Article: Hobbes’ Frontispiece: Authorship, Subordination and Contract

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Janice Richardson: ‘Hobbes’ Frontispiece: Authorship, Subordination and Contract’, Law and Critique, 27, 1 (2016).

Abstract: In this article I argue that the famous image on Hobbes’ frontispiece of Leviathan provides a more honest picture of authority and of contract than is provided by today’s liberal images of free and equal persons, who are pictured as sitting round a negotiating table making a decision as to the principles on which to base laws. Importantly, in the seventeenth century, at the start of modern political thought, Hobbes saw no contradiction between contractual agreement and subordination. I will draw out these arguments by comparing three images of politics that employ the human body: Hobbes’ frontispiece is compared firstly with an earlier picture of the state, the illustration of the Fable of the Belly, and then with a later Rawlsian image of the social contract described above. At stake is Hobbes’ view of two associated concepts: authorship and authority. I argue that Hobbes’ image is a vivid portrayal of a ‘persona covert’, akin to the feme covert, a wife characterised in common law as so dominated by her husband that she is imagined as being ‘covered’ by his body.

Article: The Beast and the Sovereign according to Hobbes

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Arnaud Milanese: ‘The Beast and the Sovereign according to Hobbes’, Philosophy Today, 60, 1 (2016).

Abstract: Hobbes obviously thought politics with metaphors relating politics to bestiality and monstrosity: in De Cive, a man is a wolf to a man, and two of his major political books are entitled with the name of a biblical monster, Leviathan and Behemoth. Did Hobbes mean that political problems emerge from a natural violence of men and that the political solution to these problems must be found in sovereign violence? This contribution tries to demonstrate that these references do not outline any natural human ugliness but a double bind of culture and society (which is organized and developed for natural reason but thanks to artificial means). For human reasons, the historical development of human life separates this life from humanity in two ways—politics and history turn humanity into monstrosity and divinity (a man is also a god to a man and Leviathan is also a mortal god), and Behemoth means that historical violence is a cultural product.

Article: Politics of Immortality: Hobbes on “Humane and Divine Politiques”

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Haig Patapan: ‘Politics of Immortality: Hobbes on “Humane and Divine Politiques”’, Political Theology, Online First (2016).

Abstract: Hobbes anticipates many important features of liberalism, including rights, the sovereign state, social contract and constitutionalism. Yet in his insistence that the sovereign will have final authority in matters of faith he appears to repudiate what we have come to consider the core liberal assumptions regarding separation of church and state. In this article, I argue that Hobbes takes this approach because of the political challenge posed by immortality (the promise of eternal rewards and the threat of eternal torment and damnation after death). Hobbes regards immortality as one of the most important factors that transform a religion from a means to strengthen the sovereign’s authority, a “humane politiques,” to a “Divine politiques,” where others come to exercise countervailing claims on subjects’ loyalty. Because immortality presents such a profound challenge to Hobbes’ political remedy founded on the judicious use of fear, he adopts a twofold strategy to moderate its political influence. The first is a redefinition of who shall speak and what shall be said about immortality. The second strategy is to elevate the demands of this-world, by promising an eternal peace that will ensure a commodious life.

Article: The Laughing Body Politic: The Counter-Sovereign Politics of Hobbes’s Theory of Laughter

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Patrick T. Giamario: ‘The Laughing Body Politic: The Counter-Sovereign Politics of Hobbes’s Theory of Laughter’, Political Research Quarterly, Online First (2016).

Abstract: This article turns to Hobbes’s theory of laughter to determine the role collective laughter plays in democratic politics. After examining the political themes in Hobbes’s various accounts of laughter as well as the appearances laughter makes in his political philosophy, I argue that the Hobbesian body politic is a laughing body politic at the moment of its foundation. The individuals who contract with one another to establish a commonwealth perform the same sudden, “vainglorious,” and counter-sovereign political enactment as the laughing individual in Hobbes. This notion of a “laughing body politic” illuminates how Hobbes—the philosophical champion of sovereign power—provides resources for theorizing the counter-sovereign, democratic possibilities of collective laughter today.

