Hume published only three books of the Treatise (the examination of politics and criticism was supposed to “compleat” it). Of the Understanding and Of Morals have a final section entitled “Conclusion of this book”; Of the Passions ends up with “Of curiosity, or the love of truth”. Each final section has its scandalous image: back-gammon, hunting or gaming, and anatomy. The final section of Book I is a proper conclusion, that of Book III is almost such, while that of Book II is something different, especially its last paragraphs on the “insatiable desire” of knowing the actions of our neighbours. The conclusion of Book I (“before I launch out…”) marks the transition to Book II and that of Book II (“before we leave …”) the transition to Book III; yet Hume allows to have been “inattentive” in running over “so many” parts of the mind and passions, without considering “that love of truth, which was the first source of all our enquiries”. It is time to analyse Hume’s account, its structure, images and connections with the philosophical tradition.

Abstract: This chapter engages closely with the key state of nature passages in Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. It shows how each text constructs strikingly distinct imaginaries of the state of nature, and begins to explore some of the real-world implications of these imaginaries.

This chapter takes its departure from the views expressed by Newtonian humanism, post-Newtonianism, and para-humanism that shape different conceptualizations of power as an instrument of calculable control in small worlds and as a source of incalculable protean power in large ones (section 1). By way of summary, it shows how both kinds of power have operated in the domains of risk and uncertainty in finance, nuclear crisis, and global warming/AI discussed in chapters 4–6 (section 2) and in another ten cases. As the main source of the modern conception of control power Thomas Hobbes articulates a rigid, authoritarian theory of language that fits into a Newtonianism formalized about forty years after Hobbes had published Leviathan. Niels Bohr’s post-Newtonian perspective and its permissive core construct of complementarity differ profoundly from Hobbes’s insistence on the necessity of a sovereign’s total control of language. During the last half century updates of these two positions by social theorist Michel Foucault and physicist-feminist Karen Barad have clarified further the yawning gap that separates them (section 3). The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of Machiavelli’s understanding of fortuna and the potentialities of protean power (section 4).

Humans seek not happiness but “power after power,” says Hobbes, and so we are perpetually at odds. We are equals in cunning and therefore equally insecure and equally error-prone. Our language contains “words of inconstant signification,” which means we must ever disagree about right and justice. Reason requires us to submit our disagreements to an arbiter – a “Common Power” – lacking whom we must be perpetually at war or on the verge of war with one another over things that matter.

Leibniz defends teleology or purposive activity against the overly mechanical worldview of Thomas Hobbes, and develops an idea of spontaneity as self-originating action irreducible to mere mechanistic reaction. He links free activity with justice as the enabling conditions for the exercise of freedom, and with the progressive deployment of individual and collective powers. He thus sets the agenda for subsequent idealism, which reconfigures the idea of spontaneity and reflects on the harmonisation of diverse individual efforts as a problem of ongoing juridical reform

Leibniz is the genuine initiator of German Idealism, developing ideas of freedom as spontaneity or self-originating action, and linking freedom with justice and progress in ways that are decisive for Kant and later idealists. Rethinking spontaneity as negative freedom, Kant criticises the paternalistic perfectionism and Enlightened absolutism of Christian Wolff, a distinct development from Leibniz, but opens the way for a new perfectionism of freedom. The origins of perfectionism in Aristotle and the Stoics are surveyed, and the various formulations of post-Kantian perfectionism from Humboldt to Marx are outlined.

The state of nature in social contract theories tells us two stories, one about who the main political actors are, and another one about the supra-juridical normativity and principles those actors use to judge and act politically once they are in the civil state. In my chapter I focus on the latter matter by contrasting Kant’s approach to the state of nature and its role in his social contract theory as given in the Feyerabend lectures with the conceptions of the state of nature in Hobbes, Locke, Achenwall, and Rousseau. Following the thesis that pre-juridical normativity functions as supra-juridical normativity once in the state, my main question is: how is "natural", in the sense of "pre-political", normativity generated? With this I am referring not only to the source of normativity, but mainly to how pretensions of normativity arise when people interact in the state of nature, and if these are or are not regulated by a moral-legal order independent from that interaction.

The Feyerabend lectures on natural right is Kant’s first clear statement of a view on punishment that balances retributivist and deterrence concerns. Kant’s earlier views, shown by other course lectures on ethics, were largely focused on deterrence. As Kant developed his view of human autonomy, he shifted his reasoning about punishment to include concern for the honor and dignity of the victim as well as the criminal, including right of criminals to be treated no worse than they treated others.

