The question this essay sets out to answer is what role God plays in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, in the book “Of a Christian Common-wealth”, in relationship to humans as moral beings. The question is relevant as the religious aspects of Hobbes’s thinking cannot be ignored, although Hobbes most likely had rather secular and sceptical philosophical views. In order to answer the research question Leviathan’s “Of a Christian Common-wealth” will be compared and contrasted with two contextual works: the canonical theological document of the Anglican Church, the Thirty-Nine Articles (1571), and Presbyterian-Anglican document the Westminster Confession (1648). Also, recent scholarly works on Hobbes and more general reference works will be employed and discussed. Hobbes’s views provide a seemingly unsolvable paradox. On the one hand, God is either portrayed, or becomes by consequence of his sceptical and secular state thinking, a distant God in relationship to moral humans in “Of a Christian Common-wealth”. Also, the freedom humans seem to have in making their own moral decisions, whether based on natural and divine, or positive laws, appears to obscure God’s almightiness. On the other hand, when placing Hobbes in context, Hobbes appears to have espoused Calvinist views, with beliefs in predestination and that God is the cause of everything. Rather paradoxically it not unlikely that Hobbes espoused both the views that appear to obscure the role of God, and his more Calvinistic views.

In his defense of negative freedom, Isaiah Berlin&rsquo / s main target is the political voluntarism of enlightenment rationalism which has paved way to totalitarian and authoritarian political regimes of the 20th century which brought the sacrifice of individual freedom. For Berlin, in contrast to Platonic realism of enlightenment rationalism in which there is a substantial belief in reason&rsquo / s capacity for giving us the knowledge of the supreme good, the nominalist foundations of negative freedom can provide us a secure grounding in the justification of the rights over the goods. By declaring the inviolable rights and relying on the principle of neutrality, negative freedom eliminates the risk of political voluntarism stemming from enlightenment rationalism or scientism. Since the 1980s, in Turkey, political and social oppositions to Rousseauian enlightenment of the Turkish state have deployed the epistemic and political tools of negative freedom. This appeal has aimed to open a legitimate space for the language of freedom as non-intervention under which each individual chooses his personal values without the fear of state intervention. In contrast to the interventionist claims of state, negative freedom, it has been believed that, has provided a secure grounding for the rights of individuals. Besides, the meta-ethical thesis of the incommensurability of human goods has also been employed for delegitimizing the substantial belief in the monism of the republican regime which relied on the assumption presenting the republican way of life as the supreme good. This missionary zeal for the re-construction of the republic on the premises of negative freedom has not, however, gone unchallenged. Against such identification of democracy with free-market and value pluralism, the republican front defends the restoration of the foundational ideals of the republic by returning to the substantial understanding of national sovereignty under the formulation of &lsquo / militant democracy&rsquo / . In this study, even though I agree with the nominalist epistemology of negative freedom which manifests a skeptic and agnostic attitude toward the power of reason and the insistence of negative freedom on the necessity of the priority of right, I have demonstrated the reasons behind the failure of negative freedom in justifying the priority of the right over the goods. Actually, my analysis has already displayed that concerning the radical consequences of the thesis of incommensurability, it is doubtful whether negative freedom can provide political conditions even for the cause of peace without the presence of absolute sovereign as suggested in Hobbes&rsquo / s political theory. At this point, I have argued that we should take into consideration the achievements of the ideal of autonomy in grounding the priority of the right over the good. Contrary to Berlin&rsquo / s distorted representation of autonomy, I believe that the critical rationalism of autonomy and its understanding of law will protect us not only from the metaphysics of enlightenment rationalism and scientism, but also from the metaphysics of historicism envisaged by Berlin&rsquo / s version of negative freedom.

This thesis aims to examine the question of freedom in its relation to political authority in social contract theories of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). In order to do that, discussions on human nature, evolution into political association and the foundations of legitimate governments are focused on. As the social contract theories of Hobbes and Rousseau mainly seek for rational justification of political obligation, the primary aim of this thesis is to analyze the nature of political obligation in order to discuss the relation between subject and sovereign in the framework of freedom.

