Social Contracts before Hobbes and Locke? Medieval Contract Theories in the First Half of the 14th Century

TWO QUODLIBETS ON ESSENCE/EXISTENCE ASPUTE OF long standing during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and one which flowed over into most of the later middle ages was that concerning the distinction between essence and existence in finite beings. Aquinas had spoken of a real distinction between essence and existence which he regarded not as two different things but as two principles of being. Giles of Rome and Henry of Ghent had each in his own way interpreted Aquinas's doctrine. Thomas of Sutton (rn50-1315) in the eighth question of his third Quodlibet took up the question and came down on the side of Aquinas against both Giles of Rome and Henry of Ghent. There is some question about how well Sutton understood the Thomistic position. His language does at times seem to indicate that he regards essence and existence almost as two things rather than two principles. But he also consistently speaks of them as related as potency is to act. Gilson seems to be correct when he states that there is no real reason to suppose that Sutton misunderstood the authentic position of Aquinas, even though his language at times resembles that of Giles of Rome.1 F. Ehrle also is convinced that Sutton was a bona fide Thomist whose doctrine was consistently in accord with that of Aquinas.2 Sometime later William of Ockham (c. 1300-1350) discussed the matter in the seventh question of his second Quodlibet. Ockham also attacked Henry of Ghent, but when he himself came to solve the question, he firmly denied any real distinction between essence and existence. He saw them merely as 1 Gilson, E. History of Christian Philos

Samuel Pufendorf: Obligation as the Basis of the State MICHAEL NUTKIEWICZ HOBBES'S AND SPINOZA'S well-articulated philosophic and scientific worldviews permeated their concept of natural law and its relationship to the state; their political theories provided formidable challenges to theorists of natural law. Hobbes and Spinoza injected a mechanistic natural philosophy into their political thought, introducing a vocabulary unlike that found in the political theories of the Middle Ages or of the Renaissance. Classical and medieval political thought was shaped by an anthropomorphic vision of the state. The metaphors used by classical thinkers, unlike the mechanistic metaphors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were heuristic and idealized. The image of the state as a biological body permeated medieval and Renaissance political theory. To some extent seventeenth -century thinkers retained this powerful metaphor. The frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan pictorially depicts the commonwealth as a man; nevertheless , early modern political theorists do not employ an anthropomorphic language to describe the state. The new mechanical science, which serves as the background for political theorists, suggested an alternative meaning for the idea of a body: a body is not a biological entity but an artifical mechanism, an artifact. This novel view of the state was facilitated by the growing interest in scientific method as exemplified by Descartes and Galileo. The most profound insight that early modern political thinkers took from natural science was the assumption that knowledge entails the ability to reconstruct (either actually or theoretically) the object of enquiry. This methodological principle of natural science was carried into early modern political theory, offering new analogies to political thinkers. Just as the laws of inertia, for example, [15] t6 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY are "discovered" in a hypothetical vacuum, men are studied in an imaginary state of nature. The subject matter of the political philosopher becomes the ontology of the state: the political thinker's task is to explain rather than to describe the mechanism of the state. The emphasis on reconstructing political society and the attempt to discover the mechanism by which men generate or "make" their institutions turned the state into an artifact, a product of man's labor. The political theory of Hobbes (and Spinoza) is the first attempt to wed the new natural science to political theory. Abraham Cowley's mocking tribute serves Hobbes well: "Thou great Columbus of the Golden Lands of New Philosophies."' Hobbes's attempt to conjoin the new science to political theory, with its implication that the state is an artifact, must be viewed as the decisive force in the development of early modern political theory. The notion that the state is an artifact is pervasive in early modern political theory. ~ Most troublesome to the political theorists, however, was Hobbes's claim that the state evolved out of mechanical principles, s They could accept Hobbes's general (and implicit) conclusion but rejected his mechanical account of the state's formation. In the figure of Samuel Pufendorf (163~-94), born in the same year as Spinoza, we have a decidedly nonmechanistic political philosophy, For Hobbes and Spinoza, mechanistic principles provided scientific, self-evident laws for the construction of a rational political theory. Pufendorf, by contrast , finds these self-evident principles neither in the mechanistic theory of nature nor in traditional divine theories of law but, as we shall see, in the working legal system itself. Pufendorf agrees with Hobbes regarding the "inclinations of human character" and, like Hobbes, argues that "it is discipline, not nature," that ' "Mr. Cowley's Verses in Praiseof Mr. Hobbes, Oppo'd" (London, 168o), p. 7Spinoza , like Hobbes, formulates his principles of political science from his natural science . But his use of science is more than metaphorical, and it is not merely methodological. For Spinoza, the physical body and the political body amount to the same thing: one needs only the laws of nature to understand both their mechanisms. The axioms and lemmata between propositions 13 and 14 in part ~ of Spinoza's Ethics (where he discusses the physics of the body) and the Political Treatise must be read together: Spinoza involves the observer's own body and compels him to view it as a balance of motion and rest. The...

Reviewed by: Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages ed. by Dallas G. Denery, II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman Lola Sharon Davidson Denery, Dallas G., II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman, eds, Uncertain Knowledge: Scepticism, Relativism, and Doubt in the Middle Ages (Disputatio, 14), Turnhout, Brepols, 2014; hardback; pp. viii, 345; 10 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €90.00; ISBN 9782503547763. This book originated in a research project and workshop examining uncertain knowledge in the Middle Ages. The papers fall broadly into two camps, philosophical and literary. The editors’ Introduction makes clear that this breadth arises from an explicit strategy aimed at exploring both the role played by scepticism in the scholastic production of authorised knowledge and the subversion of that institutional knowledge by vernacular and lay cultural players. The focus is determinedly epistemological and largely ignores the vexed and voluminous subject of religious orthodoxy and heresy. Dallas G. Denery II opens the discussion with John of Salisbury’s meditations on the attitude of the superior man in an environment, namely the court, rendered inherently deceptive by flattery and illusory pleasures. Denery sees in John a continuing humanist tradition masked by the ascendancy of scholasticism until its resurgence in the early modern era. Eileen C. Sweeney looks at the reception of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics by Grosseteste and Roger Bacon whose move to privilege scientific knowledge, and thereby implicitly problematise other forms, was resisted by the Summa fratris Alexandri and William of Auvergne’s championing of faith as the only possible certainty. Dominik Perler brings us to medieval considerations of the classical grounds of scepticism through Walter Chatton’s and William Ockham’s responses to Peter Aureol’s attempt to account for sensory illusions by mediated perception. Perler concludes that radical scepticism was impossible within an Aristotelian framework committed to the reliability of our natural capacities. Christophe Grellard continues this theme with John Buridan’s explanation of how it is possible to believe falsely. Buridan sympathetically employed the figure of the ‘little old woman’ to explain how habit, social pressure, and imagination might combine to distort perception and permit false belief. Concluding the more strictly philosophical section, Rita Copeland reveals the difficulty commentators, such as Giles of Rome, Buridan, and even the translator, William of Moerbeke, had in situating Aristotle’s Rhetoric within the Ciceronian rhetorical tradition. Notwithstanding Aristotle’s placing it under logic, the manuscript tradition preferred to group it with ethics and politics. Lesley Smith bridges the shift from the scholastic to the literary by looking at uncertainty in the study of the Bible. Medieval scholars were aware that they were dealing with fallible translations from unreliable texts and not all were content to resolve problems by allegorising. Nicholas of Lyra turned to a rabbi for the cultural background of the Bible. William of Auvergne and Richard and Hugh of St Victor sought rational explanations of biblical stories while accepting that uncertainty would persist. [End Page 232] Karen Sullivan shifts the focus to vernacular literature with Robert de Boron’s Merlin. Rejecting a rationalist denunciation of Merlin as diabolically inspired, Boron draws on a contemplative perspective that employs the prophet’s mysterious nature to valorise intellectual humility and faith. Helen Swift continues this perspective in her chapter on love poetry. The lover’s desire renders him peculiarly incapable of discerning the truth but this inability is itself willed for: the continuance of uncertainty is the precondition for the continuance of desire. Jean de Meun, Chaucer, and Lydgate are the subject of Nicolette Zeeman’s contribution. She sees these authors turning the weapons of the scholastic philosophers against them in a systematic problematising of sanctioned epistemological, moral, social, and gender hierarchies. Next, Mishtooni Bose focuses on the role of opinion in the vernacular philosophical and moral works of Christine de Pizan and Bishop Reginald Pecock. Notwithstanding the Introduction’s disclaimer, Kantik Ghosh addresses heresy and the policing of intellectual debate in the trials of Richard Fleming, Jerome of Prague, and Jan Hus, all of whom were accused of following Wyclif. Fleming successfully defended himself on the grounds of academic debate, but Hus and Jerome found arguments for academic freedom powerless against the Inquisition and...

