Conclusion

Abstract

Abstract This Conclusion brings the book to a close by reflecting on the geography of political discourse in the British world, especially the discourse of sovereignty. In England, political conditions in our period were often stable enough for Hobbes’s readers to reject or ‘tame’ Hobbes’s concept of sovereignty without endangering civil peace. In Ireland, Hobbes’s readers were impelled by the country’s political instability to engage with the concept more fully and sympathetically. Here, the ‘Leviathan’ was released and remained at large well into the eighteenth century. The Conclusion ends by arguing that Hobbes’s concept of sovereignty was used to defend the interests of Irish subjects, as well as to subdue them; for Hobbes, after all, sovereignty was established by the subjects’ consent. Proclamations of the demise of sovereignty in Northern Ireland following the Belfast Agreement, on the grounds that it emphasized ‘consent’ and ‘impartiality’ in the exercise of sovereignty, may therefore be mistaken.