Leviathan's Theory of Justice

Abstract

What we set out to do here is not so much raise a historical question about the social and economic reasons for the crisis in the concept of justice in the 1640s, as reflect on the philosophical aspects of Hobbes’ recasting of the theory of justice in Leviathan. The first aspect of this recasting is the emergence of a new definition of justice as the keeping of valid convenants; the second aspect is a new understanding of distribution and exchanges, and the third aspect is a criticism of alternative forms of justice, which is to be found in the famous refutation of the fool, in chapter XV of Leviathan. The peculiarity of the third of Hobbes’s political treatises is thus that it simultaneously presents the crisis in the concept of justice and resolves it, in the form of a new theory based on a novel conception of contractual exchanges and political authority.