The concept of domination is one of the central ideas in modern political and social theory. But, as Anderea Maurer points out, the sociology of domination has long since lost all relevance to the general theory of social science. What is the reason for that?In order to solve this question, we need to go back to the origin of modern political theory, where the prototype of a theory of domination can be seen. We can assume that this prototype has restricted the perspective and possibility of the theory of domination to date.It can be thought that this prototype is Thomas Hobbes's political theory. The Hobbesian political theory is indeed the very forerunner of modern political theory and the theory of domination. In Hobbes's political theory, a clear pattern can be distinguished. It shows the secularization of the conceptions and representations of human societies.This is why I deal with Hobbesian political theory. First, the contents of his prominent book, Leviathan, are examined briefly. Secondly, I remark what I take to be the main features of Hobbesian theory of domination. Finally, I clarify some assumptions which support his theory.

This chapter focuses on the concept of a social contract, which was accepted as the core of modern conceptions of democratic national governments. Social contract theory’s driving insight is that legitimate government requires the consent of those governed. Moreover, early social contract theory offered new ideas about the best form and origins of governments. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau contributed to the modern theory of the social contract based on the fiction of the state of nature to justify forms of government relevant to their historical circumstances and the interests that they represented.

With the supreme confidence of divine authority, King James I, in a speech to Parliament in 1604, the second year of his reign, relied on a powerful political metaphor to establish a permanent relationship between himself and his subjects: 'I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife'.1 In declaring himself to be intimately linked with the destiny of England, the monarch resorted to a figurative strategy familiar to his audience. In the political rhetoric of the seventeenth century, the domestic household served as the microcosmic model for the ruling state. The family/state analogy also was reinforced through religious instruction from the pulpit and the prayer book, which emphasized obedience to parents as the paradigm for honouring the sovereign.2However, the analogy could prove vulnerable to patterns of political and social flux. As political theorists, including John Milton, began questioning the prerogratives of royal authority, traditional family relations and gender roles also became subject to scrutiny. If one side of the analogy lost its stability, the other also would be placed in a precarious position. The analogy became particularly problematic during the Civil War and the Interregnum, when political theorists from both the royalist and parliamentarian camps tried to exploit the metaphor of the marriage contract to support their respective visions of political authority. Royalists seized on its potential to help them justify keeping Charles I on the throne because 'it provided an example of a contract which established a relationship of irrevocable hierarchical authority between the parties', as Mary Lyndon Shanley notes.3 Just as the marriage bond was believed to permanently authorize the husband's dominion over the household, the fictional 'social contract' between the sovereign and his subjects set up a unilateral agreement that could not be broken once the subjects consented to subordinate themselves to the ruler, according to a royalist interpretation. Political theorists in support of the parliamentary cause, however, argued that the contract could be broken if the ruler did not fulfill his obligations and that the monarch's power could be withdrawn by the people, who originally had granted it to him. Using the marriage contract analogically would force the parliamentarians into a more liberal view of marriage and divorce than many were prepared to expound. It would have required them to grant women authority to break their marriage vows and would have diminished the presumed dominance of the husband in the domestic household.Given the vexed and volatile status of the marriage analogy during the Civil War, it might come as no surprise that Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan was written during that turbulent era, avoids deployment of this familiar prop of political rhetoric. Although Hobbes frequently uses the family/state analogy in articulating his theory of political obligation, he curiously elides mention of the relationship between husband and wife as a model for the bond between sovereign and subject. This omission sets him apart from other seventeenth-century political theorists who exploited the metaphor of marriage as part of their debates about monarchy. Passing references are made to wives in Leviathan, but women's most prominent role in the text is as mothers. Wives are conspicuously absent from Hobbes's theoretical family.Hobbes's portrayal of women in Leviathan is contradictory and inconsistent. He shows women in a position of power as mothers, who have original dominion over children, but fails to account for their subjugation as wives. This paper will argue that these ambiguous depictions of women reflect the paradoxes and contradictions in Hobbes's description of the subject. Although he submits to sovereign power, the Hobbesian subject is the authorizing agent of all the ruler's actions. In addition, under certain conditions, the subject can disobey the monarch. …

