This study aims to present a new interpretation about the controversy in the Hobbesian reception about its affiliation to the natural law or the positive law. According to Norberto Bobbio, these positions are mutually exclusive. In the first place, we will present the textual passages that enable Hobbes to be considered, on the one hand, as a supporter of iusnaturalism in accordance with the paradigmatic readings of Howard Warrender and Norberto Bobbio and, on the other, or of iuspositivism, according to (...) the readings of Simone Goyard- Fabre and Jean Hampton. In the second, we will demonstrate our interpretation that accommodates both points of view, from a historical rescue of the antiphontean antilogy, considering the textual ambivalence as a Hobbesian philosophical character. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes’ dispute with Dionysius of Halicarnassus over the study of Thucydides’ history allows us to understand both the ancient case for an ennobled public rhetoric and Hobbes’ case against it. Dionysius, concerned with cultivating healthy civic oratory, faced a situation in which Roman rhetoricians were emulating shocking attacks on divine justice such as that found in Thucydides’ Melian dialogue; he attempted to steer orators away from such arguments even as he acknowledged their truth. Hobbes, however, recommends the study of (...) Thucydides’ work for a new kind of political education, one that will benefit from Thucydides’ private, even ‘secret’, instruction, which permits the reader to admit to himself what vanity would otherwise hide from him. (shrink)

This chapter explores why Hobbes produced an edition of Thucydides. In offering an interpretation of this edition in context, the chapter addresses Hobbes’s view of relations between commonwealths and, in particular, of wars of expansion; his analogy between individuals and commonwealths; and the evidence for and the nature of his humanism. Hobbes’s concerns are clarified by considering the domestic and international politics of the 1620s and the contemporary use of classical texts to promote England’s intervention in wars abroad. Hobbes’s critical (...) view of such intervention also encourages us to discern aspects of his later works that have been neglected. (shrink)

Commentators have found Hobbes's translation of Thucydides? history puzzling. It was Hobbes's first publication and it preceded his earliest political treatise by more than a decade. Although towards the end of his life Hobbes himself claimed that he published it in order to warn his compatriots of the dangers of democracy and demagoguery, some commentators have dismissed his explanation as an attempt to tie it to his own political theory, in hindsight. Through an examination of Hobbes's preface and essay on (...) the life and history of Thucydides, published alongside his translation, this paper shows that Hobbes's view of Thucydides and his usefulness remained consistent throughout. Siding with Plutarch, Hobbes valued Thucydides for his ability to turn the auditor into a spectator, thereby protecting him, as far as possible, from the dangers of demagoguery. (shrink)

This original book has been consistently cited by scholars of international relations who explore the roots of realism in Thucydides's history and the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. While acknowledging that neither thinker fits perfectly within the confines of international relations realism, Laurie M. Johnson proposes Hobbes's philosophy is more closely aligned with it than Thucydides's.

This essay argues that Hobbes’s work as a translator was fundamental to his mature political philosophy. A proper appreciation for the significance of Hobbes’s lifelong engagement with the politics of translation clarifies both the relationship between Hobbes’s humanist and scientific work, and the meaning of his simultaneous critique and use of rhetoric in his political writings. Against the interpretation held by many scholars that Hobbes simply traded his early humanist interests for his mature political and scientific views, I demonstrate that (...) Hobbes was consistently concerned with the political instability generated by the vernacular translation of classical Greek and Roman texts. In responding to this instability, Hobbes developed his geometrical approach to speech while also, through his analysis of the relationship between translation and metaphor, finding ways to employ humanist rhetorical techniques consistent with this approach. Yet I show that Hobbes continued to rely on translation in areas of speech where he thought science alone could not provide persuasive answers. (shrink)

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Hobbes's interest in the power of the Image was programmatic, as suggested by his shifts from optics, to sensationalist psychology, to the strategic use of classical history, exemplified by Thucydides and Homer. It put a great resource at the disposal of the state-propaganda machine, with application to the question of state-management and crowd control.

Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is well known for presenting a political philosophy based on a mechanistic account of human beings that offers the pain–pleasure response (or the peace–fear response) as a basis on which to make political choices. Although it has been subjected to countless treatments over the centuries, its account of civil religion in Part 3, “Of a Christian Commonwealth”, based on a highly original reading of the Bible, is deserving of further examination. Following an overview of a long line (...) of pagan and later monotheistic Christian and Muslim thinkers who advance the position that religion is a way of civilizing or uniting the masses, including Thucydides, Cicero, Augustine, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Pomponazzi, amongst others, I argue that Hobbes turns this notion on its head by arguing that religion can cause the de-civilizing of the masses, and indeed can foment civil war, leading him to the solution of separating belief from practice, with the former a solely private matter and the latter the exclusive purview of the state. In its Hobbesian schema, this great divorce of belief and practice – rather than a call for tolerance or pluralism – is sacrifice that is necessary in order to create the religious homogeneity required to sustain the body politic in the form of the great Leviathan. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), whose current reputation rests largely on his political philosophy, was a thinker with wide ranging interests. In philosophy, he defended a range of materialist, nominalist, and empiricist views against Cartesian and Aristotelian alternatives. In physics, his work was influential on Leibniz, and lead him into disputes with Boyle and the experimentalists of the early Royal Society. In history, he translated Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War into English, and later wrote his own history of the Long Parliament. (...) In mathematics he was less successful, and is best remembered for his repeated unsuccessful attempts to square the circle. But despite that, Hobbes was a serious and prominent participant in the intellectual life of his time. (shrink)

This article addresses the modern concept of sovereignty as a multivocal and conflictual semantic field, arguing for the necessity to trace its genealogy based on the structural tensions that haunt its logical framework – as well as its representations – rather than on a linear historiographic reconstruction. In particular, the scrutiny I propose aims to examine a series of exchanges that have been characterizing this concept since the beginning: the global and the European, the maritime and the territorial, the colony (...) and the state, the imperial and the proprietary. The problematic balance between ‘imperium’ and ‘dominium’ is indeed assumed here as the turning point of the rise of a sovereign power that appears to be originally rooted in the very production and governance of the global space, thus giving up all possible Eurocentric narratives of modernity. To illustrate my argument, I focus on the frontispieces to three of Thomas Hobbes’s most important books, that is, his translation of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars, De Cive and Leviathan. A thorough analysis of these images enables us to understand how these lines of force traverse the very heart of modern European political concepts, along with the mirroring effects that constantly bounce their normative construction of subjectivity back and forth from the periphery to the centre and, ultimately, from the market to the state. (shrink)

In this classic analysis, Leo Strauss pinpoints what is original and innovative in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. He argues that Hobbes's ideas arose not from tradition or science but from his own deep knowledge and experience of human nature. Tracing the development of Hobbes's moral doctrine from his early writings to his major work _The Leviathan,_ Strauss explains contradictions in the body of Hobbes's work and discovers startling connections between Hobbes and the thought of Plato, Thucydides, Aristotle, Descartes, (...) Spinoza, and Hegel. (shrink)

Offers comprehensive treatment of Thomas Hobbes’s thought, providing readers with different ways of understanding Hobbes as a systematic philosopher As one of the founders of modern political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes is best known for his ideas regarding the nature of legitimate government and the necessity of society submitting to the absolute authority of sovereign power. Yet Hobbes produced a wide range of writings, from translations of texts by Homer and Thucydides, to interpretations of Biblical books, to works devoted to geometry, (...) optics, morality, and religion. Hobbes viewed himself as presenting a unified method for theoretical and practical science—an interconnected system of philosophy that provides many entry points into his thought. A Companion to Hobbes is an expertly curated collection of essays offering close textual engagement with the thought of Thomas Hobbes in his major works while probing his ideas regarding natural philosophy, mathematics, human nature, civil philosophy, religion, and more. The Companion discusses the ways in which scholars have tried to understand the unity and diversity of Hobbes’s philosophical system and examines the reception of the different parts of Hobbes’s philosophy by thinkers such as René Descartes, Margaret Cavendish, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Presenting a diversity of fresh perspectives by both emerging and established scholars, this volume: Provides a comprehensive treatment of Hobbes’s thought in his works, including Elements of Law, Elements of Philosophy, and Leviathan Explores the connecting points between Hobbes’ metaphysics, epistemology, mathematics, natural philosophy, morality, and civil philosophy Offers readers strategies for understanding how the parts of Hobbes’s philosophical system fit together Examines Hobbes’s philosophy of mathematics and his attempts to understand geometrical objects and definitions Considers Hobbes’s philosophy in contexts such as the natural state of humans, gender relations, and materialist worldviews Challenges conceptions of Hobbes’s moral theory and his views about the rights of sovereigns Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series, A Companion to Hobbes is an invaluable resource for scholars and advanced students of Early modern thought, particularly those from disciplines such as History of Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Intellectual History, History of Politics, Political Theory, and English. (shrink)

The pirate is a figure that is both marginal to war – since he is excluded from it – and central – since he is regularly called upon to define it. From a few evocations of this figure by Bodin, Grotius and Hobbes, all of which are based on Thucydides, we want to bring to light a normativity that is specific and immanent to the space of warlike violence.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Two Books on Thomas HobbesPerez ZagorinQuentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xvi, 477p.The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), lxxxv, 1008p.The literature on Hobbes in English and other European languages has grown so large in the past two decades that it has become almost unmanageable by students of the philosopher. No one who (...) is interested in Hobbes, however, can afford to overlook the two books that are reviewed here, the first, Quentin Skinner’s study of the relationship of Hobbes to rhetoric, and the second, Noel Malcolm’s edition of Hobbes’s correspondence.Skinner is well known not only as a leading British Hobbes scholar and historian of early modern political thought but likewise for his ideas concerning the correct method of studying the history of political philosophy. In a view akin to R. G. Collingwood’s he maintains that there are no permanent or perennial questions in political philosophy and that a historical approach based on a thorough comprehension of context is the only way to grasp what political philosophers are doing and saying when they write their texts. In implementing this prescription, he argues that to understand a historical text it is necessary to reconstruct its author’s intentions and the meaning of his ideas by ascertaining the linguistic conventions and usages and the intellectual currents and back-ground that form its context. He offers the present study both as an exem-plification of this method and as a new interpretation of the principles of Hobbes’s political philosophy which takes rhetoric as its focal theme. His aim, he tells us, is to situate Hobbes’s theory and practice of civil science within its intellectual context and to depict the philosopher less as the author of a philosophical system than as a contributor to a series of debates about the moral sciences within Renaissance culture. Our judgment of the success of his work will accordingly depend on whether or not we are satisfied that rhetoric possessed for Hobbes and his philosophy the crucial significance that Skinner claims for it [End Page 361].In recent years a number of scholars have discussed Hobbes’s attitude to rhetoric, and there have been at least two books on the subject. 1 Commensurate, however, with its ambitious goal of proffering a new interpretation of Hobbes’s work on politics, Skinner’s treatment of his involvement with rhetoric is much richer and far more learned than preceding studies. By rhetoric most people nowadays mean no more than a writer’s literary strategy, but this is not what Skinner intends by the term. He deals with rhetoric precisely as Hobbes would have understood it and in the sense it bore in the ancient world and the Renaissance, when it signified a major discipline of knowledge concerned with the various figures of speech and devices of language that constituted an art of persuasion and eloquence indispensable in the education of the orator, the statesman, the writer, and the gentleman.Skinner perceives Hobbes’s mind as formed in the early years of his career by his classical education and immersion in the literary-rhetorical culture of English Renaissance humanism derived from Greco-Roman antiquity and ancient authors on rhetoric like Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Starting from this point, he pictures Hobbes’s intellectual evolution as consisting of three successive stages: a humanist, a scientific, and a scientific-humanist. In the first, as a late Renaissance intellectual, Hobbes’s initial interest in politics as a civil science was shaped by his involvement in the humanistic disciplines of rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral and political philosophy. The result was the publication in 1629 of his English translation of Thucydides’ History, with the observations contained in his introduction. In the second stage he turned against the literary-rhetorical character of Renaissance culture and its approach to politics. This shift, which occurred in the 1630s, was caused by his discovery of the geometrical method, his pursuit of his scientific interests through his association with Sir Charles Cavendish and his friends, and his introduction to the Parisian scientific circle of Marin... (shrink)

While critics have relied upon bibliographical data and his translation of Thucydides to establish the early Thomas Hobbes as a humanist, this essay argues that substantive evidence to support this conclusion can be found in the comparatively neglected discourses of the Horae Subsecivae. Reading Hobbe's contribution to the Horae alongside his translation of Thucydides reveals a consistent concern with the political potential of both verbal and visual images and with the dangers rhetorical manipulation could pose to individual and sovereign authority. (...) Together these texts demonstrate an early Hobbes already deeply invested in the political debates and crises of his era. (shrink)

This paper aims at thoroughly analyzing the relation between Thucydides’s political realism and Hobbes’s one, first of all by examining the Hobbesian translation of The Peloponnesian War, then by stressing the peculiarities of the political theory of the English philosopher. Compared to Thucydides, Hobbes presents a more complex, problematic – and truly more useful to define a theory of modernity – version of political realism, which considers not only power and security, but also ideological elements in order to understand human (...) conflicts. (shrink)

Parmi les différentes conceptualisations dont le phénomène de la guerre a pu faire l'objet, l'oeuvre de Thomas Hobbes et celle de Cari von Clausewitz se sont souvent trouvées rangées, depuis le développement du champ disciplinaire des relations internationales en particulier, parmi des auteurs dits " réalistes " tels que Thucydide ou Machiavel notamment. Or leur pensée respective semble échapper à toutes les formes de catégorisation : ni pur " réalisme ", ni bellicisme, ni pensée de la " raison d'Etat ", (...) d'une part, ni idéalisme, "pacifisme ", ou pensée de la guerre juste, d'autre part, l'oeuvre de Hobbes et celle de Clausewitz occupent une place à part parmi ceux qui, semblablement à eux, ont pris la guerre pour objet de leur réflexion. Malgré les deux siècles et bien d'autres choses qui les séparent, une pensée hétérodoxe de la guerre se fait ainsi écho à travers elles. Hobbes comme Clausewitz s'efforcent en effet d'appréhender la guerre, non point en juristes, tel Hugo Grotius, ni même en spécialistes de l'art de la guerre, comme Machiavel, ou bien encore en moralistes, tel Juste Lipse, mais bel et bien en tant que théoriciens soucieux de saisir la logique présidant aux rapports conflictuels entre les êtres humains, c'est-à-dire à la fois la suite des causes et des effets conduisant à la guerre et l'ensemble des règles commandant le déroulement de cette dernière une fois enclenchée. Le tableau de la guerre qu'offrent par conséquent Hobbes et Clausewitz à leurs lecteurs, bien qu'il puisse paraître sombre ou cynique, n'est pas celui de la déraison ou d'une hybris totalement déchaînée : loin de présenter la guerre comme un phénomène inextricable, chacun s'efforce, à sa façon, de rendre intelligible le phénomène guerrier, d'en mettre à nu les principes et les ressorts à la fois passionnels et rationnels, nécessaires et contingents. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.1 (2004) 101-103 [Access article in PDF] Cees Leijenhorst. The Mechanization of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes' Natural Philosophy. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Pp. xv + 242. Cloth, $97.00. Cees Leijenhorst, the young Dutch scholar and student of the late Karl Schuhmann, has written the most important book on Thomas Hobbes's natural science since Frithiof Brandt's Thomas Hobbes's Mechanical Conception of (...) Nature of 1928. This is true despite the undoubted brilliance and success of Leviathan and the Air Pump, published in 1985 by Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin. Why this is so, it will be the burden of this review to clarify.Writing in the modern historiographical tradition known as contextualism, long associated with John Pocock, Quentin Skinner and Richard Tuck, Leijenhorst seeks to locate Hobbes within the horizon of that current of natural thought that began with Aristotle, led through antiquity and then flourished and came to predominate with the West's recovery of the Stagirite in the late Middle Ages. The course of so long a filiation of ideas cannot be the subject of a book whose length is under 250 pages, though a companion collection of essays on Aristotle and his long progeny, edited by Leijenhorst and others, has also appeared [End Page 101] (to be reviewed in the Journal). Instead, Leijenhorst focuses on the last, self-avowed inheritors and developers of that tradition, known as late Aristotelianism, though precisely how to define that tradition is itself problematized.Classically trained, Hobbes was well equipped to study Aristotle directly in Greek, without intermediaries; he early on published a translation of Thucydides. Still, Leijenhorst's concern is less to draw Hobbes closer to Aristotle than to relate him both to his immediate intellectual predecessors and to his own contemporaries, though, in each case, for different reasons. In the former, Leijenhorst convincingly argues that, as Gilson showed for Descartes, Hobbes assumed, drew upon, adopted and modified prevailing Aristotelian doctrines, even as he famously condemned their ancient author. And, Hobbes's sources, as they themselves interpreted, rejected and modified the views of their forebear, were rather various, including such writers of manuals as Bartholomaeus Anglicus and John Case, as well as others whose interests and directions were more varied and less conservative, including Scaliger, Rudolph Goclenius and Otto Casmann.A common source for both these strains of late Aristotelianism was the great stream of commentaries produced largely by members of the Jesuit Order from the middle of the sixteenth century onward, including Franciscus Toletus, Antonio Rubio, Petrus Fonseca, as well as Franciscus Suarez and members of other orders.This stream of thought also fed into the confessional strife of post-Reformation Europe, so that both Lutherans and Calvinists developed their own Aristotelianisms. One of the most striking conclusions of Leijenhorst's work is that, in characterizing both Aristotle's and his own metaphysics (or philosophia prima) as a universal science rather than as a particular theological science, Hobbes is an heir of this "Protestant ontology."Finally, Hobbes looked to the great names of natural-scientific thinking in sixteenth-century Italy, Zabarella, Pomponazzi, Fracastoro, Telesio and Campanella. Like Hobbes, these latter authors, "though vehemently anti-Aristotelian," nonetheless "exploited kinematic, empiricist and materialist tendencies found within the Aristotelian tradition itself, particularly in the School of Padua" (11).Such investigations into sources and lines of argument illuminate relations with predecessors and contemporaries in ways that social-constructivist accounts, like those of Schaeffer and Shapin and of the Edinburgh sociologist of knowledge David Bloor, may not accomplish. The author gives one instance of direct conflict between the results of that school and his own contextualism which illustrates this larger point.In his fight with Boyle, Hobbes is at pains to deny the existence of the void. Though he came to reject it rather late in his scientific thinking, the void, Schaffer and Shapin suggest, served to give space to the "incorporeal substances," similar to the scholastics' "abstract essences," upon which the latter erected the "kingdom of darkness" that... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Scholars have analysed in-depth the famous three greatest things linking Thomas Hobbes and Thucydides. As is well known, the ideas of fear, honour and profit – that is, timé, déos and opheléia – play a fundamental role in showing the latter’s influences on the former. With particular regard to ophelía it has been suggested that it has to be conceived ‘as economic advantage or interest’ [Slomp Gabriella, ‘Hobbes, Thucydides and the Three Greatest Things’, History of Political Thought 11 : (...) 565–86]. Since Thucydides’ lexicon uses several words in addition to opheléia to express the idea of profit, the essay, through a comparative lexical analysis of the original Greek text and its Hobbesian translation, will take these into consideration, in order to find out if they can provide us with elements capable of widening the above definition. All this to better clarify the notion of profit, a notion that is truly crucial in Hobbes’ political thought. (shrink)

