Research

Thomas Hobbes

Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes

New Work

Friendly Sovereignty

This will be a book on neglected aspects of sovereignty centered not in the lawless violence most often associated with sovereign power today, but with lawless favor, benefits, pardons, and the extension of the sovereign's immunity to others within the community. Covering both historical and contemporary instances, this work will discuss sources ranging from Seneca to contemporary American administrations. Along the way, the work will focus on the moments in which friendly sovereignty has been the object of controversy, including the defenders of the Stuart reign during the Restoration and those who railed against class privilege in the era of the French Revolution. A counterpoint to Schmitt and Agamben, this work will expand our concept of sovereignty and broaden our understanding of the practices of lawless power.

Ongoing and past Interests:

"Sovereign generosity:

republican resistance"

Presented annual meeting of the APSA, Washington, DC, Augsust 2014. This paper reviews some of the major figures in the so called "republican tradition," and turns towards those such as Tacitus, Machiavelli, Sidney, Harrington, Bolingbroke and Rousseau. Beginning with Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker, I explore the ways in which generosity can be classed as corrupting practice. Within this loosely defined tradition, I'm interested most in those who cast a suspicious eye on the generosity of sovereigns and others who would subvert virtue and/or lawful orders. Contemporary philosophical republicanism and its concept of domination is also critically discussed.

"Sovereign Theodicies: Schmitt, the Exception, and the Prosperity of the Wicked"

Presented at the Western Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Seattle, April 25, 2014. This paper is a critical consideration of Schmitt, Schmittians, and "the political" though a second look at the early modern and liberal thought he condemns: specifically Leibniz, Bayle, and Michelet. The political struggle against unmerited grace and the embarrassing excesses of generous sovereigns are central topics.

William Davenant:

This 17th Century playwright was a friend to Hobbes, author of several "improved" restoration revisions of Shakespeare, and a collaborator with Inigo Jones in creating masques for the Stuart court. I'm particularly interested in how his later plays offered a defense for the Restoration settlement. See “The Two Deaths of Lady Macduff: Anti-Metaphysics, Violence and Davenant’s Restoration revision of Macbeth”, Political Theory, 36( Dec., 2008). Aside from running the most successful restoration play-house, Davenant was appointed the King's ordinance officer during the English Civil War. He did such a good job that he was to be sent to replace the king's disloyal governors in the colonies of Virginia and Maryland. He would have assumed the office in the New World had his ship not been captured by a pirate commissioned by Parliament. Davenant talked his way out jail, and wrote a few propaganda pieces for Cromwell before returning to the good graces of the restored Stuarts in the 1660's. For nearly one hundred years after it's performance audiences that went to see Macbeth saw Davenant's, and not the version we today think of as Shakespeare's.

Weak Ontology

I'm interested in the political and intellectual projects of Gianni Vattimo, Stephan White and others who wish to thread the needle between overbearing strong ontologies (e.g. religious orthodoxies, numerous visions of rationalism) and what are sometimes identified as the excesses of deconstruction or geneological approaches in philosophy and social science. Vattimo calls his approach an "accomplished nihilism." The above mentioned essay on Davenant motivates a critique of Weak Ontology, and I debate the matter further with Stephen White in "In Hermeneutic Circles: A Reply to White", Political Theory 37 (Dec. 2009).

History of Science

Makers Knowledge, humanism and mathematics, artisan knowledge.

Michael Oakeshott

How could his fantastic introduction to Leviathan be so right and wrong at the same time? Why wasn't the one of the champions of the fight against political rationalism an antagonist, rather than an admirer, of Thomas Hobbes? I've tried to answer this question in “Oakeshott’s Hobbes and the Fear of Political Rationalism”, Political Theory, 4, (Dec., 2001).

Interview with Scott Horton of

Harpers.

Reviewed in Journal of British Studies

(formerly Albion)

Reviewed in History of Political Thought

Reviewed in the APSR's Perspectives on Politics

Within Hobbes scholarship it is a truism that Hobbes began as a humanist, but gave up this approach to learning and politics when he discovered mathematics and the "New Science."

Mortal Gods challenges this assumption.

We know that Hobbes retained the rhetorical skills we associate with humanist learning, but this is only part of the story.

Numerous renaissance humanists also had strong affinities for mathematical learning. Hobbes was a part of this tradition, and he remained a part of it even as he delved into the New Science.

Mortal Gods explores what it meant, in light of this connection, for Hobbes to have offered his patrons a mathematical science of politics. I've argued that Hobbes's understanding of what his science would do was shaped by humanist ambitions.

His goals, therefore, neither conform to those assigned to him by his scientific admirers today, nor to the descriptions of his work by recent detractors.