Hobbes's Political Research Articles

Nominalism and Conceptualism in Hobbes's Political Theory

Hobbes developed two theories of language, each with peculiar implications for his views on reason and truth, and each applied throughout his political philosophy. As a nominalist, Hobbes argues that individuals subsume particular things under general names by an act of will. Nominalism supports his view of the moral anarchy of the state of nature, and helps justify an arbitrary sovereign. Conceptualism allows Hobbes to picture the sovereign as a rational rule-creator and his subjects as rule-followers. Either theory, however, taken alone, contradicts important parts of Hobbes's political project. The contradictions between the two theories result from difficulties inherent in the attempt to reconcile reason and passion in politics.

Hobbes's Political Philosophy: Interpretation and Interpretations by Aloysius P. Martinich

Hobbes's Political Philosophy: Interpretation and Interpretations by Aloysius P. Martinich

Hobbes's genealogy of private conscience

AbstractThis contribution aims at reconstructing Hobbes's critique of the language of private conscience and at evaluating the relevance of this critique for Hobbes's political philosophy. Hobbes, I argue, radically subverts the traditional moral‐theological notion of private judgment by turning it into a natural and social fact: conscience becomes nothing more than a shared opinion. This drastic redefinition allows him to condemn the seditious uses of the language of conscience: Hobbes's criticism of Papists and Presbyterians can be read, I contend, as an attempt at a genealogical analysis of private conscience. Yet, while always constructed by powerful rhetoric, conscience is not insignificant to Hobbes, since it becomes—in a way that neither “liberal” nor “absolutist” readings of Hobbes's politics have satisfactorily accounted for—the ambivalent dimension of the construction of political consent.

Hobbes on Politics and Religion ed. by Laurens van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass

Reviewed by: Hobbes on Politics and Religion ed. by Laurens van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass Monicka Tutschka Laurens van Apeldoorn and Robin Douglass, editors. Hobbes on Politics and Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv + 297. Cloth, $70.00. It is refreshing to read fifteen erudite articles written by seasoned experts and promising young scholars who engage the wide-ranging question of the intersection of religion and politics in Hobbes's works. The free standing arguments are not framed by Hobbes's alleged religious (in)sincerity, or by a priori conceptions of natural law, or some modernization thesis. This work is therefore a must-read for scholars yearning to explore Hobbes's religious politics in new ways. I hope it inspires more volumes, possibly organized around narrower religious topics (I will suggest two). Johan Olsthoorn argues that Hobbes's theory of representation takes him beyond Erastianism to the stronger claim of church-state identity with the sovereign speaking and acting in this new unity's name. Al Martinich likens Hobbes's human sovereign to his divine natural sovereign. God's sovereignty derives from the sure and irresistible power that He [End Page 172] may exercise arbitrarily. Since Hobbes's human sovereign resembles God, the former also is not accountable to humankind if (s)he unleashes irrational, evil, or destructive power. Teresa Bejan engages the Hobbes toleration debate. The sovereign influences fundamental inner beliefs by determining what young impressionable minds hear, and youth indoctrination is at odds with toleration. To the contrary, Franck Lessay maintains that Hobbes delineates an inner sphere that is home to religious belief and reflection, and offers a prudential foundation for political authority amenable to diverse faiths. His minimalist soteriology tolerates diverse Christian belief. Alexandra Chadwick explores Hobbes's responses to the politically destabilizing aftereffects of martyrdom. To minimize these effects, Hobbes defines martyrdom narrowly. He also undermines martyrs by claiming they mistake soteriological requirements and believe wrongly in reason's power to make correct salvific judgments. Alan Cromartie exposes the novelty of Hobbes's determinist-materialist psychology and his dubious Calvinist credentials. Hobbes's determinism deviates from the soteriological accounts of the bounded will developed by Luther and Arminians. His determinism also departs from predestination defined by Calvin and prominent English Divines. Alison McQueen maintains that Hobbes used the biblical figure of Moses to support absolutism in civil war England. This was a time when many Englishmen and women took Scripture's authority for granted. Whereas republican and parliamentarian activists interpreted Mosaic rule as a defense of their politics, Hobbes intervenes to realign Mosaic rule with absolutism and risks exposing the political nature of Scriptural interpretation. Paul Davis examines Hobbes's Scriptural quotations, documenting which Biblical translations he used, and if his quotations diverge from them. Usually, Hobbes transcribed quotations faithfully. Sometimes, he borrowed from theologians who influenced him. Occasionally, he takes liberties to reconcile biblical quotations with his theories. Patricia Springborg contextualizes and explores Hobbes's intentions in Historia Ecclesiastica. She locates the poem within Hobbes's works on heresy, dating its composition between the English and Latin Leviathans. The poem elevates humanist Christian historiographers above post-Eusebius church historians. She contends that Hobbes's preference for the former reflects his fear of persecution, as the histories of the latter are rabidly sectarian. For his part, Glen Newey is unconvinced that fear of persecution led Hobbes to amend the Latin Leviathan. The Appendix's account of the Trinity is nonconformist. Hobbes either made it fit his personation theory because he thought it was right, or because it could accommodate diverse faiths. Jon Parkin argues that Hobbes's vague vision of a Christianity supportive of civil authority made him adopt an ambiguous religious identity. His writing strategies block disagreeable conclusions and tease with paradoxes. Hobbes wins over diverse believers by reengineering convictions to conform to his theories. Elad Carmel complicates the Hobbes (authoritarian)/English deist (tolerationist) binary. Hobbes's anticlericalism, commitment to rational religion, and skepticism toward revelation influenced the English deists. He is a precursor to radical enlightenment. Jeffrey Collins asserts that Hobbes constructed two different conceptions of 'religious war.' The first is historically specific, addresses prominent causes of England's war...

