February 21, 2025

I believe democracy to be of all forms of government the most natural, the most consonant with individual liberty. In it no one transfers his natural rights so absolutely that he has no further voice in affairs, he only hands it over to the majority of a society, whereof he is a unit. Thus all men remain, as they were in the state of nature, equals.

Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677), Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Sephardi origin, Theologico-Political Treatise

Is this state of nature, of equality, the very thing that makes democracy so attractive and yet so volatile a form of government?

This is surely one of the best and briefest of commentaries on democracy—an unabashedly positive antidote to that ascribed to Winston Churchill, that it’s the best of all forms of government other than those that have been tried to date.