Abstract
AbstractThomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) is a key text to Enlightenment, not the least because of its discussion of the concept of eudaimonia or felicity. A discourse on felicity originates in antiquity and continues into Enlightenment. Hobbes rearranges this discourse, in as much as he questions the antique and Christian lines of tradition and plays these systems of knowledge off against one another. The following article demonstrates how Hobbes deals with central presuppositions and concepts in the antique and Christian traditions and reveals which rhetorics and polemics he employs to contest a Western ethics of felicity. What becomes evident is that Hobbes’s language-critical approach and anthropological assumptions assume a salient role in this criticism. At the same time, this analysis argues that it is precisely Hobbes’s chosen rhetorical strategies, such as praeteritio or brevitas, that, in the end, do not fully dismantle the antique- Christian concept of eudaimonia.
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