The cambridge companion to hobbes's leviathan

Open Journal of Philosophy, 2015

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.

Minding the Modern, 2013

The Review of Politics , 2021

Hobbes's preference for monarchical sovereign forms and his critique of democratic political organization are well-known. In this article I suggest that his opposition to democratic life, however, constitutes a central frame through which we must understand the most important theoretical mutations that occur throughout the various stages of his civil science. Key alterations in the Hobbesian political philosophy from The Elements of Law to Leviathan can be interpreted as efforts to retroactively foreclose the emergence of a substantive democratic normativity that the prior theoretical framework allowed for or suggested. Hobbes's opposition to democracy is ultimately so significant so as to fundamentally structure core elements of his political philosophy, the form of political obligation shifting in response to the perception of democratic potentiality.

Most discussions of Hobbes' political thought leave one with the impression that Hobbes' most important contribution to political theory is the contractual nature of his commonwealth from which the modern social contract and many discussions of contemporary political theory emerge. Adopting this perspective on Hobbes' political thought risks losing sight of the philosophy of politics he develops. This philosophy not only draws on a realist attitude toward human political motivation, but it also takes a position on the place of politics in culture, and redefines the horizons of culture to emphasize the role of religion within it, at times drawing on and echoing classical Jewish sources. In Leviathan, politics inherits the classical role of religion as the determining force of this cultural horizon. Political theology legitimizes the sovereign not only politically, but culturally. Liberal political theory has for over two centuries assumed the question of religion and politics to be settled. This article proposes that this question be reconsidered in light of liberalism's foundational philosophy.

1987

Chronological awareness might lead us to consider Hobbes’s Leviathan as his most definitive statement on political philosophy in the historical development of his thought and to prefer it for that reason to his earlier works on the subject, in interpreting his system. However, history involves more than mere chronology. There is evidence of various kinds that Leviathan (1651) did not just come last, but was conceived from the start as different in intention and therefore in nature from both De Cive (1642) and The Elements of Law (1640).

Evidence accumulated from a range of academic disciplines can, and ought to, be used by political theorists to evaluate the seminal works of their field. This essay attempts to demonstrate the merits of this approach by utilizing empirical evidence from anthropology, archaeology, criminology, history, political science coupled with a sociobiological perspective to evaluate three of the central propositions Hobbesian political theory namely that (a) individuals are solitary beings that focus on maximizing personal felicity; (b) life is more violent without centralized government (the Leviathan) than it is with it and; (c) there can be no rational reason for returning to pre-Leviathan times or the ‘state of nature’ given (b). Though (a) stands in contradiction to what we now know about humanity’s universal inclination towards sociability, there is nevertheless considerable empirical evidence which suggests that violence – which occurred not just over somatic resources, as Hobbes originally predicted, but also over reproductive opportunities – in the ‘state of nature’ was both endemic and lethal. Even though (b) is fairly well-established, however, it does not follow that (c) should always be true: a potent criticism that can be made of Hobbes is his insensitivity towards issues such as immediate social deprivation that have often caused people to rebel against the Leviathan and thus return to the state of nature.

Springborg, “The Paradoxical Hobbes: A Critical Response to the Hobbes Symposium, Political Theory, 36 2008”, Political Theory, 37, 5 (2009), 676-688; to which Deborah Baumgold responds in the same issue, Political Theory, 37, 5 (2009), pp. 689-94.

Attention has turned from Hobbes the systematic thinker to his inconsistencies, as the essays in the Hobbes symposium published in the recent volume of Political Theory suggest. Deborah Baumgold, in “The Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation,” shifted the focus to “the history of the book,” and Hobbes’s method of serial composition and peripatetic insertion, as a major source of his inconsistency. Accepting Baumgold’s method, the author argues that the manner of composition does not necessarily determine content and that fundamental paradoxes in Hobbes’s work have a different provenance, for which there are also contextual answers. Hobbes was a courtier’s client, but one committed early to a materialist ontology and epistemology, and these commitments shackled him in treating the immediate political questions with which he was required to deal, leading to systemic paradoxes in his treatment of natural law, liberty, authorization, and consent. Keywords: Hobbes’s paradoxes; materialist ontology; politics

Teoria Politica, 2012

Contemporary debates on obedience and consent, such as those between Thomas Senor and A. John Simmons, suggest that either political obligation must exist as a concept or there must be natural duty of justice accessible to us through reason. Without one or the other, de facto political institutions would lack the requisite moral framework to engage in legitimate coercion. This essay suggests that both are unnecessary in order to provide a conceptual framework in which obedience to coercive political institutions can be understood. By providing a novel reading of Hobbes's Leviathan, this article argues that both political obligation and a natural duty to justice are unnecessary to ground the ability of political institutions to engage in legitimate coercion. This essay takes issue with common readings of Hobbes which assume consent is necessary to generate obedience on the part of citizens, and furthermore that political obligation is critical for the success of political institutions. While the failure of the traditional Hobbesian narrative of a consenting individual would seem to suggest the Leviathan is indefensible as a project, this paper argues that the right of war in the state of nature was more central for Hobbes's understanding of political institutions than obligation. Furthermore, Hobbes provides an adequate defense of political institutions even if his arguments about consent, obligation and punishment are only rhetorical. In this way Hobbesian law is best understood as a set of practical requirements to avoid war, and not as moral requirements that individuals are bound to comply with. Thus Hobbesian political institutions are not vulnerable to contemporary philosophical anarchist criticisms about political obligation and political institutions as such. To develop this reading, I focus primarily on the Leviathan, including interpretations by Skinner, Kateb, Flathman, and Oakeshott. Ultimately, this argument provides insight into contemporary political institutions of the state, citizenship, criminality, and the law in a world where political obligation has not been adequately justified.

Hobbes Studies, 2022

This article identifies an argument in Hobbes’s writings often overlooked but relevant to current philosophical debates. Political philosophers tend to categorize his thought as representing consent or rescue theories of political authority. Though these interpretations have textual support and are understandable, they leave out one of his most compelling arguments—what we call the lesser evil argument for political authority, expressed most explicitly in Chapter 20 of Leviathan. Hobbes frankly admits the state’s evils but appeals to the significant disparity between those evils and the greater evils outside the state as a basis for political authority. More than a passing observation, aspects of the lesser evil argument appear in each of his three major political works. In addition to outlining this argument, the article examines its significance both for Hobbes scholarship and recent philosophical debates on political authority.