Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- A note on texts and references
- Introduction
- 1 “Of Man”: the foundation of Hobbes's political argument
- 2 What is the cause of conflict in the state of nature?
- 3 The shortsightedness account of conflict and the laws of nature
- 4 The argument for absolute sovereignty
- 5 Authorizing the sovereign
- 6 Hobbes's social contract
- 7 The failure of Hobbes's social contract argument
- 8 Can Hobbes's argument be salvaged?
- 9 How the traditional social contract argument works
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- A note on texts and references
- Introduction
- 1 “Of Man”: the foundation of Hobbes's political argument
- 2 What is the cause of conflict in the state of nature?
- 3 The shortsightedness account of conflict and the laws of nature
- 4 The argument for absolute sovereignty
- 5 Authorizing the sovereign
- 6 Hobbes's social contract
- 7 The failure of Hobbes's social contract argument
- 8 Can Hobbes's argument be salvaged?
- 9 How the traditional social contract argument works
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is not to revive the corpse of past erudition that I have any desire, but rather to make more vivid the life of today, and to help us envisage its problems with a more accurate perspective. Otherwise my task would be as ungrateful as it is difficult … We [must] see our own day as from a watch tower. We are trying to know more closely the road we have been travelling.
J. N. Figgis, Studies of Political Thought From Gerson to Grotius 1414–1623It would be difficult to find a time in history more tumultuous than the period of the English Revolution and Puritan protectorate from approximately 1640 to 1660. In the midst of the tumult, many people offered prescriptions for curing the nation's disorders and achieving its long-lasting health. Hobbes's argument for the institution of an absolute sovereign in his masterpiece Leviathan is the most famous and celebrated of those prescriptions, and in this book I will be undertaking an extensive examination of Hobbes's political theory based primarily on his statement of it in Leviathan and supported by many of his political and philosophical writings.
However, my concerns go beyond mere analysis of the Hobbesian political position. In recent years, philosophers and historians have displayed considerable interest in social contract theories. But there has been confusion and controversy over the structure and justificational force of social contract arguments, as well as a good deal of perplexity over the nature of the argument used by Hobbes to establish the institution of the sovereign.
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- Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition , pp. 1 - 4Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987
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