Contract theory in historical context : essays on Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke / / by Deborah Baumgold.

• Superior document: Brill's studies in intellectual history ; v. 187
• Author: Baumgold, Deborah.
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Brill's studies in intellectual history ; v. 187.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (208 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

These essays contest the truism that the social contract is a modern political idea. Just as Rawls came to acknowledge that his political theory built in the parochial horizon of his time, Hobbes’s, Grotius’s, and Locke’s theories presuppose their ancien regime world. Despite their universalizing language, Hobbes’s and Locke’s theories addressed the age-old issue of resistance to tyrants and assumed the framework of hereditary monarchy. Essays in the volume also relate the logic of their contract claims back to Bodin’s and Grotius’s defenses of absolute sovereignty and direct attention to the affinity between an ‘absolutism of fear’ and Hume’s sensibility. For politically-inclined readers, these theories come to life by being read as treatises on politics in the early-modern state.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material / D. Baumgold -- Chapter One. Hobbes’s And Locke’s Contract Theories: Political Not Metaphysical / D. Baumgold -- Chapter Two. Pacifying Politics: Resistance, Violence, And Accountability In Seventeenth-Century Contract Theory / D. Baumgold -- Chapter Three. When Hobbes Needed History / D. Baumgold -- Chapter Four. Hobbesian Absolutism And The Paradox In Modern Contractarianism / D. Baumgold -- Chapter Five. The Composition Of Hobbes’s Elements Of Law / D. Baumgold -- Chapter Six. The Difficulties Of Hobbes Interpretation / D. Baumgold -- Chapter Seven. Afterword: Theorists Of The Absolutist State / D. Baumgold -- Bibliography / D. Baumgold -- Index / D. Baumgold.