War by Other Means? Incentives for Power Seekers in Thomas Hobbes's Political Philosophy

AbstractThe problem of the power seeker is of crucial importance for Hobbes's political philosophy. While education might aid in changing the behavior of some people, Hobbes is clear that there are limits to the effectiveness of education and that incurable, unsocial power seekers will persist. In my analysis, I ask whether and, if so, how Hobbes can also get these incurable power seekers on board. The result of my findings that Hobbes provides a huge variety of treatments for power seekers, including incentives to betray and exploit their fellow citizens by employing a public gesture of civility, has implications for Hobbes research: it shows the complexity and costs of Hobbes's “solution” to the problem of war and corrects a widespread developmental hypothesis about the concept of honor in Hobbes's works. Thereby, it can also enrich a recent diagnosis about the decline of honor in modern societies.

Actorship,parrhesia, and Representation: Remarks on Theatricality and Politics in Hobbes, Rousseau, and Diderot

AbstractThis paper addresses the strained relationship betweenparrhesiaand actorship and analyzes its political implications. These two terms seem to be antipodes:parrhesiaemphasizes thepresenceof a speaker or author whereas actorship deploysrepresentation. As their relation can be explained by means of the concept of representation it is worthwhile considering the two settings in which representation matters: theater and politics. These settings will be explored in case studies on Hobbes’s, Rousseau’s, and Diderot’s accounts ofparrhesiaand actorship. Hobbes dismissesparrhesiasticfreedom, minimalizes political authorship and favors a model of representation featuring a peculiar, powerful actor: the State. Rousseau criticizes actorship and representation, and seeks to re-install the people as sovereign author. This author is equipped with a strangely distorted form ofparrhesia. Diderot takes neither Hobbes’s nor Rousseau’s side. He hints at the political potential of the author-actor relationship and paves the way to a revised notion ofparrhesia.

The Hostile Family and the Purpose of the “Natural Kingdom” in Hobbes's Political Thought

AbstractIn his political writings, Hobbes consistently distinguishes between “natural” and “artificial” commonwealths—those that arise from the family, and those created by mutual covenants. Although he insists that “both have the same right of government,” closer examination of Hobbes's accounts of the family reveals that it is a radically deficient model for the state, and that Hobbes was engaged in a polemic against both republicans and absolutists who claimed that parental power was natural, prior to, and even a model for the power of civil sovereigns. For Hobbes, a state based on parental rule is dangerously unstable, exacerbating the mutual fears of parents and children. The “office of the sovereign representative” defuses this conflict, and within the commonwealth, the family is denaturalized and reconstituted as an educative institution whose purpose is to reinforce the artificial sovereign by schooling both parents and children in the miseries of personal rule.

Consent, Consensus and the Leviathan: A Critical Study of Hobbes Political Theory for the Contemporary Society

The purpose of the state and its apparatus right from the formation of human society to this contemporary period is still being confronted with the question of legitimacy. One of the major reasons why the state is formed is for the attainment of good life of the citizens. The institution of the state would thus remain legitimate only when those who are in political authority perform basic functions of government to meet the expectations of the members of the society. To this end, this paper examines the concept of consent and consensus as a foundation for the justification of the emergence of the state and argue that if there is no mutual agreement within the society, there can be little or no way of ensuring peaceful resolution of policy differences that is associated with the democratic process. Consequent upon this, the paper adopts Thomas Hobbes social contract theory as a theoretical framework to explain the origin of the state and justify the absolute power of the government which is rooted in the consent and the consensus of the people. The philosophical methods of conceptual clarification and critical analysis are employed to examine Hobbes political theory and evaluate its relevance to the contemporary society.

