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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Leo Strauss on Hobbes

Leo Strauss on Hobbes

Strauss, Leo
Dahlquist, Karl

Hardcover

Series: Leo Strauss Transcript

PhilosophyGeneral Political Science

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0226857247
ISBN13: 9780226857244
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Pages: 512
Weight: 1.00
Language: English

Leo Strauss's final seminar on Thomas Hobbes, representing the culmination of more than four decades of close engagement.

Leo Strauss spent more than four decades studying the work of Thomas Hobbes. In Strauss's distinctive genealogy of political thought, Hobbes emerges as a decisive counterpoint, not only to the Ancients, but also to Strauss's own project. Strauss saw Hobbes as both the founder of modern natural rights and the modern esoteric writer par excellence.

Strauss's final seminar on Hobbes from 1964 is the culmination of his engagement with Hobbes's corpus and contains the richest account of Strauss's final insight into the nerve of Hobbes's thought, linking human consciousness to power and passion. The seminar reflects on the tension between Hobbes's scientific and political frameworks, Hobbes's emphasis on rights over duties, Hobbes's atheism, and Hobbes's attention to causal thinking as the core capacity that sets humans apart from other animals. It also includes Strauss's most sustained exchange with the Marxist political theorist, C. B. Macpherson. Their rival interpretations of why the state of nature takes the form of a war of all against all led Strauss to reconsider his earlier writings on Hobbes, including those parts that pertain to other thinkers, such as Aristotle, Locke, and Spinoza.

With an introductory essay by Karl Dahlquist that traces the evolution of Strauss's thinking on Hobbes and frames Strauss's dialogue with Macpherson, this 1964 seminar on Hobbes is a vital contribution to political thought and intellectual history.

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