Hobbes’s Materialist Agenda
Edinburgh University Press (Verlag)
978-1-3995-4087-2 (ISBN)
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In this major contribution to our understanding of Hobbes’s political thought, Andrea Bardin contends that it should be analysed in relation to the ‘materialist agenda’ Hobbes was pursuing when confronting Descartes’s project. Bardin pinpoints the changes in Hobbes’s political thought to the intellectual context in which he elaborated his materialist ontology and epistemology. He investigates the classical sources that initially shaped Hobbes’s political thinking, including Thucydides and Aristotle, as well as the broad materialist agenda that Hobbes drew from Bacon and elaborated in opposition to Descartes. He studies Hobbes’s exchanges with his contemporary interlocutors in the Mersenne circle, including Descartes and Gassendi, with whom he discussed first philosophy and natural philosophy. In this way, Bardin vindicates materialist critiques of the idealist foundations of early modern mechanical philosophy.
Andrea Bardin is Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies at the University of Padua. He works on the relationship between science and political thought, and political anthropology from early modernity to the present. He has written extensively on Gilbert Simondon and Thomas Hobbes, and is the author of Epistemology and Political Philosophy in Gilbert Simondon: Individuation, Technics, Social Systems (Springer, 2015) and Hobbes’s Materialist Agenda: The Politics of Early Modern Science (Edinburgh University Press, 2026).
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Hobbes’s Materialist Agenda
PART I
Chapter 1 – Ontology and Epistemology in Hobbes’s mechanics
1.1 The Quaestio de certitudine mathematicarum and the Pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanica
1.2 Bacon’s materialist project and Galileo’s mathematical revolution
1.3 The Mersenne circle and Gassendi
1.4 Descartes’s dualist foundation of mechanics
1.5 Hobbes’s Materialist Geometry and the System of the Sciences
Chapter 2 – Political Epistemology: the strange case of Hobbes’s scientia civilis
2.1 The table of sciences in Leviathan IX: what’s the problem with civil philosophy?
2.2 Civil science as political techne
2.3 The twofold method of civil science
2.4 On the neutrality and purpose of civil science
Chapter 3 – Political Ontology: the body politic as an artificial automaton
3.1 The passive matter of mechanics
3.2 The political anthropology of mechanics
3.3 The automation of wisdom
3.4 The political automaton imagined
PART II
Chapter 4 – From The Elements of Law to De cive: the powerless power of civil science
4.1 The Elements of Law: an ‘optical’ ontology
4.2 De cive: a ‘geometrical’ epistemology
4.3 On the laws of (human) nature
4.4 The powerless superiority of recta ratio
4.5 Empowering right reason: Hobbes’s modest Platonism
Chapter 5 – The political stakes of determinism: ‘liberty’, ‘conatus’, ‘void’, ‘causa integra’
5.1 On liberty
5.2 On conatus
5.3 On void
5.4 On causa integra
5.5 The political stakes of determinism
Chapter 6 – Leviathan Becoming Behemoth: Back to Ideology
6.1 Neutralising human power (potentia/potestas)
6.2 The civil person and the materiality of representation
6.3 Imagination: a material principium for the body politic
6.4 From Leviathan to Behemoth: for a theory of ideology
6.5 The political myth of mechanical philosophy
Bibliography
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 12.5.2026 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | Cycles |
| Verlagsort | Edinburgh |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 156 x 234 mm |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Geschichte der Philosophie |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie der Neuzeit | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-3995-4087-4 / 1399540874 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-3995-4087-2 / 9781399540872 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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