FOLLOWING THE PUBLICATION in 2000 of his Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory and in 2005 of The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology, the American Canadian rabbi, scholar, and theologian David Novak has emerged as perhaps the most important political thinker within the Jewish tradition in the still very young twenty-first century. With his customary display of vast erudition and incisive thinking Novak has made an impressive endeavor in these books to formulate distinctively Jewish but broadly applicable answers to some of the age-old questions of political philosophy. For this effort he has already received much acclaim.1Novak's goals are certainly very ambitious. Far from being a mere academic exercise, his theological-political project represents a bold attempt to replace modern liberalism. Rejecting what he sees as the social contract foundations on which it based as well as the political theories that have been erected upon them, he offers the blueprints for a better world, one in which the deficiencies of liberalism will remedied but where the admitted benefits it has conferred upon humankind will still retained. Whenever a thinker of Novak's stature promises to do so much, it behooves us to listen carefully.Covenantal Rights, Novak indicates, a work of political theory and The Jewish Social Contract articulates a political theology. What exactly he considers to the difference between these two disciplines difficult to discern. But it quite clear that his political theory completely intertwined with his theology, just as his political theology deeply theoretical. And, if we disregard their respective subtitles, it also quite clear what place each of his two most recent books occupies in his overall project. Covenantal Rights seeks mainly to locate the foundation of human rights, properly understood, in men's covenantal relationship with God. The Jewish Social Contract aims above all to explain now modern polities can best sustained and utilized if they are conceived not as conglomerations of isolated individuals but as the products of social contracts agreed upon by disparate but mutually accommodating covenantal communities. Novak's theoretical efforts will no doubt attract the attention of many Jews who are ill at ease with modern liberalism but averse to anything that would tend to undermine its greatest achievements, especially its guarantee of religious freedom. Ultimately, however, his reasoning can fully persuasive to only a small sector of the Jewish people. For Novak, a self-described traditionalist Jew, bases most of his positive recommendations on dogmatic premises that less traditional Jews simply cannot accept. And the political theology with whick he wishes to replace liberalism rests on a belated and inconsistent appropriation of ideas that are only justifiable on the basis of what he considers to his liberal adversaries' invalid assumptions. It provides, in the final analysis, no solid justification for the preservation of religious freedom and consequently of very doubtful use to the Diaspora Jews it primarily meant to serve.DOGMATIC FOUNDATIONSDavid Novak rejects the idea of the state of nature as a hypothetical-that is, fictitious, even mythical condition.2 He faults the modern social contract theory that takes this idea as its starting point both for its lack of any and ontology and for its essential inutility (JSC, 19). It is, at bottom, a way of thinking that is insufficient to protect us from the anarchy most of us correctly fear.3 Rejecting the social contract theorists' focus on the primacy of individuals, Novak emphasizes the primacy of community, something that can be really located in history-especially in Jewish history (JSC, 19). For Novak, Jewish above all the record of his people's interaction with the God who rules the entire universe.The real history to which Novak refers hardly distinguishable from the biblical narrative, taken quite literally. …

<p>La intención del presente trabajo es analizar las consecuencias filosófico-teológicopolíticas que la distinción entre potentia dei absoluta y potentia dei ordinata, surgida en el medioevo, generará en el pensamiento político moderno, particularmente en el de Thomas Hobbes. Se parte de la consideración del tema que hace Pedro Damián.<br />Luego se analiza en Tomás de Aquino la noción de potencia divina, el tratamiento<br />que el Aquinate da a la omnipotencia y, finalmente, el valor secundario que Tomás<br />asigna a la distinctio. Se continúa con el análisis de las versiones ofrecidas por Duns Scoto y Ockham. Se examina también la elaboración que de la omnipotencia divina hicieran Bonifacio VIII y Egidio Romano tal que permitiera explicar la relación del poder papal (plenitudo potestatis) con las leyes eclesiásticas y con el poder temporal.<br />Se concluye con el tratamiento de la cuestión en la teología política de Thomas<br />Hobbes, quien anula la distinctio en favor del poder absoluto.</p>

