Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics
Philip Pettit
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0691143250
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Hobbes's extreme political views have commanded so much attention that they have eclipsed his work on language and mind, and on reasoning, personhood, and group formation. But this work is of immense interest in itself, as Philip Pettit shows in Made with Words, and it critically shapes Hobbes's political philosophy.
Pettit argues that it was Hobbes, not later thinkers like Rousseau, who invented the invention of language thesis--the idea that language is a cultural innovation that transformed the human mind. The invention, in Hobbes's story, is a double-edged sword. It enables human beings to reason, commit themselves as persons, and incorporate in groups. But it also allows them to agonize about the future and about their standing relative to one another; it takes them out of the Eden of animal silence and into a life of inescapable conflict--the state of nature. Still, if language leads into this wasteland, according to Hobbes, it can also lead out. It can enable people to establish a commonwealth where the words of law and morality have a common, enforceable sense, and where people can invoke the sanctions of an absolute sovereign to give their words to one another in credible commitment and contract.
Written by one of today's leading philosophers, Made with Words is both an original reinterpretation and a clear and lively introduction to Hobbes's thought.
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Bernie Gert, Tony Grafton, Jonathan Israel, Susan James, Melissa Lane, Steven Lukes, Steve Macedo, Jim Moor, Jim Murphy, Sankar Muthu, Christian Nadeau, Eric Nelson, Josh Ober, Pasquale Pasquino, Alan Patten, Jennifer Pitts, David Plunkett, David Runciman, Tamsin Shaw, Paul Sigmund, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and Maurizio Viroli. I am also grateful to Owen Pettit for some work he did in cleaning up the manuscript; to Chris Karpowicz, who provided invaluable research assistance; to Ian Malcolm, my.
The present” (DCr 25.6). Despite the hurly-burly of motions produced under current input, surviving from past input, and produced by the mixing of conceptions into novel fictions, the natural mind can rely on “the vehement motion made by some one object in the organs of sense” to ensure that at any moment it can attain focus, and not be lost to a miasma of impressions. Apart from the concurrent association of different internal motions— different images, conceptions, or ideas—there is also an.
Monarch constitute the people, or is the monarch the people, as Hobbes once suggests (DCv 12.8)? If the multitude is the people in such a case, does it constitute a corporate person, distinct from the person of the monarch? If the people is a corporate person, does it constitute the commonwealth or state? And does the sovereign represent the state or the multitude? The answers for which I argue in the text and notes, based primarily on Leviathan and later works, are that the personated multitude.
Explanation for the line that Hobbes takes here is this. He is anxious in both his earlier and later works to insist that the people cannot rebel against the sovereign; as soon as they reject the sovereign, they cease to be a people and become a multitude again. In Leviathan he can easily maintain this point of view, since the multitude becomes a people in the case of monarchy by directly adopting an individual as sovereign, and in the case of aristocracy and democracy by adopting a committee as.
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