Multitude is a philosophical term for a group of people not classed under any other distinct category, except for their shared fact of existence.
Niccolò Machiavelli notably used it, and both Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza deployed it more technically in philosophy and in engaging with their respective historical or intellectual contexts.
In the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, among others, it became a radically democratic or revolutionary concept whereby individuals stand against institutions.
The term first entered into the lexicon of early modern philosophy when it was used by thinkers like Machiavelli, Hobbes (in De Cive), and Spinoza (especially in the Tractatus Politicus or TP).
In Spinoza's political philosophy, multitude ("multitudo" or "veelheid")[3] is a key concept that is essential to his systematic œuvre in its historical context.
[16] Moreso on the Right, Leo Strauss emphasized Spinoza's fear of the masses in his more general understanding of political philosophy as a manual for the elite.
[17] Indeed, Spinoza asked unprepared commoners not to read his TTP, arguing that it would exceed their limitations and be misinterpreted (though he is arguably most positive about democracy in this work).
[18] Strauss's orientation may be seen in some secondary literature on Spinoza, including that of Raia Prokhovnik, Alexandre Matheron, Steven B. Smith, and Étienne Balibar (to some extent).
[12] She proposed that Spinoza ultimately developed a theory of the multitude as something to be understood, not feared, in order to sustain institutions, peace, and prosperity within democratic states.
[31] This culminated in the lynching of the De Witt brothers of the Loevestein faction, against whom the Calvinists of the Dutch Reformed Church and Orangists were allied.
[35][g] Young Spinoza hoped for the improvement of common people in the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (TIE), who he referred to as the "vulgus" before better theorizing the "multitude" in the TP.
In attending to politics, his fear arguably settled into resignation as he began to consider the situation in terms of the role of the multitude.
[48][k] Balibar, Warren Montag, Justin Steinberg, and Tucker read Spinoza as deliberately ambiguous here, referring to the fear of the masses as that which they felt and inspired.
[51] He considered the immediate or ostentatious materialistic concerns of the vulgus[52] and recommended the pursuit of knowledge and love of God, "the end for which I [myself] strive".
[53] He argued that the improvement of education, medicine, and social order would be not only virtuous, but also instrumental in raising the vulgus to higher things and better capabilities.
[51] In Spinoza's typical, semantically revisionist sense, argued J. Steinberg, this "absolute" power was simply that of a sovereign as in principle greater than that of the church, as defined in relation to (and sometimes constrained by) that of the multitude, and as necessarily limited or finite in an immanent and naturalistic sense (i.e., in the same way as "Deus ..." is rendered "... sive Natura" in the Ethics, though Spinoza specifically clarified that "Kings are not Gods, but men").
[61] He argued that natural right was coextensive with power and drew relations between the individual and the sovereign, and between the multitude and the entire state.
Negri describes the multitude in his The Savage Anomaly as an unmediated, revolutionary, immanent, and positive collective social subject which can found a "nonmystified" form of democracy (p. 194).
This is when the political is really affirmed—when the genesis is complete and self-valorization, the cooperative convergence of subjects, and the proletarian management of production become a constituent power.
In the Introduction to Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude, Lotringer criticized Hardt's and Negri's use of the concept for its ostensible return to dialectical dualism.