Hobbes's political theory has traditionally been taken to be an endorsement of state power and a prescription for unconditional obedience to the sovereign's will. In this book, Susanne Sreedhar ...develops a novel interpretation of Hobbes's theory of political obligation and explores important cases where Hobbes claims that subjects have a right to disobey and resist state power, even when their lives are not directly threatened. Drawing attention to this broader set of rights, her comprehensive analysis of Hobbes's account of political disobedience reveals a unified and coherent theory of resistance that has previously gone unnoticed and undefended. Her book will appeal to all who are interested in the nature and limits of political authority, the right of self-defense, the right of revolution, and the modern origins of these issues.
In this book, S. A. Lloyd provides a radical interpretation of Hobbes' laws of nature, revealing them to be not egoistic precepts of personal prudence but rather moral instructions for obtaining the ...common good. This account of Hobbes' moral philosophy stands in contrast to both divine command and rational choice interpretations. Drawing from the core notion of reciprocity, Lloyd explains Hobbes' system of 'cases in the law of nature' and situates Hobbes' moral philosophy in the broader context of his political philosophy and views on religion. Offering ingenious new arguments, Lloyd defends a reciprocity interpretation of the laws of nature through which humanity's common good is secured.
L'anthropologie de Thomas Hobbes domine les horizons de sens et percole notamment dans le champ les sciences sociales au point de tenir pour vraie et ultime la guerre de tous contre tous. Dès lors, ...la nature égoïste de l'être humain ne fait plus débat, si bien que s'impose une exclusive anthropologique conduisant à ne voir, parmi les affaires humaines, que domination, concurrence, ruse, pouvoir, violence, avidité, efficacité, rentabilité... La figure d' homo œconomicus vient renforcer cette prétendue évidence humaine, puisque chacun est censé poursuivre naturellement ses intérêts bien compris et parfaitement clairs, et ce à partir d'un rapport de soi à soi souverain et vu comme indépassable ou primordial. Aux antipodes de cette anthropologie normative mutilante car trop étroite, cet article propose d'identifier quelques traits de ce que pourrait être homo alterus , entendue comme une figure anthropologique à même de penser autrement notre rapport à nous-mêmes, aux autres et au monde.
Made with words Pettit, Philip
2008., 20090706, 2009, 2008, 2008-01-01, 20080101
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Hobbes's extreme political views have commanded so much attention that they have eclipsed his work on language and mind, and on reasoning, personhood, and group formation. But this work is of immense ...interest in itself, as Philip Pettit shows in Made with Words, and it critically shapes Hobbes's political philosophy. Pettit argues that it was Hobbes, not later thinkers like Rousseau, who invented the invention of language thesis--the idea that language is a cultural innovation that transformed the human mind. The invention, in Hobbes's story, is a double-edged sword. It enables human beings to reason, commit themselves as persons, and incorporate in groups. But it also allows them to agonize about the future and about their standing relative to one another; it takes them out of the Eden of animal silence and into a life of inescapable conflict--the state of nature. Still, if language leads into this wasteland, according to Hobbes, it can also lead out. It can enable people to establish a commonwealth where the words of law and morality have a common, enforceable sense, and where people can invoke the sanctions of an absolute sovereign to give their words to one another in credible commitment and contract.
This is the first major work in English to explore at length the meaning, context, aims, and vital importance of Thomas Hobbes’s concepts of the law of nature and the right of nature. Hobbes remains ...one of the most challenging and controversial of early modern philosophers, and debates persist about the interpretation of many of his ideas, particularly his views about natural law and natural right. In this book, Perez Zagorin argues that these two concepts are the twin foundations of the entire structure of Hobbes’s moral and political thought.
Jelen tanulmány a Hobbes-i természeti állapot négy aspektusát helyezi reflektorfénybe. Egyrészt, arra a kérdésre keresi a választ, hogy vajon tekinthetjük-e a Hobbes által ábrázolt eredeti állapotot ...időtlen helyzetnek, amelyben nem az időtartamon, hanem csupán a szerző által felépített logikai konstrukció kimenetén van a hangsúly, vagy időtartammal rendelkezőnek kell (lehet) ezt az állapotot tekintenünk, amelynek sajátos fejlődési íve is van. Másrészt, az eredeti állapotba helyezett embert vizsgálja meg annak érdekében, hogy megállapíthassuk a természetes környezet emberének valóban „természetes” voltát, és e kettő (ember és állapot természetessége) közötti összhangot. Harmadrészt, az eredeti helyzet emberei között fennálló lehetséges viszonyok tanulmányozása képezi az elemzés tárgyát. Negyedrészt, az előző kérdéshez közvetlenül kapcsolódva, a természeti állapot többféle értelmezésének bemutatására kerül sor. E szempontok kibontásával – úgy tűnik – jobban rávilágíthatunk a Hobbes-i természeti állapot ambivalens jellegére is.
The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes offers a new interpretation of Thomas Hobbes's response to the English Revolution. By focusing on his religious thought, it debunks the standard view of him as a ...royalist, and recovers his sympathies with the religious projects of the 1640s and 1650s. This reinterpretation culminates with an exploration of Hobbes's surprising sympathies with Oliver Cromwell and his supporters. By placing Thomas Hobbes within fresh contexts, Professor Collins offers a new angle of vision on the religious significance of the English Revolution itself.
Commentators have traditionally constructed Hobbes's thinking on representation too narrowly, as a self-contained area of his political theory. This book challenges this orthodoxy of Hobbes ...scholarship, which owes less to Hobbes's thought than to contemporary preconceptions of what counts as political thinking. In her powerful and original analysis, Mónica Brito Vieira mines neglected strands of Hobbes's theory of representation, and reinstates it in a much wider pattern of Hobbes's theorizing about human thought and action in relation to widely varied images, roles and fictions. The result is a compelling portrait of how man's natural power to form representations through the imagination and artifice underpins his capacity to break away from nature, and fashion a world that best suits his needs.
Golem and Leviathan. Judaic Sources of Thomas Hobbes's Political Theology In the article, the Authors point out that Hobbes's political philosophy (and in fact theology) in the heterodox layer is ...inspired not only by Judeo-Christianity, but also by rabbinic Judaism. According to them, only adopting such a Judaic and in a sense syncretistic perspective enabled Hobbes to come to such radical conclusions, hostile towards the Catholic and Calvinist conceptions of the state and the Church. In their argument they focused on three elements that are most important for Hobbesian concept of sovereignty: the covenant between Jahwe and the Chosen People, the concept of the Kingdom of God, salvation and the afterlife, and the concept of a messiah.
Certain English writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, whom scholars often associate with classical republicanism, were not, in fact, hostile to liberalism. Indeed, these thinkers ...contributed to a synthesis of liberalism and modern republicanism. As this book argues, Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, Henry Neville, Algernon Sidney, and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, the co-authors of a series of editorials entitled Cato's Letters, provide a synthesis that responds to the demands of both republicans and liberals by offering a politically engaged citizenry as well as the protection of individual rights. The book also reinterprets the writings of Machiavelli and Hobbes to show that each contributed in a fundamental way to the formation of this liberal republicanism.
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