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Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
New Volume: Interpreting Hobbes’s Political Philosophy, edited by S. A. Lloyd (Cambridge University Press)
/in General, Member Publications, New Publications /by Publication OfficerS. A. Lloyd (ed.) (2019): Interpreting Hobbes’s Political Philosophy, Cambridge University Press
The essays in this volume provide a state-of-the-art overview of the central elements of Hobbes’s political philosophy and the ways in which they can be interpreted. The volume’s contributors offer their own interpretations of Hobbes’s philosophical method, his materialism, his psychological theory and moral theory, and his views on benevolence, law and civil liberties, religion, and women. Hobbes’s ideas of authorization and representation, his use of the ‘state of nature’, and his reply to the unjust ‘Foole’ are also critically analyzed. The essays will help readers to orient themselves in the complex scholarly literature while also offering groundbreaking arguments and innovative interpretations. The volume as a whole will facilitate new insights into Hobbes’s political theory, enabling readers to consider key elements of his thought from multiple perspectives and to select and combine them to form their own interpretations of his political philosophy.
Essays
Hobbes Studies: Special Issue
/in General, Member Publications, New Publications /by Publication OfficerHobbes Studies Volume 32, Issue 1, 2019
Special Issue: The Reception of Hobbes in Germany
A new issue of Hobbes Studies is now available containing the following articles:
Celi Hirata: Subject and Subjectivity in Hobbes and Leibniz
Nathaniel Boyd: The Reception of Hobbes in Germany and the Holy Roman Empire
Daniel Eggers: Hobbes, Kant, and the Universal ‘right to all things’, or Why We Have to Leave the State of Nature
Edgar Straehle: The Problem of Sovereignty: Reading Hobbes through the Eyes of Hannah Arendt
Dirk Brantl: Recent Trends in German Hobbes Scholarship
Olaf Asbach De cive / Vom Bürger, written by Thomas Hobbes
New chapter on Oakeshott’s and Strauss’s Hobbes
/in General, New Publications /by Publication OfficerMcIlwain D. (2019) The Philosophical Intention and Legacy of Hobbes. In: Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13381-8_5
Abstract: Michael Oakeshott’s engagement with Leo Strauss on Hobbes is known to be an important part of Oakeshott’s development as a thinker, but the extent to which the Hobbes chapter of Strauss’s Natural Right and History forms a response to Oakeshott’s “Introduction to Leviathan” is less well known. McIlwain argues that when taken with Oakeshott’s rejoinder in “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes” this constitutes the rudiments of a dialogue. Participating in the scholarly return to Hobbes in the 1930s, both thinkers approached Hobbes’s thought on moral grounds. The chapter examines and compares the divergent interpretations in which Strauss detected the origins of modern technological mindset in Hobbes while Oakeshott presented Hobbes as securing the non-substantive civil autonomy for a Renaissance individuality.
New article on Hobbes’s philosophy of science
/in General, New Publications /by Publication Officerhttps://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes-science/
A new entry by Marcus Adams on Hobbes’s philosophy of science in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). Content:
Bibliography
New Article: The Political Theology of Betrayal: Hobbes’ Uzzah, and Schmitt’s Hobbes
/in General, New Publications /by Publication OfficerFeisal G. Mohamed (2018): The Political Theology of Betrayal: Hobbes’ Uzzah, and Schmitt’s Hobbes, in: Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, 11-33.
Abstract
Carl Schmitt’s interest in the writings of Thomas Hobbes is widely known, and clearly visible in Political Theology (1922). This essay explores the relationship between these two thinkers, especially surrounding the “protection- obedience axiom” that Schmitt strongly associated with Hobbes. As is apparent in Hobbes’ responses to the story of Uzzah, protection and obedience are more complex in his writings than might first appear. This essay considers these responses alongside those of John Donne, Richard Hooker, and Lancelot Andrewes. Schmitt tends to overlook this complexity, even as he comes to similar conclusions on the loyal subject’s exposure to the sovereign’s arbitrary violence. We will see that Schmitt is ambivalent about Hobbes, associating him with the advent of legal positivism, the strain of legal theory against which he continually strives. If Political Theology enlists Hobbes as an ally, then, it is on the point of methodology propping up Schmitt’s central argument: that political theory must be grounded in a sociology of the concept of sovereignty.
New Article: Materialism and Right Reason in Hobbes’s Political Treatises: A Troubled Foundation for Civil Science
/in General, New Publications /by Publication OfficerAndrea Bardin (2019): Materialism and Right Reason in Hobbes’s Political Treatises: A Troubled Foundation for Civil Science, in: History of Political Thought, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 85-110
Abstract
After abandoning the approach taken in The Elements of Law, Hobbes used De Cive to establish his new civil science on a materialist basis, thus challenging the dualist foundations of Descartes’s mechanical philosophy. This shift is analysed here with close reference to the discontinuity in Hobbes’s use of the concepts of ‘laws of nature’ and ‘right reason’. The article argues that, the descriptive nature of mechanics notwithstanding, De Cive’s foundational aim left civil science with the normative task of producing its own material conditions of possibility until, in Leviathan, Hobbes went as far as reconsidering Plato’s philosophical commitment to political pedagogy.