Hobbes's Political Theory

Rating:
Summary: An at times brilliant anlaysis of Hobbes's view of politics.
Review: Deborah Baumgold understands what so many Hobbes commentators have forgotten. Namely, that Hobbes wrote about politics and the conditions necessary to prevent elite competition wherein the many are sacrificed to the ambitiousness of the few. Examining, as no one else before her has, how Hobbes treats the state as constituted out of the many different roles that ordinary subjects and rulers are called upon to fill, Baumgold persuades us that Leviathan is, indeed, meant to protect the innocent by chastening the proud. Baumgold's Hobbes is political through and through, a point unfortunately obscured by those studies that would convert Hobbes into a methodological individualist or, even worse, a theorist of rational choice. The discussion of subjects and soldiers alone makes the book a treat.