Hobbes on Justice

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-0-19-886798-2
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Format (B × H): 163 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 630 g

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is widely regarded as one of the most important political thinkers in the Western tradition. Justice is one of the main political concepts today. This is the first book-length analysis of Hobbes's ideas on justice.

Hobbes made many startling claims about justice. Norms of justice have no place outside the commonwealth, the civil law determines what is just and unjust, and nothing sovereigns do is unjust to their citizens. But what exactly did Hobbes mean by justice? And how did he convince his audience that he was speaking about justice when advancing such controversial views, and not about something else?

In Hobbes on Justice, Olsthoorn traces the place of justice in Hobbes's moral, legal, political, and international thought as developed over time. The book reconstructs his idiosyncratic glosses on notions like justice, rights, injury, obligation, and law; proposes new solutions to some long-standing interpretive puzzles; and provides in-depth discussions of property, slavery, treason, just war and other neglected aspects of Hobbes's thought. Olsthoorn shows that Hobbes's theory of justice doubled as a civil theodicy: it aimed to morally empower sovereign rulers by vindicating them from all stains of injustice, no matter how horrid their rule.

Combining analytic philosophy, intellectual history, and political theory, this major new study of Thomas Hobbes will be of wide and cross-disciplinary interest to scholars of philosophy, law, politics, and history.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Olsthoorn, Johan

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Rechtsphilosophie, Rechtsethik
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Philosophie: Allgemeines, Methoden
• Rechtswissenschaften Recht, Rechtswissenschaft Allgemein Rechtsphilosophie, Rechtsethik
• Rechtswissenschaften Recht, Rechtswissenschaft Allgemein Rechtsgeschichte, Recht der Antike

Über Autor(innen)

Johan Olsthoorn is Associate Professor in Political Theory at the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively on Hobbes and early modern moral, legal, and political theory in journals including Philosophers' Imprint; Journal of the History of Philosophy; History of Political Thought; and European Journal of Political Theory. Co-editor of Hobbes's On the Citizen: A Critical Guide (Cambridge, 2019), this is his first monograph.