The Politics of Hypocrisy: Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle on Hypocritical Conformity

• Author: Amy Gais
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591719886268
• Published date: 01 October 2020
• Date: 01 October 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719886268

Political Theory

2020, Vol. 48(5) 588 –614

© The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591719886268

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Article

The Politics of Hypocrisy:

Baruch Spinoza and

Pierre Bayle

on Hypocritical

Conformity

Amy Gais1

Abstract

Contemporary political theory has increasingly attended to the inevitability,

and even advantage, of hypocrisy in liberal democratic politics, but less

consideration has been given to the social and psychological repercussions

of this ubiquitous phenomenon. This article recovers Baruch Spinoza

and Pierre Bayle’s critiques of hypocritical conformity to demonstrate

that their influential theories of toleration and freedom were shaped

considerably by concerns with enforced conformity. Reframing Spinoza and

Bayle as theorists of hypocrisy, moreover, suggests that recent redemptive

accounts of hypocrisy in political theory overlook deeper and arguably

more discerning anxieties about a politics characterized by hypocrisy,

specifically the deleterious effects of social mistrust and psychological

distress.

Keywords

hypocrisy, toleration, dissimulation, Spinoza, Bayle

1The Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis,

MO, USA

Corresponding Author:

Amy Gais, The Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis,

Campus Box 1029, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA.

Email: amy.gais@wustl.edu

886268PTXXXX10.1177/0090591719886268Political TheoryGais

research-article2019

Gais 589

Early Modern Hypocritical Conformity,

Dissimulation, and Toleration

Contemporary political theory has increasingly attended to the problem of

hypocrisy in liberal democratic politics, perhaps because of the ubiquity of

accusations leveled against elected representatives.1 Rather than condemn

hypocrisy as a moral and political vice, however, influential political theo-

rists have set out to assuage, or at least complicate, the modern allergy to

hypocrisy.2 Most notably, Judith Shklar, but also Ruth Grant and David

Runciman, have challenged conventional critiques of hypocrisy by showing

that “a certain amount of dissimulation” is fundamentally characteristic of

liberal democratic politics.3 These commentators, moreover, carefully distin-

guish harmful forms of hypocrisy from acceptable ones to highlight the ways

in which certain kinds and degrees of dissimilation might even prove valu-

able in political life. These measured assessments of the role of hypocrisy in

politics are not Machiavellian recognitions of the necessity of immoral mach-

inations, but more benign recognitions of the inevitability, or even advantage,

of some kinds of deceit and inconsistency in political life.

These theoretical attempts to grapple with the repercussions of hypocrisy

in politics, however, are hardly new. Intellectual debates on hypocritical con-

formity lay at the center of seventeenth-century philosophical and theological

debates on toleration, conformity, and religious persecution. In particular, the

politics of hypocrisy “acquired new urgency and importance” in early mod-

ern Europe following the Protestant Reformation, as religious dissenters

were forced to dissemble in order to navigate conflicting commitments to a

repressive sovereign and their tender consciences.4 Recent revisionist histori-

ography has qualified the “heroic tale of progress” embedded in longstanding

historical narratives on the “rise of toleration,” affirming that confessional

conflicts, religious persecution, and enforced conformity were commonplace

features of seventeenth-century European political and social life.5 While

some degree of equivocation is arguably characteristic of all social interac-

tions, the severity and ubiquity of hypocritical conformity in early modern

Europe was so drastic that “concern[s] about wolves wearing sheep’s cloth-

ing was a constant ingredient of the religious culture.”6 Intellectual debates

on piety, obedience, and hypocritical conformity were central to early mod-

ern debates on toleration and persecution—to what extent should the state

compel attendance at liturgical services and sacramental rights or the public

profession of obedience and allegiance, even when insincere?

Revisionist historical accounts have been complemented by recent work

in the history of political thought, which carefully recovers the political, theo-

logical, and legal context against which early modern figures were writing, in