Quentin Skinner offers a powerful new interpretation of Hobbes’ understanding of time, and its implications for Christian belief and for politics. For Hobbes time is merely a subjective experience of continual succession. It follows that the Christian view of eternity as a state of timelessness must be a mistake, since there can be no such state. A further consequence is that the orthodox view of the Last Judgement must likewise be mistaken. It makes no sense to think of the saved living timelessly in heaven after the Second Coming; the only possibility is that they will live endlessly on earth. Hobbes also explores two political implications of his understanding of time. One is that, if time is mere succession, it cannot have any normative significance. The Common Law view that custom can make law is thus put in question. Hobbes also discounts the political significance of learning how to act with timeliness, offering instead a view of statecraft as a matter of following rules. The chapter ends by asking whether Hobbes succeeds in presenting a coherent criticism of the view – prominent in classical and Renaissance thought – that in politics it is essential to learn how to seize opportunities.

This chapter considers the private lives of the German generals. As men who are typically studied exclusively for their military roles, this chapter uses their letters to ask questions about how they expressed themselves in the ‘private’ sphere. Not surprisingly, their wives, to varying degrees, served as confidants as well as sources of strength. The role of the prominent military wife is also directly discussed with reference to letters by Margarete Guderian – the only available collection from one of the generals’ wives. The role of family is discussed, including the presence of military-age sons who were serving on the Eastern Front in 1941. The demands of senior command took a serious toll on each of the men and the letters over the course of 1941 chart their exposure to physical danger as well as psychological pressure. Coping mechanisms employed by the generals, such as free-time hobbies or spiritual beliefs are also evaluated from their writings. Overall, the value of the correspondence in illuminating a much more rounded view of the panzer generals charged with leading Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union is highlighted.

Throughout human history, societies have had to solve three economic problems. The first is to ensure that enough goods are produced. The second is that enough of the right goods are produced. The third is that these things are distributed fairly to everyone. The first two are problems of production and the third is a problem of distribution.

How did societies in the distant past solve the problems of production and distribution? John Hicks, in A Theory of Economic History, proposes three ways humans have done so. The first is through custom (sometimes also known as tradition). Imagine a San hunter-gatherer or Nguni farmer: the decision about what to produce and how to distribute that production was almost entirely determined by beliefs or customs that had been handed down from generation to generation. Tasks and occupations, titles and hierarchies were inherited.

In Chapter 4 I discuss the theoretical definition of ‘political institutions’ sketched in Chapter 3, which sets them aside from the other institutions discussed in Chapter 3. Political institutions are norms and rules that transform a set of contradictory instigations to action into a single command; that discipline the struggle to achieve positions that can transform contradictory instigations into a command; that constrain the ruler’s search for generalised and stabilised behavioural compliance in any confined group; and that concern the procedure through which public powers produce private powers (as guaranteed rights), not the concrete outcomes of these procedures. I then distinguish different kinds of norms/rules: norms/rules of conduct versus norms/rules of recognition and norms/rules of conferral. It is argued that political institutions are norms/rules of conferral and are not rules of conduct or of recognition, and that confusion is generated when the types are mixed.

This chapter turns to Aquinas’s view that the human act is a hylomorphic composite. To discuss the human act’s hylomorphic structure, it first considers three power-exercises crucial to the execution of the human act once the choice has been made, namely, “command,” “use,” and the “commanded act.” It contends that the act of command is an act of reason that specifies the power by which a choice is to be executed. Use is a volitional act that activates, and sustains the exercise, of the power determined by command, and the commanded act is the exercise of this power. It then argues that use (rather than command) functions as the form of the commanded act by virtue of directing the latter to an end. The chapter draws on an insight from Chapter 4, arguing that formal and final causation coincide here, because what it is for a human act to be of a certain kind (and so to have a certain form) is for it to be directed to a certain end. The last section of this chapter discusses Aquinas’s account of how choice explains the hylomorphically organized human act, which relies on the notion of “virtual existence.”

In his 1914 monograph, The Value of the State and the Significance of the Individual, accepted as an Habilitation in law in the field of state theory in 1916, Carl Schmitt proceeds from a discussion of his view of the relation between law (Recht) and power (Macht), through a discussion of the role of the state in the realization of law, to a discussion of his view of the significance of the individual within the state. Schmitt argues that the value of the state consists in the realization of law in the world, while the significance of the individual is that of fulfilling the roles that the state assigns and ascribes to them for the completion of the state’s task of realizing law and right. Schmitt thus claims a great value for his view of the state and a correspondingly diminutive significance for his view of the individual.

Chapter 6 considers the most controversial topics in the study of social influence, obedience to authority. The chapter reviews empirical findings concerning obedience in children. These demonstrate how children adopt a complex cognitive assessment of obedience in everyday life. This is countered by what are seemingly more rudimentary processes demonstrated by adults in one of psychology’s best known experiments: Milgram’s obedience demonstrations. The chapter goes on to examine the social identity account of obedience following a review of the Utrecht studies. The latter replicated Milgram’s installation in an ecologically more valid set-up using mediated expression of violence. The chapter concludes by arguing that the obedience response to authority is primarily 'natural' and necessary for human sociality; it enables communities to thrive by working towards the realisation of common goods through unquestioned acceptance of authority by consent. Only secondarily, obedience processes can morph into dysfunctional 'authoritarianism' that thwarts human potential.

This chapter considers two arguments for international legal skepticism, both of which appeal to an alleged analytical connection between law and coercive enforcement.The first is the legal philosopher John Austin’s characterization of law as the command of a sovereign, or in H.L.A. Hart’s apt phrase, as orders backed by threats.The second treats the mode of enforcement found in the modern state as a necessary condition for the existence of law.If true, each of these conceptual claims provides a sound basis for international legal skepticism.There are compelling reasons to reject them both, however.

The Introduction introduces the main themes, theoretical framework, methods, and key concepts of the study.