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. (shrink)

S. A. Lloyd proposes a radically new interpretation of Hobbes's Leviathan that shows transcendent interests - interests that override the fear of death - to be crucial to both Hobbes's analysis of social disorder and his proposed remedy to it. Most previous commentators in the analytic philosophical tradition have argued that Hobbes thought that credible threats of physical force could be sufficient to deter people from political insurrection. Professor Lloyd convincingly shows that because Hobbes took the transcendence of religious and (...) moral interests seriously, he never believed that mere physical force could ensure social order. Lloyd's interpretation demonstrates the ineliminability of that half of Leviathan devoted to religion, and attributes to Hobbes a much more plausible conception of human nature than the narrow psychological egoism traditionally attributed to Hobbes. (shrink)

In this book, S. A. Lloyd offers a radically new interpretation of Hobbes's laws of nature, revealing them to be not egoistic precepts of personal prudence but rather moral instructions for obtaining the common good.

The essays in this volume present versions of feminism that are explicitly liberal, or versions of liberalism that are explicitly feminist. By bringing together some of the most respected and well-known scholars in mainstream political philosophy today, Amy R. Baehr challenges the reader to reconsider the dominant view that liberalism and feminism are 'incompatible.'.

This chapter suggests that the state of nature is a continuum notion that lies in a segment along a larger continuum of the scope of private judgment, as does the continuum notion of civil authority. Jean Hampton saw Thomas Hobbes's state of nature as a “presocietal” condition of “isolated asocial individuals,” “stripped of their social connections.” There is plentiful evidence against Hampton's interpretation of the state of nature as an “asocial” condition in Hobbes's insistence across all his political writings that (...) men care deeply about their relative social standing and reputations, and that this is a major source of conflict in a state of nature. A potentially more promising way of understanding the state of nature is as a lawless condition. Societies exhibiting a high degree of consensus among private judgments may be able to tolerate incomplete removal from the mere state of nature, without threat to their stability. (shrink)

In On the Edge of Anarchy, A. John Simmons simultaneously pursues two distinguishable ends: to defend an interpretation of Locke as a “pure consent” theorist the essence of whose theory is that only actual voluntary individual consent can ground political obligations and authority, and to defend pure consent theory as the best theory of political obligation. Both ends are pursued under the heading of justifying “Lockean” consent theory, and the arguments for them overlap considerably because most of Simmons’s defense of (...) his interpretation of Locke’s theory depends on his arguments that the position he attributes to Locke is, for independent philosophical reasons, the most defensible version of “voluntaristic” theory. Two of the very interesting, and surprising, inferences Simmons defends in this book are that believing ourselves to be naturally free from political obligation implies that most existing states are illegitimate, and that Locke was committed to the view that “political drudgery,” a condition in which all of our rights are alienated to the government, although imprudent, is not morally impermissible. (shrink)

The article investigates whether Hobbes’s political theory gives us reason to expect the systematic subordination of women. It argues that who dominates whom is a matter of victory in the quest to pull allies into ordered alliances. The primary means of gaining allies—force and wiles—depend on both skill-fitness and affective fitness. The analyses suggest that it is sex-linked and gender-linked differences in affective fitness—particularly in the intensity of men’s desire to use religious wiles—that most plausibly explain the subjection of women, (...) both across the spectrum of states of nature and within civil societies. Although Hobbes’s political theory enables us to make sense of how it happened, there is nothing in that theory that either necessitates or should cause us to expect the systematic subordination of women. (shrink)

Today the study of Hobbes is both reputable and flourishing, to judge by the numbers in recent years of publications, submissions, conferences, workshops, and sessions at professional meetings devoted to Hobbes, along with growing interest from scholars in China and Latin America. I recently conducted a survey of colleagues working on Hobbes; a non-scientific survey, it included scholars working in a variety of departments. This research note reports the views of more than three dozen respondents, who answered three questions: (1) (...) what has been at stake in Hobbes debates?; (2) have any conclusions been decisively established?; and (3) what are the open questions for the future? The answers evidence a lack of consensus but also demonstrate that we have increasingly refined and sophisticated theoretical arguments for and against contending positions. (shrink)

The paper argues that the moral philosophy of Thomas Hobbes is unified by a complex conception of reason that imposes consistency norms of both rationality and reasonableness. Hobbes’s conceptions of rightness as reciprocity, and moral goodness as sociability belong to an original and attractive moral theory that is neither teleological nor classically deontological, nor as interpreters have variously argued, subjectivist, contractarian, egoist, or dependent on divine command.

