  To see how Spinoza provides a general response to the question of how peace or civic agreement is promoted, we must bear in mind that the relation of agreement comes in degrees (see Blom 1993; Steinberg 2009). Total agreement, what Blom calls “maximal agreement,” is possible only to the extent that men are fully rational (EIVP31–EIVP35). A society of free men would be a perfect union (EIVP67–73). However, the free man exists only as an ideal; all actual men are imperfectly rational. The concern of the state is to bring it about that the actual relationships between people most closely approximate the ideal society of free men. That is, the aim of the state is to make irrational, selfish men as rational and virtuous as possible. (For tension between idealist and realist features of Spinoza’s political thought, see Armstrong 2009).