Peace Is Not An Absence Of

From the unfinished Tractatus Politicus (1677), which Baruch Spinoza was writing at the time of his death. Against Hobbes, who saw peace as merely the absence of war, Spinoza insists that true peace is a positive condition of collective rational power — citizens actively cooperating under just institutions, not merely refraining from violence out of fear. This distinction between negative peace (ceasefire) and positive peace (flourishing) would later become influential in political philosophy.