Contract Theory in Historical Context: Essays on Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke

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BRILL, 2010 - Literary Collections - 190 pages
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.
 

Contents

Political not Metaphysical
3
Resistance Violence and Accountability in SeventeenthCentury Contract Theory
27
Particularity and Universality
51
Chapter Three When Hobbes Needed History
53
Chapter Four Hobbesian Absolutism and the Paradox in Modern Contractarianism
75
Serial Composition
103
Chapter Five The Composition of Hobbess Elements of Law
105
Chapter Six The Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation
135
Afterword
167
Theorists of the Absolutist State
169
Bibliography
181
Index
189
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About the author (2010)

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

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