Excerpt

My article is devoted to doing a genealogy of weak messianism (a term that Walter Benjamin coined in relation to Marxism¹) as it applies to liberal political thought and practice. The vision of a liberal political society—with a public sphere conceived as instrumental to the cultivation of “commodious living,” understood as a private sphere consisting of individual self-maximizers, bent on pursuing “power after power that ceaseth only in death”—is to a large extent a response to Hobbes's theorizing of the limits to knowledge encapsulated in such areas of his thought as his nominalism and its relationship to his theory of…