Reunion, Collision, and Reflection: Hobbes, Rhetoric and Politics in Contexts

• In Event: Rhetoric, Politics, and Hobbes

Abstract

In the last century of interpretation, Thomas Hobbes and rhetoric have been made to come together, and sometimes said to collide. These reunions and/or collisions have been put before us as a part of any number of rather different story-lines. For many, reuniting Hobbes with rhetorical traditions is a means of re-politicizing a philosopher who, in spite of himself, could not resist its assistance. It has also been a part of story of de- and re-politicizations fought on a high plane: a moment in the eternal grudge between philosophers and the sophists. When Hobbes and rhetoric are shown to come together the philosopher who seemed to put himself – or whom others put – above the rhetorical fray, returned to the cut and thrust of political conflict. If for some Hobbes might be shown to be rhetorical in spite of himself, for others he was always a rather rhetorically sophisticated writer from start to finish. Maybe the de-politicized Hobbes was a projection. Was it a product of modern wishes to wipe the slate clean of politics and start over on grounds of unassailable reason? (Was it Leo Strauss trying to show Carl Schmitt that he had been worshiping a false God?) If the de-politicized Hobbes was a projection, what was his rhetorical re-politicization: a story about Hobbes, or ourselves? More recently, rhetoric itself has been re-immersed into its own historically researched pedagogical contexts, and this too is a potential route back to a politicized terrain. Was Hobbes playing for pedagogical stakes alone? How do we reconcile his humanist and scholarly politics with the wider context of the English Civil War? This paper will attempt illustrate some avenues that seem most productive in tying these strands together in a way that corresponds with the political understandings of his contemporaries.

Author

• Ted H. Miller, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa