Contract Theory in Historical Context

Essays on Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke
Erscheinungsjahr 2010
ISBN: 978-90-04-18425-1
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 187, 190 Seiten, Format (B × H): 165 mm x 246 mm, Gewicht: 458 g

Reihe: Brill's Studies in Intellectual History

These essays contest the truism that the social contract is a modern political idea. Just as Rawls came to acknowledge that his political theory built in the parochial horizon of his time, Hobbes’s, Grotius’s, and Locke’s theories presuppose their ancien regime world. Despite their universalizing language, Hobbes’s and Locke’s theories addressed the age-old issue of resistance to tyrants and assumed the framework of hereditary monarchy. Essays in the volume also relate the logic of their contract claims back to Bodin’s and Grotius’s defenses of absolute sovereignty and direct attention to the affinity between an ‘absolutism of fear’ and Hume’s sensibility. For politically-inclined readers, these theories come to life by being read as treatises on politics in the early-modern state.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Baumgold, Deborah

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface
Abbreviations

PART I: AN ANCIEN REGIME QUESTION: RESISTANCE
1. Hobbes’s and Locke’s Contract Theories: Political not Metaphysical
2. Pacifying Politics: Resistance, Violence, and Accountability in Seventeenth-Century Contract Theory

PART II: AN ANCIEN REGIME HORIZON: PARTICULARITY AND UNIVERSALITY
3. When Hobbes Needed History
4. Hobbesian Absolutism and the Paradox in Modern Contractarianism

PART III: ANCIEN REGIME BOOKS: SERIAL COMPOSITION
5. The Composition of Hobbes’s Elements of Law
6. The Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation

AFTERWORD
7. Afterword: Theorists of the Absolutist State

Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Deborah Baumgold, Ph.D. (1980) in Political Science, Princeton University, is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon.