In The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, philosopher Thomas Hobbes endeavors to enlighten the bond between physics, psychology and politics. Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. In addition to political philosophy, Hobbes contributed to a diverse array of other fields, including history, jurisprudence, geometry, the physics of gases, theology, and ethics, as well as philosophy in general.
An exciting English-language edition which for the first time presents Thomas Hobbes's masterpiece Leviathan alongside two earlier works, The Elements of Law and De Cive. By arranging the three texts side by side, Baumgold offers readers an enhanced understanding of Hobbes's political theory and addresses an important need within Hobbes scholarship. The parallel presentation highlights substantive connections between the texts and makes it easy to trace the development of Hobbes's thinking. Readers can follow developments both at the 'micro' level of specific arguments and at the 'macro' level of the overall scope and organization of the theory. The volume also includes parallel presentations of Hobbes's chapter outlines, which serve as a key to the texts and are collected in a précis appendix.
Has Hobbesian moral and political theory been fundamentally misinterpreted by most of his readers? Since the criticism of John Bramhall, Hobbes has generally been regarded as advancing a moral and political theory that is antithetical to classical natural law theory. Kody W. Cooper challenges this traditional interpretation of Hobbes in Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law. Hobbes affirms two essential theses of classical natural law theory: the capacity of practical reason to grasp intelligible goods or reasons for action and the legally binding character of the practical requirements essential to the pursuit of human flourishing. Hobbes’s novel contribution lies principally in his formulation of a thin theory of the good. This book seeks to prove that Hobbes has more in common with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of natural law philosophy than has been recognized. According to Cooper, Hobbes affirms a realistic philosophy as well as biblical revelation as the ground of his philosophical-theological anthropology and his moral and civil science. In addition, Cooper contends that Hobbes's thought, although transformative in important ways, also has important structural continuities with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of practical reason, theology, social ontology, and law. What emerges from this study is a nuanced assessment of Hobbes’s place in the natural law tradition as a formulator of natural law liberalism. This book will appeal to political theorists and philosophers and be of particular interest to Hobbes scholars and natural law theorists.
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. Written by one of today's leading philosophers, Made with Words is both an original reinterpretation and a clear and lively introduction to Hobbes's thought.
Zagorin clears up numerous misconceptions about Hobbes and his relation to earlier natural law thinkers, in particular Hugo Grotius, and he reasserts the often overlooked role of the Hobbesian law of nature as a moral standard from which even sovereign power is not immune. Because Hobbes is commonly thought to be primarily a theorist of sovereignty, political absolutism, and unitary state power, the significance of his moral philosophy is often underestimated and widely assumed to depend entirely on individual self-interest. Zagorin reveals Hobbes's originality as a moral philosopher and his importance as a thinker who subverted and transformed the idea of natural law."--Pub. desc.
The second edition retains the selection of texts presented in the first edition but offers them in new translations by Richard J Regan -- including that of his Aquinas, Treatise on Law (Hackett, 2000). A revised Introduction and glossary, an updated select bibliography, and the inclusion of summarising headnotes for each of the units -- Conscience, Law, Justice, Property, War and Killing, Obedience and Rebellion, and Practical Wisdom and Statecraft -- further enhance its usefulness.
The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes collects twenty-six newly commissioned, original chapters on the philosophy of the English thinker Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Best known today for his important influence on political philosophy, Hobbes was in fact a wide and deep thinker on a diverse range of issues. The chapters included in this Oxford Handbook cover the full range of Hobbes's thought--his philosophy of logic and language; his view of physics and scientific method; his ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law; and his views of religion, history, and literature. Several of the chapters overlap in fruitful ways, so that the reader can see the richness and depth of Hobbes's thought from a variety of perspectives. The contributors are experts on Hobbes from many countries, whose home disciplines include philosophy, political science, history, and literature. A substantial introduction places Hobbes's work, and contemporary scholarship on Hobbes, in a broad context.
Written during a moment in English history when the political and social structures were in flux and open to interpretation, Leviathan played an essential role in the development of the modern world.
