Educating the Body Politic

How Hobbes’s Civil Science Strengthens and Constrains the Sovereign

Dados Bibliográficos

ID6356487
AutoresZachariah Black (0000-0003-2118-741X, University of Toronto, autor correspondente)
Ano2024
Volume56
Fascículo2
Páginas230-251
Data de publicação2024-04-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoPolity (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0032-3497 • E-ISSN: 1744-1684
EditoraUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/729279
OpenAlexW4392154107
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas35

This article argues that the teaching of Leviathan's doctrine in the universities is meant to contribute to a language of politics within which the sovereign will be pressured to operate by procedural considerations. The sovereign's reach over citizens is attenuated by the apparatus of government, as Hobbes's first description of the Leviathan makes clear, and Hobbes expected the sovereign's ministers, suitably trained in his doctrine, to have a mediating effect on the sovereign's power. The sovereign's laws are to be enacted and enforced by ministers who have been educated in Hobbesian civil science and therefore expect that the sovereign will rule in accordance with that science. Even ordinary citizens will be familiar with the broad outlines of Hobbesian civil science and will notice when laws and policies fail to perform the business of the state. When Leviathan's doctrines are publicly taught, sovereignty is strengthened by a teaching so favorable to sovereign power, but it is also constrained insofar as those doctrines set expectations for how the ruler will exercise their power. It is not in acts of individual or collective resistance that the sovereign's commands are to be moderated in the direction of the common good, but through the expectations of subjects, and especially of those subjects who serve as ministers, set by sovereigns themselves through the public promulgation of Leviathan's doctrine

Body politic · Environmental ethics · Law and economics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Sovereignty · Law · Marxism and Critical Theory · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought