Posts

Article: Hobbes’ Frontispiece: Authorship, Subordination and Contract

/in /by

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 Fool and the Franchiser: Formal Justice in the Political Theories of Hobbes and Rawls

/in /by

Jan Niklas Rolf: ‘The Fool and the Franchiser: Formal Justice in the Political Theories of Hobbes and Rawls’, Ethics & Global Politics, 9 (2016).

Abstract: Thomas Hobbes and John Rawls are usually portrayed in antagonistic terms. While Hobbes, one of the first scholars to translate Thucydides, is often held to be an archetypal realist, Rawls, a self-proclaimed follower of Kant, is frequently said to argue from an explicit normative position. In this paper, I try to demonstrate that the two philosophers have more in common than is generally thought. Drawing on Hobbes’s answer to the fool and Rawls’s analogy of the franchiser, I suggest that there is a powerful link between the two philosophers that can tell us something valuable about their theories of formal justice. Against Brian Barry’s characterization of Hobbes as an advocate of justice as mutual advantage and Rawls as a proponent of both justice as mutual advantage and justice as impartiality, I argue that the two philosophers adhere to one and the same tradition of justice, justice as reciprocity, which bases obligations of reciprocity not only on explicit express, but also on tacit acceptance of benefits.

Essay: The Domestic Analogy Revisited: Hobbes on International Order

/in /by

David Singh Grewal, ‘The Domestic Analogy Revisited: Hobbes on International Order’, Yale Law Journal, 125, 3 (2016).

Abstract: This Essay reexamines Thomas Hobbes’s understanding of international order. Hobbes defended the establishment of an all-powerful sovereign as the solution to interpersonal conflict, and he advanced an analogy between persons and states. Extending this “domestic analogy,” theorists following Hobbes have supposed that a global sovereign would prove the solution to interstate conflict. Yet Hobbes himself never proposed a global sovereign, which has led some scholars to diagnose an apparent inconsistency in his philosophy.

This Essay seeks to resolve that inconsistency, drawing on Hobbes’s theory of the passions and his hope for radical political transformation. Hobbes believed that the solution to international disorder was not analogous but rather identical to the solution to domestic strife: both would be overcome through the establishment of a “well-ordered commonwealth.” Hobbes argued that a state capable of securing peace within its borders was unlikely to make aggressive war outside them. The radical transformation he envisaged in domestic politics would thus in itself mitigate and perhaps even overcome international conflict.

This “realist-utopian” position aligns Hobbes more closely with later social-contract theorists, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls. It also invites a reconsideration of the foundational principles of international law, with implications for contemporary problems from humanitarian intervention to economic integration. Hobbes’s realist-utopianism provides a needed corrective not only to the narrowly defined realism that has long claimed his imprimatur, but also to realism’s rivals, which unwittingly share its premises.