Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan
Reading Group on Tyranny and Political Reason
International Research Network on Critical Theory and Conservative Thought
Introduction
The State is a ‘purely modern idea’,[1] and Hobbes was its most radical early modern theorist. It is in his work that we see the State emerge solely as a product of human ‘imaginations’,[2] and in his conceptualisation of it that we first see expressed the phenomenon of ‘political hedonism’[3] – that is, the politicisation of the idea that the good is synonymous with the absence of displeasure.
This makes Hobbes’ Leviathan a central text in the understanding of tyranny, conceived as government unconstrained by law, and relying for its justification on utility rather than norms. For Hobbes, law was ‘the Reason of this our Artificial Man the Commonwealth’;[4] and therefore no bound on his authority. And it is therefore in reading Hobbes’ work that we are able to reflect on how authority is grounded when it only acts through law, rather than being subject to it.
Details
The Reading Group on Tyranny and Political Reason will hold a series of online meetings for one hour once every two weeks, beginning on Thursday 11th September 2025 at 1pm UK time, with each meeting concerning two chapters of the Leviathan’s text. If you are interested in participating, please email david.mcgrogan@knappfoundation.ac.uk and you will be added to the mailing list.
The Reading Group
The Reading Group on Tyranny and Political Reason is an interdisciplinary collective of scholars interested in the question of the legitimacy of the State in modernity. What is it that justifies the existence of government, given that the justification cannot, in modernity, be theological? This conundrum (summarised by Michel Foucault as being the essence of ‘political reason’) preoccupied the theorists of the state in early modernity. But while we intuit that we have never really had satisfactory responses to it, we have ceased to address adequately this gap in our thinking, or to consider properly the consequences of our failure. The Reading Group brings together scholars interested in these and related matters through a shared project of regular online meetings at which important texts are read and discussed.
[1] M. Loughlin, Advanced Introduction to Political Jurisprudence (Elgar, 2025), p. 44.
[2] T. Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], R. Tuck (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 75.
[3] L. Strauss, Natural Right and History (University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 169.
[4] T. Hobbes, supra note 2, p. 187.