The leviathan and the chimera

Gian Vincenzo Gravina’s Hobbesianism and its limits

Bibliographic Data

ID11344978
AuthorsNathaniel K Gilmore (0000-0002-3143-7884, The University of Texas at Austin, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume49
Issue6
Pages926-941
Publication date2023-08-18
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory of European Ideas (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0191-6599 • E-ISSN: 1873-541X
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01916599.2023.2198543
OpenAlexW4362670814
LanguageEN
References cited40

In his political thought, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy’s premier jurist, Gian Vincenzo Gravina, adopted a Hobbesian state of nature, a Hobbesian social contract, and a Hobbesian idea of law as collective will; he fused these ideas with the Roman legal tradition, a tradition that he trained in and later ordered when he wrote his masterpiece, the Three Books on the Origins of the Civil Law. But Gravina was more than a Roman Hobbesian. While he held a Hobbesian view of political legitimacy, he also held an anti-Hobbesian view of human life’s true ends. Gravina set out to restore these true ends – reason, virtue, and internal tranquility – and to do that he turned to Plato. In synthesizing Hobbes’s legal innovations with prior understandings of law, Gravina demonstrates just how far those innovations reached in eighteenth-century Europe

Legitimacy · LEVIATHAN (cipher · Political science · Politics · Social contract · State (computer science · Theology · Virtue · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical Economic and Legal Thought · Law · Philosophy · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

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