Abstract

This brilliant book seeks to understand “the central aspiration of Hobbes’s civil philosophy, the aspiration to convert the study of moral and political theory into a scientific discipline”, by tracing the influence of the rhetorical culture of Renaissance humanism upon Hobbes’s texts. Attention to this influence, the author argues, will show that the Leviathan “is a work in which the humanist ideal of a union between reason and rhetoric is not merely defended but systematically realized”.