person from the level of the natural state to the level of the political and legal state allows us to say that the Dutch thinker was ahead of his time and largely approached the ideas of the later paradigm of legal thought, developed by German classics at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries.