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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2015
Analyses of the social contract described by Thomas Hobbes have proceeded in three major directions. First, some readers naturally have felt that Hobbes viewed the primal charter as a genuine outcome of events which truly occurred. Other exegetes have contended that the story of the formation of the social contract was a deliberate fiction—either an artful narrative designed to elicit orderliness, or a heuristic model designed to spark hypothetical reasoning about what would have occurred in a primeval context with specified conditions. Still other analysts affirm that Hobbes used the tale of the social contract as a warning against the evils that plague a society which descends into civil strife.
This article is from a chapter on Hobbes in my book, Encounters with Liberalism (in progress). I have made changes to facilitate the excerpting of the article. I wish to thank Nigel Simmonds for his helpful remarks.
1. The texts by Hobbes to which I shall be referring are De Cive: The English Version, H. Warrender, ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) [hereinafter cited as DC]; The Elements of Law Natural and Politic 2d ed., F. Tönnies & M. Goldsmith, eds, (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1969) [hereinafter cited as EL); and Leviathan, R. Tuck ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) [hereinafter cited as Leviathan].
2. For an interesting approach lo remarks by Hobbes on signification, see Hacking, Ian Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? ch. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Hacking makes important distinctions that my own analysis need not make.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