Thomas Hobbes, Charles Cotton and the ‘wonders’ of the Derbyshire Peak

This essay deals with two seventeenth-century writers who describe, from personal experience, the ‘wonders’ of the Derbyshire Peak district, one of the first destinations for English domestic tourism. Both Thomas Hobbes and Charles Cotton describe the Peak in poems usually associated, in the rare instances where they have attracted any critical attention at all, with the country house or estate tradition of Jonson and Marvell. I argue that Hobbes's De Mirabilibus Pecci, first published in 1636, is best understood as a ‘journey poem’, a largely neglected early modern genre, and that it finds in the Peak a space on which to project those authoritarian theories of science and politics for which Hobbes would later become notorious. I suggest that Charles Cotton's Wonders of the Peake makes explicit the science and the politics in Hobbes's poetic topography, confronting and revising them in response to the new political circumstances of 1681.

How many Commonwealths can Leviathan Swallow? Covenant, Sovereign and People in Hobbes's Political Theory?

How many Commonwealths can Leviathan Swallow? Covenant, Sovereign and People in Hobbes's Political Theory?

Reason and Reciprocity in Hobbes's Political Philosophy: On Sharon Lloyd's: Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes

AbstractLloyd's book, Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, correctly stresses the deductive element in Hobbes's proofs of the laws of nature. She believes that “the principle of reciprocity” is the key to these proofs. This principle is effective in getting ego-centric people to recognize moral laws and their moral obligations. However, it is not, I argue, the basic principle Hobbes uses to derive the laws of nature, from definitions. The principle of reason, which dictates that all similar cases be treated similarly, is. It is important not to diminish the centrality of reason for Hobbes because it is essential to understanding his reply to “the fool” and understanding why the state of nature cannot be a continuum.

QUENTIN SKINNER'S HOBBES AND THE NEO-REPUBLICAN PROJECT

For nearly half a century, Quentin Skinner has been the world's foremost interpreter of Thomas Hobbes. When the contextualist mode of intellectual history now known as the “Cambridge School” was first asserting itself in the 1960s, the life and writings of John Locke were the primary topic for pioneers such as Peter Laslett and John Dunn. At that time, Hobbes was still the plaything of philosophers and political scientists, virtually all of whom wrote in an ahistorical, textual-analytic manner. Hobbes had not been the subject of serious contextual research for decades, since the foundational writings of Ferdinand Tönnies. For Skinner, he was thus an ideal subject, providing a space for original research on a major figure, and an occasion for some polemically charged methodological manifestos. Both of these purposes animated his 1965 article “History and Ideology in the English Revolution,” and his 1966 article “The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought”. The latter of these remains to this day one of the most widely cited scholarly articles in the fifty-year run of Cambridge'sHistorical Journal. Among other results of these early efforts was the scholarly controversy during which Howard Warrender chided Skinner for having reduced the “classic texts in political philosophy” to mere “tracts for the times”.

The “Market” and the “Forum” in Hobbes's Political Philosophy

In the last decade, the deliberative model of democracy has been offered to counter the prevalent conservative economistic tendencies of democratic theorizing. But the ideas of deliberation and rational persuasion are not newcomers on the stage of political philosophy, for they were central to the way classical rhetoricians understood politics. Against this background, this article examines the role economic and deliberative models of politics play in Hobbes's political philosophy. It argues that Hobbes chose to analogize these two models rather than to treat them as competing views of politics because he saw both the economy and deliberation as sites of manipulation and not as “consensus forming mechanisms.”

The Hedges that Are Set

This essay traces out, in the works of Thomas Hobbes, the theoretical development of what I argue is the essential temporal element of modern thought: anxiety regarding the future. What finds systematic expression in Hobbes's psychology and politics is the dilemma that modem thinking inherits: the project of social rationalization perpetuates an image of an indeterminate future, to which the only possible response is rational submission to a project of administration over men akin to that which science practices on nature.

