Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with the existence of a logical inconsistency in Hobbes's theory of obligation as enumerated in Leviathan. Numerous commentators have noticed a glaring contradiction in Hobbes's attempt to logically deduce absolute sovereign authority from the state of nature as he defines it. The contradiction rests on the idea that the kind of subjects that populate Hobbes's natural condition would never of their own will institute an absolute authority over themselves nor do they possess the tools for doing so. Paradoxically, in order for the Hobbesian commonwealth to possess the security it promises, the sovereign must actually precede the contract of which he is to be the effect. Rather than argue that Hobbes's doctrine is hopelessly inconsistent or to argue that there are more implicit logical themes in Leviathan from which to ignore the contradictions in Hobbes's argument altogether, I argue instead that the logical inconsistency is actually an intrinsic and necessary feature of Hobbes's theory of obligation. ;My argument turns on the notion that there exists a parallel inconsistency in Hobbes's understanding of language: language is incapable of producing the certainty between subjects it promises. Instead, language creates an insurmountable ambiguity in subjects, both in regards to their relations to others and their own identity. From here, the driving psychological force in Hobbesian subjects is a desire for recognition that can only be satiated in a purely negative manner. The placating of this desire comes when subjects realize that their identities are constituted in the prohibitive force of the sovereign as that element which holds the ambiguity of language at bay. In this way, subjects secure their identities by trading the impossibility of their desire for the sovereign's prohibitions. Hobbes's theory of obligation can be understood to logically work if one understands the sovereign's presence ironically as the symbolic reflection of the subject's own impossible identity with him/herself. Here, the sovereign, for Hobbes, represents the sovereign displacement of certainty