Instituting Power : Machiavelli, Spinoza, and the Groundless Ground of Political Foundation

Drawing on Machiavelli’s Discourses and Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise and Political Treatise, the book explores the roots of instituting power in social division, its resistance to fixed embodiment, and its character as a continuous process rather than a definitive foundation.

With this book, Albano Pina offers a new account of how political orders begin, change, and endure by developing the concept of instituting power through close readings of Machiavelli and Spinoza. He argues that political institutions do not arise from a single founding act or a unified sovereign people, but from ongoing social conflict, shifting collective energies, and forms of agency that no group fully controls. Drawing on Machiavelli’s Discourses and Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise and Political Treatise, Pina identifies the core features of instituting power: its roots in social division, its resistance to fixed embodiment, and its character as a continuous process rather than a definitive foundation. He shows how Machiavelli’s account of Roman institutions and Spinoza’s theory of natural right each illuminate the dynamic interplay between social forces and institutional forms. By recovering this alternative grammar of political foundation, Pina offers a way to rethink democratic renewal beyond both procedural minimalism and anti-institutional rupture. Instituting Power: Machiavelli, Spinoza, and the Groundless Ground of Political Foundation will be of great interest to scholars and advanced students of political theory, early modern philosophy, constitutional thought, and democratic studies, as well as readers seeking new conceptual tools for understanding contemporary crises of legitimacy and institutional trust.