Article: The two faces of personhood

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Fleming, Sean. “The two faces of personhood: Hobbes, corporate agency and the personality of the state” In European Journal of Political Theory, 2017/10/30, doi: 10.1177/1474885117731941
Abstract: There is an important but underappreciated ambiguity in Hobbes’ concept of personhood. In one sense, persons are representatives or actors. In the other sense, persons are representees or characters. An estate agent is a person in the first sense; her client is a person in the second. This ambiguity is crucial for understanding Hobbes’ claim that the state is a person. Most scholars follow the first sense of ‘person’, which suggests that the state is a kind of actor – in modern terms, a ‘corporate agent’. I argue that Hobbes’ state is a person only in the second sense: a character rather than an actor. If there are any primitive corporate agents in Hobbes’ political thought, they are representative assemblies, not states or corporations. Contemporary political theorists and philosophers tend to miss what is unique and valuable about Hobbes’ idea of state personality because they project the idea of corporate agency onto it.

Second EHS Biennial Conference (Amsterdam, May 14-16, 2018)

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Provisional programme:

Monday 14th May, 2018

09:30-10:00 Welcome and registration, with coffee and pastries
10:00-10:15 Opening talk by the organisers

Session 1:
10:15-11:15 Deborah Baumgold (Oregon) – ‘Dating On the Citizen’
11:25-12:25 Kinch Hoekstra & Nicholas Gooding (UC Berkeley) – ‘Hobbes’s philosophical anthropology: natural sociability’
12:25-13:45 Lunch, served in the Main Library

Session 2:
13:45-14:45 Susanne Sreedhar (Boston University) – ‘The right of nature and the right to all things’
14:55-15:55 Michael LeBuffe (Otago) – ‘Motivation and the good’

Session 3: 
16:15-17:15 Laurens van Apeldoorn (Leiden) – ‘Rex est Populus’: the sovereign and the state’
17:15-17:45 General meeting of the European Hobbes Society (optional)
19:00 Conference dinner, venue TBA

Tuesday 15th May

Session 4:
10:00-11:00 Sophie Smith (Oxford) – ‘Hobbes’s theory of the state: civitas, respublica, and On the Citizen’
11:10-12:10 Michael J. Green (Pomona) – ‘Personation, authorization, and group agency in On the Citizen’
12:10-13:30 Lunch, served in the Main Library

Session 5:
13:30-14:30 Johann P. Sommerville (Wisconsin-Madison) – ‘On the Citizen’s views on religion and church-state relations in historical context’
14:40-15:40 A.P. Martinich (Texas) – ‘Sovereign-making and biblical covenants’

Session 6:
16:00-17:00 Thomas Holden (USCB) – ‘Religious passions’
17:10-18:10 Alison McQueen (Stanford) – ‘Hobbes’s scriptural arguments in On the Citizen’
19:00 Informal dinner, venue TBA

Wednesday 16th May

Session 7:
9:30-10:30 Rosemarie Wagner (UC Berkeley) – ‘Legal obligation and punishment in On the Citizen’
10:40-11:40 Ioannis Evrigenis (Tufts) – ‘The political economy of On the Citizen’
11:50-12:50 S.A. Lloyd (USC) – ‘Sociability and motivation in On the Citizen’
13:00 Concluding lunch; venue TBA

The conference is generously supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Amsterdam Centre for Political Thought (ACPT) and the Challenges to Democratic Representation Research Group at the University of Amsterdam.

For further information or queries please contact the conference convenors:

Johan Olsthoorn (Amsterdam/Leuven): j.c.a.olsthoorn@uva.nl

Eva Odzuck (Erlangen-Nürnberg): eva.odzuck@fau.de

Robin Douglass (King’s College London) robin.douglass@kcl.ac.uk

New issue of Hobbes Studies

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A new issue of Hobbes Studies is now available, containing the following articles:

Eva Helene Odzuck, ‘I Professed to Write Not All to All’

Alissa MacMillan, ‘Conditioned to Believe: Hobbes on Religion, Education, and Social Context’

Douglas C. Wadle, ‘The Problem of the Unity of the Representative Assembly in Hobbes’s Leviathan’

S.A. Lloyd, ‘Duty Without Obligation’

Jacob Tootalian, ‘That Giant Monster Call’d a Multitude’

Peter Auger, ‘The Books of Tho. Hobbes’.

Two chapters on “Trust” in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy

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Kontler, László and Somos, Mark, eds. Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought. Leiden: Brill, 2017.

The notions of happiness and trust as cements of the social fabric and political legitimacy have a long history in Western political thought. However, despite the great contemporary relevance of both subjects, and burgeoning literatures in the social sciences around them, historians and historians of thought have, with some exceptions, unduly neglected them. In Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought, editors László Kontler and Mark Somos bring together twenty scholars from different generations and academic traditions to redress this lacuna by contextualising historically the discussion of these two notions from ancient Greece to Soviet Russia. Confronting this legacy and deep reservoir of thought will serve as a tool of optimising the terms of current debates.

Contains a chapter by Peter Schröder on Fidem Observandam Esse – Trust and Fear in Hobbes and Locke and a chapter by Eva Odzuck on The Concept of Trust in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy

Political Theory Cover

New article: Hobbes and Slavery

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Daniel Luban,  ‘Hobbes and Slavery’, Political Theory, first published online: October 6 2017 (DOI: 10.1177/0090591717731070).

Abstract: Although Thomas Hobbes’s critics have often accused him of espousing a form of extreme subjection that differs only in name from outright slavery, Hobbes’s own striking views about slavery have attracted little notice. For Hobbes repeatedly insists that slaves, uniquely among the populace, maintain an unlimited right of resistance by force. But how seriously should we take this doctrine, particularly in the context of the rapidly expanding Atlantic slave trade of Hobbes’s time? While there are several reasons to doubt whether Hobbes’s arguments here should be taken at face value, the most serious stems from the highly restricted definition that he gives to the term “slave,” one that would seem to make his acceptance of slave resistance entirely hollow in practice. Yet a closer examination of Hobbes’s theory indicates that his understanding of slavery is less narrow than it might initially appear—and thus that his argument carries a genuine political bite.