This article criticises recent interpretations of Hobbes’s intellectual development as a result of his engagement with rhetoric. In particular Johnston and Skinner have argued that Leviathan differs significantly, both in style and contents, from the earlier, ‘scientific’ works, The Elements and De Cive. They have argued that Hobbes’s re-appropriation of rhetoric in Leviathan was caused by a growing pessimism about men’s rational capacities. I think the textual evidence does not show such a shift in Hobbes’s thought. I argue that the (...) differences have been exaggerated, and the motives which are thought to have caused these differences have been misconstrued. (shrink)

Questions of nature’s role in politics — what constitutes a people, justice, necessity — thread together into a singular significant problem: what is religious? This essay begins with the aim of defining religiosity—to say what it is. Thucydides serves as an invaluable educator. With Thucydides’ History we can analyse human nature writ large: we see the rise of a people, observe their division, note the dissolution of their ‘ancestral’ and finally question the cancer of self-doubt that sets in as to (...) the justness of their Justice — that is to say: their crisis of faith. But how to question Thucydides? The questions Nietzsche raised in his ‘On the Use and Abuse of History for Life’ aremost relevant and revealing to the topic at hand. What is Religious? examines the nascent emergence and mature decline of a people, it strives to grasp the modus operandi behind it, it seeks a forward philosophy. (shrink)