Article: “My Highest Priority Was to Absolve the Divine Laws”: The Theory and Politics of Hobbes’ Leviathan in a War of Religion

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Meirav Jones:  ‘“My Highest Priority Was to Absolve the Divine Laws”: The Theory and Politics of Hobbes’ Leviathan in a War of Religion’, Political Studies, Online First (2016).

Abstract: In his autobiography, Thomas Hobbes stated that he wrote his most influential work of political theory, Leviathan, to “absolve the divine laws” in response to “atrocious crimes being attributed to the commands of God.” This article attempts to take Hobbes seriously, and to read Leviathan as a contribution to the religious politics of the English Civil War. I demonstrate Hobbes’ appropriation of the religious terms and sources characterizing civil-war political discourse, and explore these terms and sources both in Hobbes’ response to religiously motivated politics and in the foundations of his most important political ideas. Hobbes emerges from this account as a critic of Christian politics and enthusiasm broadly conceived, as a political philosopher who employed an Israelite political model, and as an erstwhile ally of some of those usually considered his deepest opponents.

 

 

Article: The Arse Poetica of Thomas Hobbes: On the Composition and Reception of De Mirabilibus Pecci

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Jessica Wolfe: ‘The Arse Poetica of Thomas Hobbes: On the Composition and Reception of De Mirabilibus Pecci’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 1, 3 (2016).

Abstract: This article provides a two-part study of Thomas Hobbes’ De Mirabilibus Pecci, a Latin poem composed very early in his career. Part one examines the poem as a product of Hobbes’ participation in the recreational literary culture of Caroline England, in particular analysing the influence of mock-epic and burlesque traditions that would continue to shape Hobbes’ writings but also studying how the poem offers compelling evidence for his early preoccupation with the laws of motion, with geological processes such as the creation and erosion of stone formations, and with the philosophy of Lucretius. Part two recounts the extraordinary history of the poem’s reception in the last decades of the seventeenth century. The poem’s familiarity among Hobbes’ allies and adversaries alike helped to cement his reputation as a master of scoffing and drollery, as an opponent of the experimental science practiced by the Royal Society, and as a freethinker or atheist.

New book: L’Axe Montaigne-Hobbes – Anthropologie et politique

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Emiliano Ferrari et Thierry Gontier (eds.), L’Axe Montaigne-Hobbes – Anthropologie et politique, Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016

About this book: Against a background of civil, political and religious conflict, Montaigne and Hobbes redeveloped a form of anthropological and political thinking that ushered in modernity. This collective work is as much concerned with the points where the two authors converge as with the difference in the paths they follow.

To view the table of contents, click here.

Book: Hobbes, La vie inquiète

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Luc Foisneau: Hobbes, La vie inquiète, Editions Gallimard, Collection Folio essais, 2016.

In the recently published paperback edition of Hobbes, La vie inquiète, Luc Foisneau provides a wideranging interpretation of Hobbes’s answer to the question how we should live together when we fundamentally disagree about the good life.

In a review of the book in Le Monde (27.4.2016) Roger-Pol Droit writes: ‘En plus de 600 pages, il met en lu­mière les changements – anthro­pologiques, moraux et théologico-politiques – accomplis par Hobbes. Il analyse leurs répercussions, souvent méconnues, sur Mauss, Voegelin, Foucault ou Rawls. Directeur de recherche au CNRS, enseignant à Sciences Po et à Oxford, aujourd’hui à l’EHESS, Luc Foisneau se révèle, avec cette somme, guide expérimenté. Rien de hobbesien ne semble lui être étranger.’

New issue of Hobbes Studies

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A special issues of Hobbes Studies is now available, focusing on Optics, Simple Circular Motion and Conatus.

AGOSTINO LUPOLI: Introduction

JOHN HENRY: Hobbes, Galileo, and the Physics of Simple Circular Motions

JOSÉ MÉDINA: Hobbes’s Geometrical Optics

DOUGLAS JESSEPH: Hobbes on ‘Conatus’: A Study in the Foundations of Hobbesian Philosophy

FRANCO GIUDICE: Optics in Hobbes’s Natural Philosophy