Philosophers on race: critical essays

Contributors. Acknowledgments. Introduction. 1. Distinction Without a Difference? Race and Genos in Plato (Rachana Kamtekar). 2. Ethnos in the Politics: Aristole and Race (Julie K. Ward). 3. Medieval Muslim Philosophers on Race (Paul--A. Hardy). 4. Patriarchy and Slavery in Hobbes's Political Philosophy (Tommy L. Lott). 5. An Inconsistency not to be Excused: On Locke and Racism (William Uzgalis). 6. Locke and the Dispossession of the American Indian (Kathy Squadrito). 7. Between Primates and Primitives: Natural Man as the Missing Link in Rousseau's Second Discourse (Francis Moran III). 8. Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Racism (Robert Bernasconi). 9. The Great Play and Fight of Forces: Nietzsche on Race (Daniel W. Conway). 10. Liberalism's Limits: Carlyle and Mill on The Negro Question (David Theo Goldberg). 11. Heidegger and the Jewish Question: Metaphysical Racism in Silence and Word (Berel Lang). 12. Sartre on American Racism (Julien Murphy). 13. Sartrean Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Lewis R. Gordon). 14. Beavoir and the Problem of Racism (Margaret A. Simons). 15. Dewey's Philosophical Approach to Racial Prejudice (Gregory Fernando Pappas). Index.

Keith Thomas's "Definitive Refutation" of C. B. Macpherson: Revisiting "The Social Origins of Hobbes's Political Thought"

Keith Thomas's "Definitive Refutation" of C. B. Macpherson: Revisiting "The Social Origins of Hobbes's Political Thought"

"Persona": Reason and Representation in Hobbes's Political Philosophy

REPRESENTATION IS USUALLY CONSIDERED one of key concepts of modern political theory. As such, is viewed as a mechanism of legitimization that defines a form of government, and it is generally linked to modem democracy. A representative government is a type of political organization where power is held through accord, agreement or authorization of those governed. From this point of view, representation is seen as a characteristic of government or political poweras something political power does: it represents, or is taken as a condition that government satisfies (or should satisfy), as in expression no taxation without There is another way in which term representation is used in context of politics: for example, in such expressions as the of or when we say that Versailles was constructed to represent power of Louis XIV both to French nobility and to all of Europe. In cases like this, is taken as something exterior to political power itself, something added to it. Though in many instances this representing is done by government itself, it is not an intrinsic characteristic of a certain form of political power, but something that can be added to any type of power. Conceptually, these two meanings of representation are clearly distinct and logically independent. A non-representative government can represent itself, for example, through a personality cult. A contrario, a representative government can fail to represent itself (properly), as, for example, in Canada in a recent referendum campaign. At conceptual level, two major characteristics seem to distinguish these two meanings of representation. First, as hinted before, reflexivity in case of representing power and non-reflexivity in case of representative power. A government is representative only if what it represents is not itself: people, nation, interest groups, major social agents, etc. It is only through them that it finds its legitimacy and meaning as being a representative government. On other hand, representing power is reflexive. It is power representing itself. Though others, like artists, historians or

Fear, Technology, and the State

It is striking that one of the most consequential representatives of [the] abstract scientific orientation of the seventeenth century [Thomas Hobbes] became so personalistic. This is because as a juristic thinker he wanted to grasp the reality of societal life just as much as he, as a philosopher and a natural scientist, wanted to grasp the reality of nature.... [J]uristic thought in those days had not yet become so overpowered by the natural sciences that he, in the intensity of his scientific approach, should unsuspectingly have overlooked the specific reality of legal life. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (1922) In the light of Hobbes's natural science, man and his works become a mere phantasmagoria. Through Hobbes's natural science, “the native hue” of his political science “is sicklied o'er with the pale cast” of something which is reminiscent of death but utterly lacks the majesty of death—of something which foreshadows the positivism of our day. It seems then that if we want to do justice to the life which vibrates in Hobbes's political teaching, we must understand that teaching by itself, and not in the light of his natural science. Can this be done?² Leo Strauss, “On the Basis of Hobbes's Political Philosophy” (1959)

Hobbes and the Equality of Women

Hobbes's politics of gender affords valuable insights into his concept of equality. It is argued that: (i) although in Hobbes's theory women are equal to men ‘by nature’ and remain so ‘in natural conditions’, (ii) the Hobbesian social contract does not rule out logically the possibility of unequal treatment of men and women living in civil associations; (iii) nevertheless, contemporary interpreters can find in Hobbes's political philosophy a number of arguments that might be deployed to deny the morality, rationality, and utility of sexual subjugation.

Science, Prudence, and Folly in Hobbes's Political Theory

L'A. affirme que l'on a trop insiste sur le role de la science dans l'oeuvre de Hobbes et cela a cache l'importance de sa theorie politique (de ce qu'il appellait prudence ou jugement naturel). L'A. analyse la conception hobbesienne de la faute comme la partie la plus significative de sa theorie de la vie politique