‘Saepe stilum vertas’, says Horace; and he had excellent company in his friend Virgil, who wrote the Aeneid at the rate of only about 900 lines a year, and spent hours in licking his verses into shape. It would have been instructive to sit at the elbow of these two poets, to see what they altered and what they rejected. It is clear, e.g., that there were certain caesural arrangements which Virgil deliberately affected and others which he as deliberately avoided. (...) But what of the care taken by these and other classical authors in arranging sounds in relation to mood or idea? This present incomplete essay is written frankly with scepticism in regard to dogmatic comments on certain particular points. It has been perilously easy to frame legislation on the basis of a predilection bolstered up by one or two instances. Even in the field of syntax we have seen generalizations on too narrow a foundation. An editor of Andocides enunciates ‘a very important principle of the language, which is rigidly observed by the best writers; viz., that, when a participle and a verb of different government are referred to the same object, the case of that object depends on the participle and not at all on the verb… Shilleto's remarks on this point must be excused, as evidently written hastily.’ But a casual cast of the net brings up about a score of violations of this principle from Homer to Menander. Where does the editor propose to draw the line between the respectable and the declassé Greek writers? Aristophanes, though cited in support, is actually flagrantly lawless in the matter; and with him must go not only Homer and Hyperides but Sophocles, Euripides, Menander, Xenophon, Lysias, and Plato, leaving among the élite, as cited by this editor, only Thucydides, Antiphon, and Aeschines; and one is entitled to doubt even their rigid observance of the law until they have actually been brought to court. In problems of rhythm, also, one has to be careful to use evidence as against preconception. When an editor hacks and fits the dactylics of Ennius so as to eradicate all feet beginning with two short syllables, it is as impious as recarving a statue by Daedalus because it does not conform to the canon of Polyclitus; and one may be forgiven if now and then one interprets the editor's corr. in his apparatus criticus not as correxi but as corrupi. (shrink)

Benner, Erica. Machiavelli’s Ethics. Princeton, 2009. 527p bibl index afp; ISBN 9780691141763, $75.00; ISBN 9780691141770 pbk, $35.00.

Reviewed in CHOICE, April 2010

This major new study of Machiavelli’s moral and political philosophy by Benner (Yale) argues that most readings of Machiavelli suffer from a failure to appreciate his debt to Greek sources, particularly the Socratic tradition of moral and political philosophy. Benner argues that when read in the light of his Greek sources, Machiavelli appears as much less the immoralist or sophist (...) he often is taken for and instead as a serious moral philosopher very much concerned with the republican ideals of justice and the rule of law. The author does not ignore Machiavelli’s more infamous dicta, but argues that a careful reading shows that they are expressions of views he ultimately rejects. Particularly noteworthy here is her careful attention to Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories.
Benner’s reading of Machiavelli is far too complex and subtle for such a brief summary. Her research is meticulous and her arguments finely honed. This important contribution to both Machiavelli studies and the history of political philosophy will be indispensable for scholars.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and faculty/researchers. — B. T. Harding

Endorsements:

"Machiavelli's Ethics is a superb scholarly book. Erica Benner does truly impressive work in analyzing Machiavelli's views on the most fundamental ethical issues--including necessity and virtue, justice and injustice, and ends and means. She shows, with very solid evidence, that Machiavelli did in fact worry a lot about justice and that he put it at the core of his republican theory."--Maurizio Viroli, author of Niccolò's Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli

"Machiavelli's Ethics is excellent--learned, subtle, highly original, and a constant pleasure to read. And, since it is really a study of Machiavelli's thought in its entirety, it is also the first book of its kind. Its originality lies in taking seriously the claim by some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers--notably Bacon, Spinoza, and Alberico Gentili--that Machiavelli was essentially a moral and political philosopher. Erica Benner does a brilliant job of resurrecting this neglected Machiavelli."--Giulia Sissa, University of California, Los Angeles


About the book, from the publisher:
Machiavelli's Ethics challenges the most entrenched understandings of Machiavelli, arguing that he was a moral and political philosopher who consistently favored the rule of law over that of men, that he had a coherent theory of justice, and that he did not defend the "Machiavellian" maxim that the ends justify the means. By carefully reconstructing the principled foundations of his political theory, Erica Benner gives the most complete account yet of Machiavelli's thought. She argues that his difficult and puzzling style of writing owes far more to ancient Greek sources than is usually recognized, as does his chief aim: to teach readers not how to produce deceptive political appearances and rhetoric, but how to see through them. Drawing on a close reading of Greek authors--including Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, and Plutarch--Benner identifies a powerful and neglected key to understanding Machiavelli.

This important new interpretation is based on the most comprehensive study of Machiavelli's writings to date, including a detailed examination of all of his major works: The Prince, The Discourses, The Art of War, and Florentine Histories. It helps explain why readers such as Bacon and Rousseau could see Machiavelli as a fellow moral philosopher, and how they could view The Prince as an ethical and republican text. By identifying a rigorous structure of principles behind Machiavelli's historical examples, the book should also open up fresh debates about his relationship to later philosophers, including Rousseau, Hobbes, and Kant.
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The First Great Political Realist is a succinct and penetrating analysis of one of the ancient world's foremost political realists, Kautilya. Kautilya's treatise Arthashastra stands as one of the great political books of the ancient world, its ideas on the science of politics strikingly similar to those of Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Clausewitz, and even Sun Tsu. Roger Boesche's excellent commentary on Kautilya's voluminous text draws out the essential realist arguments for modern political analysis and demonstrates the continued relevance of Kautilya's (...) work to modern Indian strategic thinking and our understanding of the relationship between politics and economics. (shrink)

Theory and practice, reason and revelation, ancients and moderns are the key themes running through the eighteen studies of the literature of political philosophy in Reason's Inquisition. Alfarabi is a pivotal figure, but the range is wide, from Plato and Thucydides to Shakespeare and Hobbes, extending to such contemporary figures as Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How We Write Plagues JAMES UDEN One advantage of writing about historical pandemics is that they have already occurred. From where I sit, as I listen to the loudspeaker on the council truck telling me to stay indoors, it is impossible to know what direction the covid-19 crisis will take. Certainly, aspects of the virus’s social impact have mirrored the trajectory of previous pandemics. Back in February, people in (...) France began circulating the phrase Je ne suis pas un virus, protesting acts of violence against Asian communities and resisting the well-documented tendency for societies to target ethnic minorities as scapegoats for epidemic disease. The President’s labeling of covid-19 as the “Chinese virus” aroused similar protest in the United States.1 At an armed rally at the state house in Lansing, MI, armed protesters demanded the reopening of businesses despite public health advice to the contrary, an act that raised familiar questions about the freedom of the individual versus the health of the collective in times of health crisis. Here in Boston, anti-lockdown protesters assembled at the Massachusetts State House on May 4, chanting “no more dictatorship”—language congenial to Boston’s history of colonial rebellion, though not especially fitting to the crisis at hand. Just one day earlier, a banner had flown over the buildings of Manhattan with the words CAPITALISM IS THE PANDEMIC. Whether the virus will redistribute power and become, in Walter Scheidel’s words, a “great leveler,” remains to be seen.2 arion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 Hunter H. Gardner, Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. x + 303 pages. $90.00. Brian Walters, The Deaths of the Republic: Imagery of the Body Politic in Ciceronian Rome, 2020. xv + 158 pages. $80.00. 132 how we write plagues Given that we have frequently been reminded that we are facing a pandemic of historic proportions, it is natural that people have turned to history for perspective. Daniel Defoe’s journalistic account of plague in London in 1665, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), has catapulted to an unlikely relevance, promoted on the publisher’s website as the “surprise ‘must-read’ for people facing the covid-19 epidemic.” Thucydides ’ description of Athens’s experience of the plague in 430 bc has made news in The Economist, The Washington Post and The Guardian. Historical accounts of plagues are regularly being called upon to offer advice to the present. Yet not all plagues are alike. Historians have rightly protested about parallels being made between covid-19 and the aids crisis, since the current emergency response contrasts damningly with the Reagan government’s protracted silence and willful ignorance throughout the 1980s.3 One problem is the word “plague” itself, a term too suggestive of sin to represent the devastating impartiality of viral disease. “Plagues,” Susan Sontag wrote in aids and its Metaphors (1988), are “inflicted, not just endured.” She argued that the term imposed additional burdens on patients, who were portrayed as suffering some punishment, and could not simply be ill.4 To speak of “plagues” in the plural also suggests a common experience across time, a regular and shared event. Literary accounts of the plague do indeed share many common tropes. Yet there are important differences in the way communities have responded to outbreaks in different eras, and significant divergences in the meaning of disease. Accounts of plagues understandably arouse interest during a pandemic, but they are apt to mislead us, because the plagues so often look the same. One unshakable constant is the analogy between the body and the state, the “body politic.” As has long been recognized, the symbol surfaces across many, unrelated world cultures.5 In seeking to explain a unity composed of many parts, human beings have tended to look to the most immediate parallel— themselves. Although it has been invoked famously to justify James Uden 133 hierarchies within the state (Livy, Shakespeare, Hobbes), the image seems to resonate most intuitively when it conceptualizes danger, when the “health” of the state is threatened by “infection” or “disease.” In 2009, psychologists asked sixty -nine undergraduates at the University of Arizona to read a popular... (shrink)

