Spinoza, Rousseau, and Adam Smith on Rotating Federal Capitals.

Through a number of posts during the last few years I have noted that at various points in his posthumously published Political Treatise, Spinoza offers federalism as a mechanism toward peace. In the context of discussing aristocratic federalisms, that is, those ruled by representatives of the constitutive republics, Spinoza confronts an important problem: where should the capital be located?

The idea of rotating capitals is familiar from the late roman empire and the Franks. I would not be surprised that some nomad tribes also had experience with it. But to the best of my knowledge ancient federations had a tendency to stick to one capital city. In more recent times, the Hanseatic league, for example, treated Lübeck as its administrative center.

But in a federal structure appointing one place the site of the federal assembly or council, causes an obvious problem. As Spinoza puts it in the Political Treatise: “For if any City in the state were designated for meetings of this supreme Council, that city would really be the capital of the state.” (TP 9.3, Curley’s translation.) That would undermine the formal equality among the entities that make up the federation.

Spinoza was intimately familiar with a solution to this problem that, oddly, he does not mention. The Dutch designated The Hague as the site of the estates general of the United Provinces, even though Amsterdam was (and still is) the dominant city in the republic (and the Holland province which has Harlem has it capital now).

Instead Spinoza offers two other options: first, a rotating capital or second a capital that is in an important sense lacks certain political rights. As he puts it: “either the cities would have to take turns, or some place would have to be designated for this Council which does not have the right of Citizenship, and which belongs equally to all the cities.” (TP 9.3) Interestingly enough, the United States ended up pursuing a version of the second option to this day (with the citizens of Washington DC deprived of certain political rights). It would be worth exploring this connection to the Founders.

Spinoza adds for good measure:

“In each case: easy to say, hard to do. Each solution requires many thousand men to frequently go outside their Cities, perhaps to meet now in one place, now in another. TP 9.3.

As I hinted above, a rotating capital is not wholly original with Spinoza. It’s possible, for example, to interpret the first estates general of the low countries (1464) as a federal structure and part of a state-building attempt in the Burgundian Netherlands. It was multi-lingual and the constituent elements had different kind of partial self-governing structures, frequently assemblies. Somewhat accidentally (and under influence of political events), it seems, it ended up rotating capitals among many important Flemish city. On my view there is more than a hint of all of this in More’s Utopia, but the Utopian federalism of book 2 has one major capital city. So does the federal capital of Hume’s “Idea Of a Perfect Commonwealth.”

Spinoza’s idea of a rotating capital did have an afterlife. Back in 1973, in “Rousseau as a Theorist of National and International Federalism,” Patrick Riley pointed out (without mentioning Spinoza in context) that Rousseau considered a rotating capital for Corsica in his proposed constitution for it:

Given a chance to recommend the breaking up of Corsica into confederacy of small states to avoid establishing a great capital city in any one part, Rousseau balked; to have a rotating capital "it would be necessary to divide the island into a number of small con- federated states, each of which would assume the presidency in turn." But he rejected this possibility on the grounds that it "would complicate the operation of the machine" and that (more importantly) "its parts would be less closely knit." In a showdown between federalizing a fairly large state and keeping its national unity intact, Rousseau picked the latter.—pp. 10-11

Now in a note to Book 3, Chapter 15 of the Social Contract, Rousseau had implied that he would develop a major theory of federalism in it. That seems not to have materialized.

But earlier, at the end of 3.13, he does make an explicit point that if one cannot avoid a large republic (including a federal kind), the general assembly should rotate: “if the state cannot be limited to reasonable bodies, there remains one remedy, and that is to have no fixed capital, but to move the seat of government from one place to another and to assemble the estates the country in each in turn.” (translation by Maurice Cranston.) While I won’t claim Rousseau got this directly from Spinoza (I don’t recall this being in Abbe St. Pierre, however), it’s pretty clear by now that he was familiar with Spinoza. But perhaps this is also discussed in Montesquieu or Puffendorf—reader suggestions welcome!

Let me turn the knob one more time. In recent times there has been considerable scholarly interest in and diverging debate over the nature of Smith’s reception of Rousseau without much consensus. However we all agree that Smith seems to have been familiar with the Social Contract (Smith purportedly told a visitor, "His 'Social Contract' will one day avenge all the persecutions he suffered,") but little has been made of Smith’s reading of it. (Few people wish to follow my arguments that Smith and members of the Scottish Enlightenment more generally were actually quite aware of Spinoza’s philosophy.)

As regular readers know, I have been fascinated by the reception, in Bentham and Kant, of Smith’s project of a federal parliamentary union of Great Britain and her Atlantic colonies (including Ireland) that would effectively turn the North Atlantic into a free trade zone. In the Wealth of Nations, Smith calls this the "States General of the British Empire," (WN 5.3.68, 933) and presents it as a “completion” of the British constitution (WN 4.7.c.77, 624).

Initially, the representatives would meet in Westminster. But Smith goes on to say, this need not be fixed eternally, “The seat of the empire would then naturally remove itself to that part of the empire which contributed most to the general defence and support of the whole.” (WN 4.7.C.79, 625-626) This kind of (relatively infrequent) rotation makes a virtue out of something that Spinoza wishes to avoid: namely that the federal structure also can mirror the financial and political power of the contributions of the federal units.