Hobbes, War, Movement

Abstract

While informed by Foucault's understanding of power in terms of war and circulation, this article challenges Foucault's static reading of Hobbes. Contextualising Hobbes's political thought within the scientific ideas that he was inspired by, this article reveals that there is more to Hobbes than the static, depoliticising image of the contract. Hobbes's political thought is premised upon an ontology of movement; that is, his account of political order pivots on a double movement in which war constitutes the very possibility of social and political relations as well as of their continued reproduction via circulation. It is this conceptualisation of order that makes Hobbes's liberal political thought genealogically significant. And it is the model of a play of (re)productive movements—in certain respects close to Foucault's own conception of power—that can be used productively for thinking about governance and resistance today.