Subverting the Leviathan Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat

Free Download James Martel, "Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat"
English | 2007 | pages: 240 | ISBN: 0231139845 | EPUB | 1,3 mb
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes’s landmark work on political philosophy, James Martel argues that although Hobbes pays lip service to the superior interpretive authority of the sovereign, he consistently subverts this authority throughout the book by returning it to the reader.

To combat such idolatry, Hobbes offers a method of reading in which one resists the rhetorical manipulation of figures and tropes and recognizes the codes and structures of language for what they are-the only way to convey a fundamental inability to ever know "the thing itself." Making the leap to politics, Martel suggests that following Hobbes’s argument, the sovereign can also be seen as idolatrous-a separated essence-a figure who supplants the people it purportedly represents, and that learning to be better readers enables us to challenge, if not defeat, the authority of the sovereign.