Reviewed by: The Politics of Romanticism: The Social Contract and Literature by Zoe Beenstock Arden Hegele Zoe Beenstock, The Politics of Romanticism: The Social Contract and Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. pp. vii + 228. In Zoe Beenstock's intriguing study, a specter haunts Romanticism: the specter of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley—those "overdetermined synecdoches" of British Romanticism—are, she claims, deeply responsive not just to Rousseauvian political theory but to the philosopher himself, who posthumously embodies the temperament of the age (6). Narrowing down the overwhelming scope suggested by the book's title, Beenstock turns to Rousseau's influence upon British literature of the subsequent generation. By refining her focus to consider the philosopher's afterlives in canonical Romantic texts, she addresses the question of how Rousseau's version of social-contract theory (the idea that society's institutions exist to govern brutish individual human natures) fits into the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism—a key point of current critical debate in both literary studies and the history of political thought. Is Romanticism a liberal reaction, epitomized by the French Revolution, to the Enlightenment's repressive, institutionalizing vision of the social order? Or is Romanticism, instead, a conservative turn against the radicalism endorsed by Enlightenment philosophers, a radicalism which culminated in the Terror of the 1790s? For Beenstock, the answer is both, and this duality is captured in the enigmatic and shape-shifting Rousseau, who in this book is both a figure for Enlightenment principles and an apostate from them. The book's key claim about Romanticism's relation to the Enlightenment is a striking departure from other historiographies: "Romanticism develops as a critique of radical changes in political theory of the mid-seventeenth to late eighteenth centuries and of the new theory of a social contract" (1). In the first and second chapters, which describe Rousseau's context and his corpus, Beenstock presents the philosopher as the dominant Enlightenment articulator of the social contract, and she shows how he inherits and revises the idea (from Thomas Hobbes through the Scottish Enlightenment and the German Idealists) that human nature needed social regulation. According to this trajectory, Rousseau is (atypically) Hobbes' direct intellectual heir, in that both writers use "imagery of a fragmented body politic held together by violence rather than volition"—a violence which all the philosophers in this intellectual history depict in metaphorical terms, as an anatomized or dismembered body (as in Hobbes' Leviathan), as a body in chains "providing both intimacy and constraint," or (prefiguring Rousseau's haunting of Romantic texts) as a ghostly "invisible hand" that "binds [End Page 173] people involuntarily to each other" (25, 29). Beenstock's placement of Rousseau in a strict continuum with Hobbes (in fact, in a "more or less direct line uniting Hobbes with Wordsworth") is unusual and suggestive, since the republican Rousseau is more often understood among philosophers to be in a vexed, combative relation to the sovereigntist Hobbes (45). Robin Douglass expresses such a typical view in Rousseau and Hobbes (2015): "Rousseau probably never read Leviathan [but] nonetheless appears to have viewed Hobbes' political proposals as being diametrically opposed to his own" and as "destructive of every republican government" (3). And yet, for Beenstock, it is this difference (which remains, in her book, implicit) between Hobbes and Rousseau—the radically different ends which they see the social contract as serving—that makes Rousseau the pivot-figure in this story of the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. Rousseau inherits the social contract's inherently conservative project to control human nature; yet he is also a forward-looking republican who seeks to correct the freedom-limiting impulses of his philosophical predecessors. Both sides of Rousseau's character, which in Beenstock's book take on the metonymic weight of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, frame the exploration of the philosopher's afterlives in British Romantic literature. Beenstock couples her radical revision of this epistemological trajectory with a call for a new disciplinary approach to reading Rousseau's work across genres. In the second chapter, where she discusses Rousseau's writing on individualism, she takes scholars of Romanticism to task for reading...

BOOK REVIEWS 351 bias by inventing something that is fictitious. But again the author's methodology is too limited and preordained to deal with this option. Finally, the phenomenon of celibacy in its many forms past and present within the Christian community is a constant irritant for the author. His criticism of some of the theology on celibacy and its justification in the Christian lives of men and women is quite valid at times. But his contribution to the present debate is minimal. If those who seriously question the present discipline of the Church on this point need the support of this book, they could be in serious intellectual difficulty. In conclusion, one wonders who the author has in view as the readers of his work. It seems impossible that he could expect any intelligent and knowledgeable reader to be satisfied with the feeble and offensive polemics of his study. And what is the value of appealing to those who already agree with him about the distortion of Jesus' life and morality perpetrated by the Church? The author should be informed that a " celibate" is the author of this review (the word might be added to the list of pejoratives in the English language after its usage in this book) ; this may allow him to dismiss the preceding observations as Pavlovian responses to his conclusions . But I looked forward to more from this book; I am disappointed that it was much less than it could have been. The topic is too serious to be handled in the way in which it was in this book. The Catholic University of America Washington, D. C. JAMES P. CLIFTON, c. F. X. Hervaeus Natalis, 0. P. and the Controversies over the Real Presence and Transubstantiation. By KENNETH PLoTNIK. Paderbom: Verlag Ferdinand Schoningh, 1970. Pp. 83. DM 9,80. Once again the name of the Grabmann Institute is associated with a valuable contribution to the history of theology. This time, in connection with the Theological Faculty of the University of Munich, the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, and St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, the spirit of the Grabmann Institute finds expression in a study of medieval controversies over the Eucharist. Kenneth Plotnik reviews the positions of Hervaeus Natalis, 0. P. and his opponents in the questions of the mode of the Real Presence and Transubstantiation, offering interpretations of important texts and evidence for possible reconciliations among the adherents of opposing schools of thought. 352 BOOK REVIEWS Plotnik addresses himself to a segment of the rational effort of medieval theologians to express the richness of the Christian doctrine of the Eucharist. Evident in his work are the strange interaction and interdependence of the medieval disciplines which forced commitments to set formulas and produced contrived philosophical positions ostensibly in defense of orthodoxy. However remote in time its subject might be from current Process Theology, this study provides a useful link between the simplistic presentation of New Testament doctrine and the expected complexities of the sophisticated theology common to speculative thinkers today. The work is divided into three chapters. The first introduces the reader to the life of Hervaeus Natalis, his basic writings, and the character of the controversies over the Real Presence and Transubstantiation after the death of Thomas Aquinas. The second offers a brief treatment of the views of Aquinas and Hervaeus concerning the mode of Christ's presence, discusses in some detail Hervaeus's conception of relational presence , and considers the positions of Durand of St. Pourgain and Giles of Rome. It takes up the problem of quantity in the Eucharist and concludes with an overview of the relevant disputations between Hervaeus and Durand. The third chapter treats the question of Transubstantiation as decided by Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, Godfrey of Fontaines, James of Metz (through an anonymous commentator), and Durand; and the question of consubstantiation as decided by John Quidort of Paris and William of Occam. Plotnik succeeds in presenting clearly the positions of the opponents, even though, at times, they appear to be over-simplified, and he sets in good historical perspective their textual bases. It is his purpose to bring to the attention of current...

The Nation came to replace God as the ultimate source of political authority in Europe by a somewhat complex path. This complexity can be clarified by examining the role that agency played in early modern political theories. One strand of seventeenth-century political theory, exemplified by Thomas Hobbes, sought to transform the active God of the sixteenth century into a passive and distant observer. Somewhat simultaneously, the People were made active agents in the derivation of political authority by John Locke and the theorists of another strand of political theory. The eighteenth-century saw authors like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Herder weave together the changes made in each of these seventeenth-centuries strands into a theory of political authority that depended on the Nation. An examination of the process by which the theoretical source of political authority passed from God to the Nation in the early modern period of Europe reveals that society continued to require and rely upon a “sacred center,” a transcendent source of political credibility.