Hume’s and Bentham’s criticisms of natural law theory are direct and even mocking. By contrast, Kant’s approach in the Feyerabend lectures is far more restrained. Having adopted for his course an author explicitly committed to natural law premises, Kant largely avoids open conflict with those premises, choosing instead to develop his claims about right without making any direct critique (or defense) of the appeal to natural law. What accounts for this difference? After briefly reviewing the history of natural law theory in the modern period, I turn to a close reading of Kant’s brief but pointed criticisms of Achenwall in the opening sections of the Feyerabend lectures. I argue that Kant understands a theory of natural law not as opposed to but as irrelevant to a theory of right. Once we appreciate this claim, we can better understand Kant’s equally important contribution to the decline of natural law theory in the tradition of liberal political theory.

Hobbes posed for modernity what we can think of as the puzzle – even the paradox – of sovereignty. The sovereign of a particular polity is the person or body who wields ultimate authority to make law. It follows, he claimed, that the sovereign is legally unlimited. But for Hobbes, any sovereign is legally constituted in that it must comply with what I call the ‘validity mark’ of sovereignty: Legal change must happen in accordance with the criteria of validity. In addition, there is the ‘fundamental legality mark’: To count as an act of sovereign will, a law must be consistent with the laws of nature, in more contemporary terms with the fundamental legal commitments of the legal order. Hobbes’s idea of sovereignty is thus a legal idea, which contrasts with the figure that haunts politics today, the ‘political idea of sovereignty’. I argue that in order to properly oppose the troubling figure of the political sovereign, one needs to have in place not only both marks of sovereignty, but also a political theory of their value. There is a politics to the legal idea of sovereignty.

There have been more than 400 years of research surrounding the state, but its concept remains iridescent and varies between different legal cultures. This contribution asks why and how the concept of the state evolved in continental Europe and examines why the term did not enter the legal terminology of England and later the US. It introduces four influential concepts of the state from the constitutional theory of the 19th and 20th century and shows how these concepts have set the paths on which debate around the state still moves today. Finally, the chapter revisits the most famous critiques of the concept, to then answer the central question surrounding the “state” in constitutional theory: what use does the concept retain today.

Chapter 7 begins with the reaction that followed from Price and Paine’s defence of the colonial cause. They agreed with the colonists that to live in dependence on the arbitrary will of someone else is what it means to be a slave, and consequently agreed that the colonists must have a natural right to free themselves from their servitude, if necessary by force. This was the moment when a large number of pro-imperial spokesmen came forward to claim that the colonists and their supporters were failing to understand what it means to speak of possessing or losing one’s liberty. They objected that we are not rendered unfree if we are merely subject to someone else’s will; we are only rendered unfree if we are restrained from acting in some particular way. Generally this definition of liberty has been seen as an invention of the late eighteenth century. But as this chapter shows, it arose out of a long tradition of legal and political argument that originated with Hobbes, Pufendorf and their followers. We already find it present in England in the early eighteenth century, and the pro-imperialist writers now brought it to the forefront of debate.

Scholars have observed that Schopenhauer did not develop much of a political philosophy but have failed to recognize that this is a deliberate deflationary strategy. Schopenhauer’s aim was to circumscribe the function of politics narrowly and assign it a place in a broader range of human responses to the agony of existence. However, his attempt to differentiate politics from religion and the state from the church led to contradictions. One the one hand, Schopenhauer favored a strong state that could control social strife and noted that political leadership can rely on religious justifications to ensure stability. On the other hand, he observed that state-affiliated religious institutions often eliminate critical perspectives on their doctrines by silencing philosophical reflection, an attitude he could not accept. Schopenhauer thus ended up with an ambivalent conception of statehood as simultaneously protective of life and property and damaging to free inquiry.

This chapter explores the concept of democratic political causality in different political regimes. It distinguishes between top-down hierarchical causality in religious, traditional, and authoritarian regimes and the bottom-up and horizontal causality found in democracies. Democracy rejects the vertical hierarchical causality since it attributes political actions to human agency rather than transcendental or superhuman forces. Real-world examples, such as the messianic movement in Israel, highlight the tensions when divine attributions clash with democratic ideals. The chapter thoroughly examines the influence of Thomas Hobbes and his social contract theory on modern political thought, particularly his emphasis on bottom-up causality in the formation of the state. Furthermore, the chapter examines the challenges faced by democratic causality, including issues of trust in power holders, understanding others’ motives, and the emergence of conspiracy theories. It discusses self-regulation as an alternative to voluntary political interaction and the tension between individualism and collective action in democratic governance. Finally, the chapter highlights that despite the obstacles and complexities, democratic causality remains a fundamental measure of legitimate political action and authority. It introduces the concept of the “public fact” as a critical element in the epistemological framework of modern democracy.