Partant du contexte colonial canadien, la thèse souhaite déterminer la fonction de la figure du « sauvage américain » chez Thomas Hobbes. La thèse est ainsi divisée en deux parties. La première porte sur l'évolution du couple « sauvagerie et civilité » depuis l'Antiquité jusqu'à la modernité. On y fait un survol étymologique, discursif et mythologique en guise de contextualisation. Et on parcourt également le thème chez des auteurs allant de More et Machiavel à Bodin et Grotius, en passant par Vitoria, Las Casas, Sepúlveda, Botero, La Boétie et Montaigne. La seconde partie porte sur la figure proprement hobbesienne du « sauvage ». On y trouve le premier inventaire exhaustif de ses occurrences dans l'œuvre de Hobbes. L'étude tente ainsi de faire sens du caractère fondamentalement ambigu de cette figure, et ce, selon les axes épistémologique et politique. Sur le plan du savoir, la figure est confinée dans une agnotopie où elle est à la fois ignorante et ignorée. Sur le plan du pouvoir, elle est une figure à la fois purement apolitique et l'image du « petit gouvernement de famille » dont nous parle le Léviathan. Dans cette ambiguïté, qui est aussi celle de l'état de nature, on reconnait chez Hobbes l'effacement des structures politiques autochtones que décrivent clairement les récits coloniaux. Et on découvre aussi l'effacement du pouvoir de la mère qui est tenu sous silence dans la théorie du contrat, ce qui suggère, peut-être, un désir de contourner le problème des structures matrilinéaires. La conclusion synthétise ces ambiguïtés en faisant du « sauvage » hobbesien une figure liminaire jouant un rôle clé dans le récit de l'État souverain. On peut en effet reconnaitre dans ce récit un rituel discursif de passage où le sujet doit revêtir le déguisement du « sauvage » afin de produire la « civilité » du sujet moderne européen. Ce serait là la part sauvage qui se cache dans la doctrine de l'État moderne.

No description available.

Cette thèse vise à cerner les raisons historiques, intellectuelles et affectives de l’importance que reçoit le problème de la vulnérabilité individuelle dans la culture politique des sociétés modernes. Il s’agit de tenter de comprendre pourquoi et par le concours de quelles transformations normatives et structurelles nous en sommes venus, comme citoyens, à attendre de l’État qu’il nous protège des affres de l’existence. L’oeuvre philosophique de Thomas Hobbes, fondée sur une anthropologie individualiste où l’homme apparaît mû par deux affects, le désir et la crainte, nous paraît être la première formulation théorique de ce problème de la vulnérabilité, et à ce titre, nous posons qu’elle a été déterminante pour l’institutionnalisation d’une rationalité politique proprement moderne. De manière à saisir quelles ont pu être les conditions de possibilité de la philosophie de Hobbes, de même que son influence sur l’imaginaire politique occidental, il nous faut tenter de comprendre non seulement pourquoi l’affectivité humaine a pu se trouver ainsi posée comme enjeu du gouvernement, mais comment elle est aussi liée, de manière générale, au fonctionnement des institutions sociales, lequel est historiquement contingent. Il en va ainsi d’une interrogation, que nous poursuivrons dans un relevé des principaux concepts à l’aide desquels Sigmund Freud, Norbert Elias, Max Weber et Michel Foucault ont pensé les modalités du façonnement social et historique de la subjectivité, et par le biais de laquelle nous espérons expliquer pourquoi le « type d’homme » sur lequel s’appuie le régime libéral moderne implique le vécu d’une expérience affective marquée par un rapport tendu entre le désir et le sentiment de la vulnérabilité.

The current president of the United States, Donald Trump, has been identified as the reason for a large shift in American foreign policy towards a doctrine closer to that of political realism. This claim has led us to examine if this transformation could be detected and described if we analyzed and compared Trump’s foreign policy doctrine with his predecessor, Barack Obama, through the lens Thomas Hobbes, whose ideas are at the core of the three modern schools of political realism. Accordingly, in this thesis, we deduce an analytical framework from the original corpus of Hobbes, where anarchy is divided into moral and empirical variables, identified as the primary factors for behavior in international settings. This is then applied inductively via a comparative qualitative content analysis to two primary documents, the National Security Strategies of 2010 containing the foreign policy doctrine of Obama, and the National Security Strategy of 2017 containing the doctrine of Trump. Our thesis shows a large shift in how the Presidents view the world in moral terms, or how they see it fit for the American executive to act on the international stage. And a relatively minor shift in empirical terms, or their perception of the foundational reality of the world system which they both consider to be of an anarchical nature closely connected to the theoretical model presented by our interpretation of Hobbes

