  Alexandre Matheron’s Individu et Communauté chez Spinoza contains perhaps the most influential interpretation of Spinoza’s account of individuality (1969, esp. Ch. 3). Matheron identifies political societies as individuals, characterized by their own “formal element,” i.e., their own unique ratio of motion and rest (see e.g., p. 42, 58).  Following Matheron, Etienne Balibar views the state as a highly composite individual, as an “individual of individuals, having a ‘body’ and a ‘soul’ or mind” (1998, 64), a status that he calls elsewhere “transindividuality” (1997). Others who have espoused this view include Meinecke (1965) and Blom (2007).