Abstract

Communitarians claim that the political commitments of the historical liberal tradition presuppose implausible understandings of individualism and the self---liberal individualism is alleged to be atomistic, and the liberal self is alleged to be unencumbered. A common liberal response to these charges is that the communitarians have merely lined up straw men to tear apart rather than charitably recognizing the sophistication of actual liberal views. ;This dissertation takes up that rallying cry and seeks to give a more careful account of the views of one of the earliest contributors to the liberal tradition, Thomas Hobbes. Though not a full-blown liberal himself---his political absolutism prevents such an appellation---Hobbes stood at the epicenter of the paradigm transformation in political thought that set the stage for liberalism, and his affinities with some key liberal tenets should at least situate him in the debate as a proto-liberal. The seeds of liberalism were sewn by the individualistic turn that Hobbes, in part, initiated, so it is somewhat surprising that more has not been said about Hobbes's bearing upon the liberal/communitarian debate. ;Many commentators consider Hobbes a paradigm target for the communitarian criticisms of liberalism. Hobbes's picture of solitary, selfish, and glory-driven humans which land themselves in a horrific war of all against all would seem to succumb to the communitarian worries about atomism and fragmented communities. I argue, however, that Hobbes, far from painting humans as the self-sufficient and independent creatures entailed by atomistic individualism, actually recognizes our deep dependence upon social matrices for our development of both our basic human capacities and our understandings of the good life. I also argue that Hobbes's understanding of the self does not bear any relation to the ethereal unencumbered self that allegedly populates views which bear the taint of liberal premises. Hobbes's theory of human conflict requires that human selves be constituted by and identified with their ends, not simply possessors of those ends. Finally, in light of these corrections to communitarian overstatements, I argue that Hobbes's vision of community, a society which embodies submission to the laws of nature, is entirely theoretically sustainable