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New article on Hobbes’s Politics of Monstrosity

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Robbins, Nicholas W. (2020): Hobbes’s Social Contract as Monster Narrative: The Wolf-Man, Leviathan, and the Politics of Monstrosity, in: Polity, 52 (4),
doi.org/10.1086/710686

Description
This article reads Hobbes’s social contract through a monster genre lens, revealing the presence of an ancient narrative structure that deploys powerful symbolic forces. It argues that Hobbes creatively utilizes the monster genre’s mythic spatiality, linear trajectory, and subject positions—monster, victim, and hero—to compellingly present a fundamental problem plaguing humanity (wolfishness), as well as his political-theoretical solution (Leviathan). In this political monster tale, Leviathan, a heroic sovereign, conquers the wolf-man of the nightmarish state of nature, thereby making civil society possible. However, Hobbes potentially undercuts the success of his own political theory by framing his fellow citizens as monstrous wolf-men, and by associating his sovereign with a figure that, read mythically and symbolically, appears to be a complex hybrid that devours its subjects.

New Article: Rethinking the sexual contract. The case of Thomas Hobbes

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Lorenzo Rustighi (2018): Rethinking the sexual contract: The case of Thomas Hobbes, in: Philosophy & Social Criticism

https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453718814881

Description

Feminist scholars have long debated on a key contradiction in the political theory of Thomas Hobbes: While he sees women as free and equal to men in the state of nature, he postulates their subjection to male rule in the civil state without any apparent explanation. Focusing on Hobbes’s construction of the mother–child relationship, this article suggests that the subjugation of the mother to the father epitomizes the neutralization of the ancient principle of ‘governance’, which he replaces with a novel concept of ‘power’ as formally authorized command. This scrutiny leads to three main conclusions: (1) a radicalization of Pateman’s concept of ‘sexual contract’; (2) the acknowledgement that patriarchy is inseparable from the logic of political authority constructed by Hobbes; and (3) the claim that criticism of patriarchal rule requires an overall problematization of the mainstream conception of political participation we have inherited from modern political science.

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.