Abstract: Taking its point of departure in Spinoza’s reading, in a letter to Jelles, of a book entitled Homo politicus, this paper confronts Spinoza’s conception of good political practice and the libertine conceptions of Machiavellian statesmanship that took shape at the fringes of the North European traditions of reason of state. I show how Spinoza, against what saw as libertine political practices governed by envy, defended an Erasmian politics of friendship.
