Is it anachronistic to talk about racism in Hobbes? After all, racism is usually seen as biological: the disliked group must have innate characteristics which are inherited biologically. This is mostly said to be a modern idea. Yet biological racism can be found in medieval and early modern times, as with the Spanish doctrine of limpieza de sangre (cleanliness/purity of blood). Racism, including biological racism, was much more common in Hobbes’s England than we might think, including in texts he may (...) have read; the language of race was hardly uncommon either. Moreover, someone can be called a racist whether or not their dislike of a group is based on characteristics of a group that are inherited biologically, I argue. Whether Hobbes was a racist remains open to debate; this paper offers evidence both for and against that proposition. But we should not reject the question of Hobbes’s racism as anachronistic. (shrink)

In this article I argue that Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the “state of nature” should be understood as describing a thoroughly political situation. Hobbes’s exemplification of the state of nature by resorting to the “savages” of America should be taken in its ultimately paradoxical character, one that puts in question the stark opposition between a prepolitical natural state and the properly political state resulting from the “social contract.” Through the lenses of ethnographic studies and anthropological theory, I propose a reinterpretation (...) of Hobbes’s characterization of the state of nature as a state of war. In the first section, I present my interpretation of Hobbes’s understanding of war, arguing that war is characterized not by actual battle but by the uncertainty of conflict, already entailing a social dimension to it. In the second section, I engage with Pierre Clastres’s theory of the society against the State to discuss how, for Amerindian peoples, war not only has a social character but is itself the basis of sociality. In the last section, I discuss Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s theory of potential affinity to propose that Hobbes’s state of nature is also a form of schematization of alterity as enmity. I conclude by showing how this provides an understanding of peace as a precarious situation, one that is the outcome of ethical practices ultimately independent from the State. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes, like other early modern social contract theorists, has been accused of promoting racist views in his philosophy – ideas used to justify European imperialism and the devastation of Indigenous peoples. I argue that his philosophy does not assume or promote a naturalized racial hierarchy. I demonstrate that the logic of Hobbes’s project requires rejecting a racially essentialist conception of human nature. His is a thoroughgoing and unrepentant anti-essentialism; he claims that there are no objective, immutable, necessary differences between (...) ‘civilized’ people and ‘savages.’ Instead, I locate Hobbes’s bias in his reliance on culturally-specific notions of government. Finally, I suggest that the Hobbes’s natural law requirement of ‘acknowledging’ equality can be applied to questions about race. Though this was not its purpose, this requirement might provide a useful – and distinctively Hobbesian – tool to combat the impulse behind the problematic and persistent desire to find ‘real’ differences among racial groups. (shrink)

During a period when transatlantic slavery was still being racialized, Hobbes and Leibniz represent stark alternatives on the nature and justification of slavery. This article investigates Leibniz’s encounter with the Hobbesian position on slavery (servitus), drawing out the racial implications. Throughout his political works, Hobbes defended voluntary servitude by transforming a legacy of Roman jurisprudence that had come to be encapsulated in the law of nations (jus gentium). Hobbes defended the justification that a master could possess slaves as de jure (...) property with the rights to buy or sell them. In Sur la notion commune de la justice, Leibniz argued against Hobbes that slave-owners’ rights should be limited. He also defended his own paternalistic justification of slavery, reinterpreting Aristotelian natural slavery. Leibniz claimed that some persons merit guidance as slaves by nature, yet legitimate possession of persons can only go as far as a usufruct. In contrast, Hobbes had rejected the normative logic that any person could rationally merit enslavement but maintained that masters could totally possess the body of captive slaves for as far as their power extends. (shrink)

Taking Hobbesian logic as my starting point, I argue that Hobbesian diffidence, one of the causes of quarrel in the state of nature, does not disappear once the citizens enter civil society. Rather, diffidence is merely contained by the sovereign. Following Alice Ristroph, I argue that diffidence comes to shape what citizens demand of the state/sovereign in the criminal law. However, I show that Ristroph does not fully appreciate that the concept of diffidence is a racialized one, and as such, (...) race underlies how the citizens understand their own diffidence, what citizens demand of the sovereign, and how they demand it. Further, because diffidence itself is racialized, criminal law need not make explicit appeals to race. Once racialized diffidence becomes embedded in the criminal law, it remains there regardless of any conscious racial animus. I show that racial profiling is a prime example of how this racialized diffidence manifests. Thus, I present Hobbesian diffidence as a framework from which to understand racial oppression. This paper is primarily an application of Hobbes to contemporary issues rather than an exegesis and analysis of Hobbes’s views. (shrink)