"The Leviathan" as automaton: method and politics in Thomas Hobbes

Abstract

This article points out the tension between the normative purpose of Thomas Hobbes’s political texts, and the identification of the resolutive-compositive method of science as it is applied in those texts. In order to solve this difficulty one should appeal to Hobbes’s epistemological texts to read the example of the clock from a new perspective. Thus, if the Hobbesian method responds to the need for normative innovation, it not only denies an apologetic intentionality for a completely ignored historical reality, but also makes it possible to describe the relationship between the individual and the State in a manner different from traditional understandings. According to these conclusions, man ceases to be simply a mechanical part but rather becomes a cause, and therefore, a measure of the effectiveness and functionality of a State. Man’s savage individualism while in the state of nature is not the model, but the cause that justifies a Leviathan capable of turning the homo homini lupus into homo homini deus