Methodology

Hobbes, Rousseau and Schmitt stand at three important moments concerning the forging of the notion of sovereignty; the myth of Leviathan, the articulation of the general will, and the conception of a total state. Their writings instantiate relevant nuances in political philosophy, the transforming definition of sovereignty and their accompanying practices. They also developed parallel and coalescent conceptions of man in the sense of individual, sometimes implicitly, without a specific reference to it, but also recurrent in the base of their writings. We could pinpoint at the relation between those two concepts and how they were co-constructed. How the notions of man and power in society were configured along their conception of nature and knowledge in general, resorting to the peculiar relation between a particular metaphysics, an ontology, an anthropology, and a political analysis.(1)

Bourgeois- Sevenina Bed

The rooting of their conceptions with the given notions as datum, the discourses, part of the plain of consistence in which they grow, would also be briefly sketched. Some sample of contiguous affirmations, related in a similar vein to the topics analyzed, will give us an impression, of the actual dispersion in the way these topics were addressed, sustaining an uneven but still coherent, commonly shaped, plane of construction.(2) Their coexistence and consistence affected the way people could possibly think about the matters discussed, and thus both limited and extended, contracted and dilated, the ways of knowing and saying. They presented political and social conceptions that eventually became entrenched in the practices, styles, and discourses, and reshaped both linguistic practices and assumed ontologies. In this sense, ideas became belief and were common ground in any possible discussion or understanding of man, society, and nature. Their configuration and insertion in these particular authors also reminds us how they were contrived by the way things could be thought up to them.(3)

(1) Concerning our first author cf. M. A. Bertman and M. Malherbe, Thomas Hobbes de la métaphysique à la politique, Paris, 1989. Y. C. Zarka and J. Bernhardt, Thomas Hobbes: philosophie première, théorie de la science et politique, Paris, 1990. On Hobbes’s modernity cf. D. Coli, La modernità di Thomas Hobbes, Bologna, 1995. M. Diesselhorst, Ursprünge des modernen Systemdenkens bei Hobbes, Stuttgart, 1968. P. Hoffman, The quest for power: Hobbes, Descartes, and the emergence of modernity, New Jersey, 1996. R. P. Kraynak, History and modernity in the thought of Thomas Hobbes, Ithaca, 1990.
(2) Quentin Skinner has thought this relation in terms of text/context, the reconstruction of the context being required to attain a proper understanding of the aims conveyed in the text, its uses. But intentions, like attitudes, always remain on a plain of consistence. What matters to authors is the construction and this analysis implies a coordinated activity that exceeds singular intentions. The references to the context are highlighted here not in terms of any intentionality but rather as means, as the elements used coetaneously. Cf. the monumental Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought 2 vols., Cambridge, 1978. Q. Skinner, “The State”, T. Ball et al. (eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 90-131.
(3) Rather than an itinerary of judgment ours will be, as Kavanagh points out, an itinerary of comprehension. T.M. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth. Authority and Desire in Rousseau, Berkeley, 1987.