Submitted by Mariana Dornelles Vargas (marianadv) on 2015-05-13T14:38:02Z No. of bitstreams: 1 dinastia_solipsismo.pdf: 1241002 bytes, checksum: 4e91919775f9f37d4453e52f880c5f9d (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-13T14:38:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 dinastia_solipsismo.pdf: 1241002 bytes, checksum: 4e91919775f9f37d4453e52f880c5f9d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-03-25 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / A proposta de abordagem do presente estudo pretende analisar o solipsismo soberano na sociedade internacional através das premissas político-jurídicas de Thomas Hobbes no contexto contemporâneo relativo à manutenção da paz e da segurança internacionais, sobretudo na análise do mundo pós Segunda Guerra Mundial, da Carta das Nações Unidas de 1945 e, por consequência, do principal órgão da referida instituição, o Conselho de Segurança das Nações Unidas (CSNU). A partir da análise temporal centrada na passagem do jusnaturalismo à instituição de um sistema internacional de dominação política, demonstrar-se-á a estabilização do sistema político-internacional por meio das Resoluções e a manutenção do status quo mundial pela regra de unanimidade das grandes potências (direito de veto), apresentando as dimensões de instrumentalização do poder nas relações internacionais, inseridos claramente na perspectiva hobbesiana. Em tal concepção, o Direito Internacional Público assume mínimas funções instrumentais de garantia de paz e de segurança, com vistas à salvaguarda da temporalidade estável do Leviatã mundial hobbesiano. Além disso, demarcando os Direitos Humanos como legitimação por eloquência, a retórica jurídico-minimalista apresentada pelos discursos contemporâneos na política global resta constatada, o que torna a pesquisa, muito além de uma observação e de uma descrição do sistema político-internacional a partir de categorias de Thomas Hobbes, uma articulação perceptiva e reflexiva do despotismo e das controvérsias arrojadas nos processos de manutenção da paz e da segurança internacionais. / The main approach of this study intends to analyze the sovereign solipsism in the international society through the political and legal premises of Thomas Hobbes, in the contemporary context related to the maintenance of international peace and security, particularly in the analysis of the post World War II scenario, as well as the Charter of the United Nations (1945) and, moreover, the main body of that institution: the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). From the temporal analysis focused on the passage of natural law to the establishment of an international system of political domination, it will be demonstrated that the stabilization of the international-political system occurs through Resolutions and the maintenance of the global status quo through the great owers’ unanimity rule (veto right), showing the dimensions of the instrumentalization of power in the international relations field, clearly inserted in a Hobbesian perspective. In this conception, Public International Law assumes minimal and instrumental functions of maintaining peace and security, in a stable temporal safeguarding view of the Hobbesian Leviathan. Moreover, marking Human Rights as a legitimation for eloquence, the rhetoric presented by legal and minimalist contemporary discourses on global politics remains questioned, making the research a perceptive and thoughtful articulation of despotism and the controversies found within the process of maintaining peace and international security, well beyond the observation and description of the political-international system through Thomas Hobbes categories.

State responsibility is central to modern politics and international relations. States are commonly blamed for wars, called on to apologize, punished with sanctions, admonished to keep their promises, bound by treaties, and held liable for debts and reparations. But why, and under which conditions, does it make sense to assign responsibilities to whole states rather than to individual leaders and officials? The purpose of this thesis is to resurrect and develop a forgotten understanding of state responsibility from the political thought of Thomas Hobbes. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the two dominant theories of state responsibility and propose a Hobbesian alternative. According to the agential theory, states can be held responsible because they are moral agents like human beings, with analogous capacities for deliberation and intentional action. According to the functional theory, states can be held responsible because they act vicariously through their organs, much as principals act vicariously through agents. What makes Hobbes unique is that he considers states to be 'persons'-entities to which actions, rights, and responsibilities can be attributed-even though they are neither agents nor principals. Hobbes' idea of state personality relies on the concepts of authorization and representation, not of agency and intentionality, nor of functions and organs. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 develop the Hobbesian theory of state responsibility and apply it to three sets of problems. Chapter 3 addresses problems of attribution, such as whether the actions of dictators count as acts of state and whether states can commit crimes. Chapter 4 addresses problems of identity, such as whether revolutions and annexations negate the state's identity and hence its responsibilities. Chapter 5 addresses problems of distribution, such as whether the subjects of the state ought to bear the costs of debts and reparations that their state incurred before they were born. I argue that the Hobbesian theory provides better answers to each set of problems than the agential and functional alternatives.

Cette thèse vise à cerner les raisons historiques, intellectuelles et affectives de l’importance que reçoit le problème de la vulnérabilité individuelle dans la culture politique des sociétés modernes. Il s’agit de tenter de comprendre pourquoi et par le concours de quelles transformations normatives et structurelles nous en sommes venus, comme citoyens, à attendre de l’État qu’il nous protège des affres de l’existence. L’oeuvre philosophique de Thomas Hobbes, fondée sur une anthropologie individualiste où l’homme apparaît mû par deux affects, le désir et la crainte, nous paraît être la première formulation théorique de ce problème de la vulnérabilité, et à ce titre, nous posons qu’elle a été déterminante pour l’institutionnalisation d’une rationalité politique proprement moderne. De manière à saisir quelles ont pu être les conditions de possibilité de la philosophie de Hobbes, de même que son influence sur l’imaginaire politique occidental, il nous faut tenter de comprendre non seulement pourquoi l’affectivité humaine a pu se trouver ainsi posée comme enjeu du gouvernement, mais comment elle est aussi liée, de manière générale, au fonctionnement des institutions sociales, lequel est historiquement contingent. Il en va ainsi d’une interrogation, que nous poursuivrons dans un relevé des principaux concepts à l’aide desquels Sigmund Freud, Norbert Elias, Max Weber et Michel Foucault ont pensé les modalités du façonnement social et historique de la subjectivité, et par le biais de laquelle nous espérons expliquer pourquoi le « type d’homme » sur lequel s’appuie le régime libéral moderne implique le vécu d’une expérience affective marquée par un rapport tendu entre le désir et le sentiment de la vulnérabilité.