While most discussions of political realism in the West draw their inspiration from thinkers such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, they were far from the only political theorists developing such an approach. Rather, we see realist approaches to politics not only in a vast array of European thinkers throughout history, but also in in a diverse range of non-European traditions. From Kautilya’s 2nd c. BCE Sanskrit classic to the eponymously named Han Feizi from China, a variety of realist visions were (...) developed alongside arguments detailing structural problems in the more idealist political visions of their rivals. One such thinker, whose ideas have largely been lost to the contemporary world was the Chinese philosopher Shen Dao (c. 350-275 BCE). -/- One of the most philosophical intriguing arguments Shen Dao develops focuses on the sources of political resentment and the necessity of eliminating them as a prerequisite to a strong and stable society and state. This essay develops Shen Dao’s argument that resentment arises not merely when people’s desires are not fulfilled but rather when there was an expectation that they could have been fulfilled and work to demonstrate how he envisions eliminating sources of resentment in the political sphere. In doing so, it engages with much more prevalent Confucian views, demonstrating that Shen Dao presents a trenchant criticism of one of the very bases of Confucian political philosophy and, indeed any political theory that develops itself from moral foundations. -/- This paper closes with an analysis of how Shen Dao’s ideas may be brought into conversation with those of political realists more familiar to a Western audience, with a goal of “pursuing the ideal of working with similarities in differences and differences in similarities.” In particular it raises the question for students of why the worries of resentment were not foregrounded in the West in the way that they were by Chinese realists. This provides students with entry into examining the ways in which different cultures approach very similar topics and allows us to more deeply reflect not only on why certain things were emphasized in a particular tradition but why others were de-emphasized or seemingly ignored. (shrink)

While most discussions of political realism in the West draw their inspiration from thinkers such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, they were far from the only political theorists developing such an approach. Rather, we see realist approaches to politics not only in a vast array of European thinkers throughout history, but also in a diverse range of non-European traditions. One such thinker, whose ideas have largely been lost to the contemporary world, was the Chinese philosopher Shen Dao, who focuses on (...) the sources of political resentment and the necessity of eliminating them as a prerequisite to a strong and stable society and state. This essay develops Shen Dao’s argument that resentment arises not merely when people’s desires are not fulfilled, but rather when there was an expectation that they could have been fulfilled and works to demonstrate how he envisions eliminating sources of resentment in the political sphere. In doing so, this essay engages with much more prevalent Confucian views, demonstrating that Shen Dao presents a trenchant criticism of one of the very bases of Confucian political philosophy and, indeed, any political theory that develops itself from moral foundations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aux marges des dialogues de Platon: Essai d'histoire anthropologique de la philosophie ancienneAlessandra FussiMarie-Laurence Desclos. Aux marges des dialogues de Platon: Essai d'histoire anthropologique de la philosophie ancienne. Grenoble: Millon, 2003. Pp. 286. Paper, €27,00.The book takes its bearings from Plato's knowledge of Herodotus's and Thucydides' writings as it is witnessed in such dialogues as the Menexenus, the Timaeus, the Critias and the Laws. Plato not only indirectly (...) quotes from both authors, but also frequently plays with chronology and the relationship between historical events. What motivates Plato's interest in historical events? Is it possible to speak of a Platonic philosophy of history? Before addressing such questions, the author devotes several chapters to a very detailed and insightful study of the meaning(s) of "historiography" in Herodotus and Thucydides. The first chapter examines different contemporary views concerning Herodotus's and Thucydides' attitude towards their sources. Desclos sides with those who underlie the distance between modern theories of historical sources and ancient historical literature. The ancients had no theory of objective sources. Rather, they focused on the subjective means employed, such as the historian's own sense of sight, and his good judgment. As to the witnesses of the past, the accent was not as much on their reliability as it was on their plausibility vis-à-vis the opinions of the historian himself.Chapters II and III are devoted respectively to Thucydides' employment of the rhetorical instruments of the law courts, and to the stylistic and methodic proximity of Herodotus's Histories to the Corpus Hippocraticum. Both chapters oppose the view that the two ancient historians identify their task as "critical history," i.e., as an attempt to free the historical attitude towards facts and events from the subjective aspects of rhetoric, poetry, and religion, where persuasion and chance play a major role. Thucydides' language is rooted in the law courts. However, Desclos argues, the place he occupies in the Peloponnesian War is not that of the impartial judge—as N. Loraux and C. Darbo-Peshanski have suggested—but that of the defendant's attorney. He is much closer to Antiphon's antidikoi—whose ability he extols in VIII, 68, 1-2—than to the modern, impartial judge. The main stress of the methodological chapters in Book I of the Peloponnesian War, then, is not as much on the critical attitude that the historian must have towards his different kinds of sources, as it is on the attempt to persuade the readers that he is true to the facts, while his opponents and competitors are not. In this sense, Desclos agrees with Lloyd that we are in the presence of a "rhetoric of legitimation." According to this interpretation, then, Thucydides' text assigns his ideal reader a passive role. He is meant to be persuaded, conquered, and entirely a-critical (62).Chapter III argues that Herodotus's Histories give their ideal reader an entirely different role. Desclos focuses here on the analogy between medicine and writing, and on Herodotus's preference for Greek medicine, which uses "sweet" methods, over Persian medicine, characterized by harshness and violence. The Greek doctors' superiority ultimately resides in their ability to enroll the patients in the fight against illness. Analogously, the superiority of the Greek historian resides in his ability to accommodate his writings to the reader in such a way that the latter may become an active participant in the historical inquiry. Herodotus does not pretend to be above all opinions. He clearly states his opinions, but by treating them as such he allows the reader to take position, to be "interactive" with the written work (85). [End Page 203]This interesting analysis bears its fruits in the last chapters devoted to Plato. Desclos suggests that the anonymous and silent interlocutor in such dialogues as the Charmides, the Lysis and the Republic plays an important philosophical function, by circumscribing a dialogical empty space that the reader is invited to fill (220). This takes Herodotus's strategy a step forward, since the truly philosophical nature of the Platonic dialogue lies thereby in its openness to the reader. Unfortunately Desclos's chapters on Plato are not as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thucydides: The Peloponnesian WarSimon HornblowerSteven Lattimore, trans. Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War. With introduction and notes. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1998. xxii + 513 pp. 4 maps. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $12.95.This translation is generally faithful and readable, with many excellent notes. It is clearly the product of much labor and valuable thought. In accuracy (with the exceptions noted below) it is superior to Warner, though less faithful than Hobbes. (...) However, it is marred by omissions and garbling of names, which should be put right urgently in a reprinting, and the emphasis of the notes is uneven in important respects.1. Omissions: whole chunks of Greek are sometimes omitted.a. The worst, because longest, instance is 5.111.4: an entire eight–line paragraph of Greek has disappeared from the translation of the Melian Dialogue, containing among other things the Athenians' "moderate proposal" that the Melians should agree to accept tributary status.b. At 3.105.2 has disappeared from the translation, which is in fact ungrammatical English at this point ("set up camp at in Amphilochia").c. At 4.121.1 the interesting words have not been translated (did the people of Skione "go up to greet" Brasidas or did they "offer him first–fruits"?). [End Page 646]d. At 6.9.2, Nikias' first speech at Athens before the Sicilian expedition,, is not translated.e. At 7.71.5 (great sea battle in Syracuse harbor) is not translated.2. Proper names garbled: names of persons and places are regularly garbled or got wrong. This is specially regrettable in a book which rightly sees names as important, without however considering how the evidence of epigraphy might bear on the question. See for instance the ingenious note on "Philokrates son of Demeas" on p. 301 (Th. 5.116), or that on the patronymics on p. 414 (note on 8.5), or that on Euphemos ("Good speaker" as Lattimore renders it, though "auspicious" might be closer) on p. 346 (Th. 6.81–87). Here, however, "almost certainly" is much too strong for the various identifications suggested, in view of the commonness of the name Euphemos at Athens; see the entry in vol. II (1994) of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (1987–), a work never cited by Lattimore. In the following list I give Lattimore's page numbers with Thucydidean references in parentheses:27 (1.52) for "Leagoras" read "Leogoras"; 52 (1.107) for "Kitinion" read "Kytinion"; 67 (1.139) for "Milesippos" read "Melesippos" (correct at 2.12); 80 (2.12) for "Diaokritos" read "Diakritos"; 84 (2.19) for "Rhetoi" read "Rheitoi"; 108 (2.66) for "Anaristos" read "Aneristos"; 125 (2.96) for "Triballio" read "Triballoi"; 142 (3.26) for "Kleombrotos" read "Kleomenes"; 144 (3.31) for "Tein" read "Teian"; 175 (3.93) for "Kenion" read "Kenaion"; 214, 261, and 274 (4.56, 5.14, and 5.41) for "Kynosouria" read "Kynouria"; 224 (4.78) for "Striophokos" read the good epigraphically attested Thessalian name "Strophakos"; 225 (4.78) for "Phagion" read "Phakion"; 238 (4.107) for "Gelepsis" read "Galepsos"; 242 (4.118) for "Tomeos" read "Tomeus"; 254 (5.1 and in footnote) for "Pharnakos" read "Pharnakes"; 263 (5.18) for "Spartalos" read "Spartolos," and for "Ptoleon" read "Pteleon"; 308 (6.4) for "Krataimones" read "Krataimenes," and for "Anaxilos" read "Anaxilas"; 310 (6.8) for "Laches" read "Lamachos"; 335 (6.59) for "Hippokles" read "Hippoklos"; 339 (6.65) for "Symaistos" read "Symaithos"; 339 (6.66) for "Anopos" read "Anapos," as also at pp. 355 (6.96) and 381 (7.42), but note that at p. 402 (7.78) the name has come out as "Anopis"; 359 (6.105) for "Laispodios" read "Laispodias"; 386 (7.50) for "Kyrnaians" read "Kyrenaians"; 416 (8.10 n.) for "Speraion" read "Speiraion"; 431 (8.44) for "Kamieros" read "Kameiros"; 465 (8.101) for "Lektos" read "Lekton." Most of these names are, oddly enough, given correctly in the index. "Anapos" is correct on map 3.3. Omission of variant readings of proper names: since Lattimore does sometimes discuss textual variants and emendations, I give some other places where it would have been helpful to flag a variant.a. P. 224 (4.76): Ptoiodoros is... (shrink)

This paper consists of three parts. The first is devoted to the role of the Athenian plague in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. There are indications that the civil war that broke out in the country, weakened by plague, was not simply the result of a historical and degraded human nature. Instead of using evil human nature as the key for understanding each social conflict, I suggest interpreting the Athenian civil war as a symptom of non-egalitarian social relations. The (...) second part of the paper is devoted to the birth of modern capitalism and the analysis of Thomas Hobbes’ philosophy. An English philosopher, Hobbes not only translated The History of the Peloponnesian War, but was also an author who treated the reality of modern civil wars as a principal point of reference. Hobbes created his philosophy mainly as a result of fearing a conflict that could undermine the existing division of power and wealth. The result of this fear was a mechanism that I refer to as the paradox of sovereign power. It was a process during which the authority that had been established to defend society against lawlessness and chaos dominated the social life, not respecting existing laws and customs, and thus creating the very world it was supposed to protect the people from. The third part is devoted to Walter Benjamin’s criticism of sovereign power. Observing the same processes as Hobbes did, the German philosopher viewed them from the inside. Benjamin argued that the social order established at the threshold of modernity was built on unlawful violence and that the condition for its duration was the permanent reproduction of this lawlessness. According to Benjamin, this vicious circle of violence can only be escaped by recovering the memory of folk traditions, past class struggles, lost revolutions and social systems that, like the Paris Commune, pose the possibility of life liberated from the yoke. (shrink)

This comprehensive volume contains much of the important work in political and social philosophy from ancient times until the end of the nineteenth century. The anthology offers both depth and breadth in its selection of material by central figures, while also representing other currents of political thought. Thucydides, Seneca, and Cicero are included along with Plato and Aristotle; Al-Farabi, Marsilius of Padua, and de Pizan take their place alongside Augustine and Aquinas; Astell and Constant are presented in the company of (...) Locke, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft. -/- The editors have made every effort to include translations that are both readable and reliable. Every selection has been painstakingly annotated, and each figure is given a substantial introduction highlighting his or her major contribution within the tradition. In order to ensure the highest standards of accuracy and accessibility, the editors have consulted dozens of leading academics during the course of the anthology's development (a number of whom have contributed introductory material as well as advice). The result is an anthology with unparalleled pedagogical benefits, and one that truly breaks new ground. -/- . (shrink)

This is a well-conceived attempt to present a survey of thirteen "classic" political theories, beginning with Thucydides and ending with J. S. Mill, and simultaneously to suggest similarities between each and some contemporary trend in political thought. Bluhm admittedly borrows heavily from earlier commentaries in summarizing and criticizing the classics; his originality lies in his systematic efforts at "bridge building," as he styles it, in a field where an alleged conflict between ancients and moderns has been provoking much unnecessary acerbity. (...) One may criticize Bluhm's fundamental division between "noumenalists" and "naturalists" or his rather unsure handling of Rousseau, but some of his suggested comparisons—e.g., of Lipset with Aristotle or of modern game theory with Hobbes' method—are most illuminating.—W. L. M. (shrink)

Le Leviathan, en langue latine, qui se trouve ici traduit pour la premiere fois dans son integralite en francais, n'a vu le jour qu'en 1668, mais son contenu ne se reduit aucunement a la version anglaise publiee 17 ans auparavant. Au lieu de constituer une transposition fidele du texte de 1651, ce deuxieme Leviathan doit etre tenu, de plein droit, comme un autre Leviathan. La connaissance achevee de la philosophie politique de Hobbes exige ainsi de ne pas laisser ce texte (...) latin dans l'ombre du texte anglais. En effet, apres les critiques d'atheisme et d'opportunisme qui lui furent adressees, ce nouvel ouvrage premunit Hobbes contre toute accusation d'heresie, en dotant d'une fonction doctrinale essentielle le refus de subordonner le pouvoir politique au pouvoir ecclesiastique. Le Leviathan latin a ainsi pour originalite l'accentuation de la dimension theologico-politique de son enseignement moral et politique, d'ou le caractere indispensable de ce texte pour la connaissance de l'oeuvre de Hobbes. (shrink)

This comprehensive volume contains much of the important work in political and social philosophy from ancient times until the end of the nineteenth century. The anthology offers both depth and breadth in its selection of material by central figures, while also representing other currents of political thought. Thucydides, Seneca, and Cicero are included along with Plato and Aristotle; Al-Farabi, Marsilius of Padua, and de Pizan take their place alongside Augustine and Aquinas; Astell and Constant are presented in the company of (...) Locke, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft. The editors have made every effort to include translations that are both readable and reliable. Every selection has been painstakingly annotated, and each figure is given a substantial introduction highlighting his or her major contribution within the tradition. In order to ensure the highest standards of accuracy and accessibility, the editors have consulted dozens of leading academics during the course of the anthology’s development (a number of whom have contributed introductory material as well as advice). The result is an anthology with unparalleled pedagogical benefits, and one that truly breaks new ground. (shrink)