Hobbes's Body Politics
From Life to Accountability in Leviathan
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Published:31st Oct '26
Should be back in stock very soon
Reconstructing the conceptual link between life and accountability, Meghan Robison presents a new account of political founding and obligation in Hobbes. Beginning from an interpretation of life as an idiosyncratic bodily motion – a motion of limbs that begins within a living body – she shows how the Commonwealth is instituted through our self‑legislated embodied practices of holding ourselves to mutually beneficial shared rules.
Robison advances a striking reinterpretation of Hobbes grounded in a fresh reading of his concept of life. Against the standard materialist, mechanistic, individualistic readings of Hobbes, she builds on his description of life as self-instigated, a “motion of limbs that comes from within”. This insight underwrites a new kind of relational account of voluntary motion and a robust conception of agency and power, opening a genuinely original and promising path for rethinking Hobbes’s political theory. -- Susanne Sreedhar, Boston University
ISBN: 9781399537216
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
216 pages