R.J.G. Claassen draws upon Hobbes to show how concession theory can accommodate private initiative and economic analysis, and thus be a relevant position in the debate about the modern business corporation.
Contains pieces on “Political, Sociological and Economistic Ways of Avoiding a State of Nature”, “Hobbes’s Strategy of Convergence”, and the “Use and Abuse of Imagination in Leviathan”
In this paper, Christopher Bobier argues for a non‐cognitive reading of Hobbesian Passions according to which a passion is an appetite or aversion caused by, but distinct from, an imagination of a future good or harm.
Sandra Leonie Field argues that for both Hobbes and Spinoza, conscious institutional design is required in order for true popular power (potentia) to be achieved. Between Hobbes’ commitment to repressing private power and Spinoza’s exploration of civic strengthening, Field provides a new lens for thinking about the risks and promise of democracy.
The book argues that Hobbes’ idea of the state offers a far richer and more realistic conception of state responsibility than the theories prevalent today, and demonstrates that Hobbes’ Leviathan is much more than an anthropomorphic “artificial man.”
Drawing on evidence from across Hobbes’s works, and in particular from an understudied discussion of “Vespasian’s law” in the Six Lessons, Zachariah Black argues that Hobbes models the discrete use of humorous rhetoric in defense of peace.
This article argues that Hobbes creatively utilizes the monster genre’s mythic spatiality, linear trajectory, and subject positions—monster, victim, and hero—to compellingly present a fundamental problem plaguing humanity (wolfishness), as well as his political-theoretical solution (Leviathan).
In this article, J.M. Hoye argues that Hobbes’s theory of the state in Leviathan amounts to an assault on the practices of urban republican politics. Triangulating the theory of the state in Leviathan using European ideological, local historical and textual coordinates, Hoye opens new insights into Hobbes’s understanding of democracy, republicanism, popular sovereignty and the state.
In this article, Luke William Hunt argues that the metaphysical underpinnings of Hobbes’s project downplay the notion of a purely individualistic conception of the self, pointing to a positivist theory of criminology relying upon external forces.
Gianni Paganini explores the complex interplay between Gassendi and Hobbes, especially with regards to psychology, the foundations of ethics, legal theory, and political philosophy, stressing the important role that ancient Epicureanism and seventeenth-century Neo-Epicureanism played in the birth of a modern theory of individual rights.