The chapter explores the concept of the individual as a democratic citizen who voluntarily exercises rights and authority, and can both legitimize and delegitimize the government. It suggests that Western secular cosmological dualism, which separates the world from man, has led to the development of the modern individual, capable of introspection, autonomy, and agency. This dualism creates a divide between the physical human body and the autonomous human mind and spirit. It has facilitated the simultaneous growth of natural sciences and humanities. The chapter examines how this secular imaginary, based on the separation of Nature and man since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is reflected in the philosophical discourses of influential thinkers like Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant. They explored the potential of this separation to evolve human agency in politics and to derive universal rights from Nature to safeguard individual freedom in society and politics. This dual cosmology also led to the development of social sciences and varying views on voluntarism and natural determinism, as seen in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Finally, it shows how Nature has become a cultural resource through art.

In this chapter, Ezrahi analyzes the influence of philosophers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Vico, and Rousseau, as well as the Federalists, on the shift from a medieval monistic cosmology based on God to a modern dualistic cosmology, emphasizing dynamic Nature and human agency. These thinkers played a pivotal role in shaping a political order and obedience independent of divine authority, turning to Nature as the source of laws and a check on human actions. This transformation led to the emergence of new concepts, such as the state, freedom, and equality, despite their being imaginative. Hobbes pioneered the use of metaphors and empirical sciences in civic affairs. Spinoza adopted a detached scientific perspective, viewing human emotions and drives as natural phenomena. Locke presented empiricism and probability to inform political decisions through an understanding of human judgment. Vico proclaimed that political systems are based on collective political imagination, facilitating the construction of institutions and political processes rooted in commonsense. Rousseau further developed the dichotomy of Nature/Culture, highlighting its impact on politics, education, and ethics. The American Revolution marked the merging of objective Nature and human agency, giving rise to the idea of employing science to manipulate Nature.

This chapter probes the ontological foundations of territorial sovereignty by tracing its normative logic to two diverging conceptions of sovereign authority in Roman law: dominium and imperium. While the dominium-based perspective ties the legitimacy of territorial sovereignty to prototypical forms of precivil private property association, from an imperium-based viewpoint, territorial sovereignty entails only sovereign jurisdiction over persons within a given spatial domain. Tracing these viewpoints through their early modern uptake by Immanuel Kant, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes, the chapter points to a key normative disjunction – namely, whether territorial sovereignty is legitimated by the facticity of precivil object acquisition or by associational bonds between human beings unconstrained by claim rights over given segments of land, water, and air. The analysis highlights that contemporary questions on the limits of sovereign authority – including on the “right to exclude” and on the legitimacy of the extraterritorial exercise of sovereign power – stem from a normative disjunction in the very idea of territorial sovereignty. The chapter argues that the moral-ethical dilemma of inclusion in a bordered world is profoundly imbricated with the ecological-ontological question of how we imagine our collective selves to be coconstituted with the land, water, and air around us.

This chapter provides a brief history of thinking about glory from Homer to Arendt. It begins with the “Achillean” conception of the term, which is focused on celebrating how rather than why one fights. We then contrast this idea with its “Periclean” counterpart, wherein glory is fundamentally moral and political. Next, we discuss Cicero’s classical account of glory. The Roman orator argues that civic pursuits are more worthy of glory than military ones, both because the former often make the latter possible and because they frequently are more closely aligned with the state’s true interests. Machiavelli is far more circumspect about the connection between personal virtue and glory. For him, an interest in glory is constitutive of competent leadership and the objects of glory are necessarily exalted: success in war, high diplomacy, or institution building on a grand scale. Hobbes’ emphasis is more psychological – our need for glory, he claims, makes us dangerous enough to each other to require the social mediation offered by the government. Finally, we consider the connection Arendt draws between a “Greek” understanding of politics, where the private realm is subordinated to public “action,” and the emphasis on immortality and permanence fundamental to the idea of glory.