Your top 10 Leviathan articles?
I was recently asked to recommend my top Hobbes articles for a new edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan, currently being prepared by David Johnston (Columbia) for Norton. This edition will replace the original 1996 one edited by Johnston and the late Richard Flathman.
Here is my list of 10. Any thoughts? What would your top 10 be? (Comments are open!)
1. Tom Sorell, ‘The science in Hobbes’s politics’, in Tom Sorell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (CUP, 1996).
2. Kinch Hoekstra, ‘Hobbesian equality’, in Sharon Lloyd, ed., Hobbes Today (CUP, 2013).
3. Quentin Skinner, ‘Leviathan: liberty redefined’, in Hobbes and Republican Liberty (CUP, 2008).
4. Jane Jaquette, ‘Defending liberal feminism: insights from Hobbes’, in Nancy Hirschmann and Joanne Wright, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).
5. Mónica Brito Vieira, ‘Juridical representation’, in The Elements of Representation in Hobbes (Brill, 2009).
6. Sharon Lloyd, ‘The reciprocity interpretation of Hobbes’s moral philosophy’, in Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (CUP, 2009).
7. A.P. Martinich, ‘Religion’, in Hobbes (Routledge, 2005).
8. Teresa Bejan, ‘Teaching the Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on education’, Oxford Review of Education 36:5 (2010).
9. Jules Townshend, ‘Hobbes as possessive individualist: interrogating the C. B. Macpherson thesis’, Hobbes Studies 12 (1999).
10. Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes’s theory of international relations’, in Aspects of Hobbes (OUP, 2002).
Here’s the thinking behind my list:
(1) This is a ‘holistic’ list: one choice affects the others, because (a) I decided that no author could appear more than once, and (b) I sought a relatively wide coverage – so, no room for more than one article on representation, say. Obviously, though, there are significant omissions, e.g. rhetoric, law.
(2) Contributions had to be relatively short, in English, and accessible to advanced undergraduates.
(4) I’ve gone for modern rather than ‘classic’ contributions – which will not be to everyone’s taste, doubtless! So, please do say below what you would prefer, whether for individual topics or as a whole set of 10.
