HISTORICAL INTEREST AND PHILOSOPHICAL INTEREST

The work that you are going to read relates to the study of the reorienting, transforming and innovative work in political thought undertaken by Hobbes. A certain number of political modernity's nodal problems will follow from this conceptual work. In order to define the stakes of this work, I will first make an effort to point out the general, simultaneously historiographical and philosophical perspective within which it is inscribed, and I will then indicate the places that will bear on the examination of Hobbes's conceptual intervention.

The general perspective of my research concerns, in this work as in my previous works, the moment where political philosophy, particularly in the seventeenth century, conceptually forges ethical, juridical and theological positions which involve the determination of the foundations of modern politics. The direction of this approach is simultaneously historical and philosophical. Historical, because the texts that it is a question of understanding are texts of the past, the study of which must be subject to historically exact criteria; philosophical, because these texts are not simply the vestiges of a bygone era, but are the bearers of interrogations which raise determinations concerning the nature, value and end of the political to the level of concept, and thus involve our comprehension of the political. In this sense, the historical interest that I bring to past political philosophies cannot be dissociated from a philosophical interest. This position supposes two things concerning the status of, on the one hand, the history of philosophy and, on the other, political philosophy's relationship between the past and the present. On the first point, I will say that the properly philosophical stakes of past political philosophies are retrievable and can be reactivated only from a philosophical point of view. On the second point, I will say that, to the extent that they open up the determinations of the political to the thinkable, the texts of past political philosophy are likely to furnish theoretical resources for the renewal of our own reflection.

This double bond of historical interest and philosophical interest is, however, far from being self-evident.