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Contesting the Future: Secular and Religious Time in Hobbes's Leviathan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2023

Loralea Michaelis Open the ORCID record for Loralea Michaelis [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

This article examines the peculiar fusion of secular and religious temporal orders in Hobbes's Leviathan in light of the debate between Löwith and Blumenberg over the origins of modern time consciousness. The analysis places Hobbes more securely on the side of Blumenberg by uncovering the constructive agency at work in the anxiously future-preoccupied account of human nature which distinguishes Leviathan from Hobbes's earlier works and which gives his revision of Christian eschatology its psychological coherence and rhetorical force. This interpretation of Hobbes as an early architect of modern time consciousness fills in the missing temporal pieces in Blumenberg's own engagement with Hobbes and gives the theme of temporality—of creating and securing the experience of an open future above all—the attention that it deserves in the account of Hobbes's modernity.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 85 , Issue 3 , Summer 2023 , pp. 304 - 326
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the editor, Ruth Abbey, and the anonymous reviewers at the Review of Politics for their incisive and careful comments.

References

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