Social contract theory has long been at the center of political theory, and one of the inheritors of the social contract tradition, liberalism, reverberates through contemporary political life. And yet, an overlooked element of liberalism are the biblical origins of social contract theory. Specifically, how the early modern political theorists were reading Hebrew Bible, and the kinds of interpretive transformations of Hebrew Bible that take place on the pages of works like Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, John Locke’s Second Treatise, and more. Covenant is the centerpiece of this entanglement. When drawn from Hebrew Bible and read in the context of Jewish political thought, covenant has a very different meaning to that which social contract theories attribute it. This Jewish understanding of covenant concretizes a practice of politics that is constitutively dissenting and agonistic, in contrast to the command–obedience model typical of social contract theory. Furthermore, covenant loses its unique conceptual framework—thus its contribution to political thought—when it is secularized into a social contract. This Jewish conception of covenant offers a new way to understand politics and democratic practice through “covenantal authority” and its constitutively dissenting, agonistic, and circulating qualities. “Covenantal authority” captures the constitutive undecidability of who has authority over the text.

This study engages in the concept of social contract of Hobbes and Locke, and the similarities and differences of their ideas. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke both begin their political ideas with a discussion on the state of nature and the danger of living outside the community. For Thomas Hobbes, the state of nature is chaotic; it is in the state of mutual competition. He claims that the state of nature is a state of war, every man against everybody. Due to a constant competition for power and reputation, the man’s equality leads the state of nature into chaos. Man who is bestowed with equal capacities for thinking and reasoning is moved by whatever he wants for survival and preservation no matter what it takes. This state of nature, according to Thomas Hobbes, is a state of egoistic self-preservation and necessity for survival. Meanwhile, John Locke is rather optimistic in his view in the state of nature, compared to the pessimistic view of Thomas Hobbes. He sees humans as decent species which are capable of knowing what is right and wrong. Although man in the state of nature lives with full freedom, yet he is still at risk of harm and invasion. The property is very unsafe and unsecure, however, free yet full of fears. On this matter, man realizes and decides to create a contract and agree to the terms for peaceful and secure life for the safe and security of their liberty and possession. Furthermore, for Thomas Hobbes, social contract is a mutual transferring of rights to the sovereign. For him, social contract is responsible for the morality and the conception of right and wrong, just and unjust. Hence, social contract is very significant to every individual because it is the source of law and regulations and basis of morality. For Locke, the chief reason why man in creating an agreement or contract is the property. The main argument is Locke’s social contract.

This appendix of the book Les traductions francaises du De regimine principum de Gilles de Rome Parcours materiel, culturel et intellectuel d'un discours sur l'education contains transcription of the prologue of the translator, Gilles deschamps. This book deals with different translations of Giles of Rome's De regimine principum (1279) into Old French and their readership. It offers a concrete picture of what Giles of Rome's educational ideas became in the process of their transmission to a lay readership. With De regimine principum, the author participates in an important way to transmission and distribution of Aristotelian ideas in the Christian West in the middle ages. The original text of the chapter is in French.Keywords: Giles of Rome's De regimine principum; Giles of Rome's educational ideas; lay readership; Aristotelian ideas; Middle ages; Christian West; Gilles deschamps

In 2021, South Korea will make the Squid Game drama series with the mystery horror genre. The research will look at the political thinking of Thomas Hobbes in this series with the aim of analyzing the form of natural consciousness, social contract in the form of the State which is broadcast through storylines, dialogues and descriptions of the situation in the Korean drama series Squid Game. This article is a literature study on the state of nature, social contract and the concept of the state from Thomas Hobbes' political thought through the drama series Squid Game produced from South Korea. His opinion of the state is scary, cruel, and obeyed like Leviathan to make the disorderly state of human nature controllable. Human nature is homo homini lupus or humans are wolves to each other. The social contract according to Thomas Hobbes is an agreement between the people and the state, but the state is not bound by the social contract. The state/king position is above the social contract, the state has absolute authority or is called the king, it cannot be wrong. This study concludes that in the Korean drama series Squad Game, there is a thought by Thomas Hobbes which states the importance of absolute state power to create perfection. Peace can be obtained by presenting fear to the individual through the State, conflict will be avoided, society will be subject to the law with fear that is continuously maintained by the State.