_ Source: _Volume 30, Issue 2, pp 202 - 221 There is ongoing scholarly debate over the role that Hobbes’s laws of nature play in grounding the moral requirement that subjects obey the government under which they live. This essay demonstrates how the laws of nature, when understood as natural duties, may directly ground a moral duty to obey one’s sovereign without positing that subjects have undertaken any covenant of subjection. Such a grounding avoids the problems that attend accounts that (...) depend on tacit covenant and coerced covenant. The essay describes the advantages of a natural duty account of the laws of nature over accounts that regard those laws as contractual obligations entered through voluntary acts, or as legal obligations to treat the natural laws as literal laws legislated by a sovereign God. (shrink)

The paper investigates Hobbes’s arguments that injustice is a kind of absurdity involving a “contradiction properly so called,” concluding that although those arguments are undermined by their reliance on a mistaken temporality assumption, Hobbes’s philosophy provides other means for establishing his desired conclusion.

A. P. Martinich has been perhaps the most prolific and influential contributor to a general understanding of Hobbes over the last three decades, producing a much-admired Hobbes biography, a volume introducing Hobbes's entire philosophical system, another placing it in historical context, an excellent student edition of Leviathan, a magnificent Oxford handbook of Hobbes, a monograph presenting Martinich's highly original interpretation of Hobbes's political philosophy, and more than a score of papers engaging controversial aspects of Hobbes interpretation or historical interpretation generally. (...) Martinich's landmark The Two Gods of Leviathan: Religion and Politics in Hobbes's Philosophy... (shrink)

Hobbes Today: Insights for the 21st Century brings together an impressive group of political philosophers, legal theorists and political scientists to investigate the many ways in which the work of Thomas Hobbes, the famed seventeenth-century English philosopher, can illuminate the political and social problems we face today. Its essays demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Hobbes' political thought on such issues as justice, human rights, public reason, international warfare, punishment, fiscal policy and the design of positive law, among others. The volume's (...) contributors include both Hobbes specialists and philosophers bringing their expertise to consideration of Hobbes' texts for the first time. This volume will stimulate renewed interest in Hobbes studies among a new generation of thinkers. (shrink)

Arash Abizadeh's main thesis is that Hobbes severed juridical obligation—a covenant-created practice of second-personal accountability—from allegedly prudential natural law, marking a "watershed" separation of the right from the good. Daniel Eggers, Mark Peacock, and David D. Raphael fruitfully explored that thesis. The proposed independence is doubtful because natural law both underwrites and constrains covenant: "a...

This chapter supports three distinct but related claims about the significance of John Rawls′ attention to the history of political philosophy: that such attention offers the most fecund approach to questions of contemporary political philosophy, that it is not objectionably conservative, and that neglecting to learn how Rawls understood the great systems of the past places one at a severe disadvantage in interpreting Rawls's own theory of justice. It describes Rawls’ approach to the history of political philosophy, and his advice (...) on how to learn from it through comparative study of complex systems; his views about the independence of political from other sorts of philosophy, and the relationship of his thinking to the social contract tradition and the history of liberalism. The chapter discusses features of Rawls′ interpretations of various historical political philosophies to show how knowing these is needed to guide proper interpretations of his own theory of justice. (shrink)

Just as some types of philosophical analysis are more useful than others to historians or political scientists, so, I find, are some sorts of historical research more useful to philosophers than are other sorts. Sommerville makes history useful to non-historians by clarifying the large-scale historical background against which his investigative questions are posed, and then separating out crucial figures, ideas, and events from arcana of interest primarily to specialist historians. His interpretations are relatively neutral, striking a welcome balance between mere (...) reporting of events or textual ideas on the one hand, and on the other, accounts so theoretically laden that they prejudge or foreclose promising interpretive possibilities. (shrink)

In On the Edge of Anarchy, A. John Simmons simultaneously pursues two distinguishable ends: to defend an interpretation of Locke as a “pure consent” theorist the essence of whose theory is that only actual voluntary individual consent can ground political obligations and authority, and to defend pure consent theory as the best theory of political obligation. Both ends are pursued under the heading of justifying “Lockean” consent theory, and the arguments for them overlap considerably because most of Simmons’s defense of (...) his interpretation of Locke’s theory depends on his arguments that the position he attributes to Locke is, for independent philosophical reasons, the most defensible version of “voluntaristic” theory. Two of the very interesting, and surprising, inferences Simmons defends in this book are that believing ourselves to be naturally free from political obligation implies that most existing states are illegitimate, and that Locke was committed to the view that “political drudgery,” a condition in which all of our rights are alienated to the government, although imprudent, is not morally impermissible. (shrink)

S. A. Lloyd - Liberty, Rationality, and Agency in Hobbes's Leviathan - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 397-398 Book Review Liberty, Rationality, and Agency in Hobbes's Leviathan David van Mill. Liberty, Rationality, and Agency in Hobbes's Leviathan. Albany: The State University of New York Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 253. Cloth, $59.50. Paper, $19.95. David van Mill's provocative book is an ambitious and thoughtful argument by an author well-versed in Hobbes's writings (...) and the secondary literature on them, intended to revolutionize our understanding of Hobbes's theory of rational agency. It is a shame that the text is marred by such egregious copy-editing that its unrelenting misprints, misquotes, inaccurate references, and grammatical infelicities so distract from van Mill's.. (shrink)